In his introduction to the 1979 edition of Monica Itoi Sune's Nisei Daughter, S. Frank Miyamoto writes that the book is "an autobiographical account by a Japanese-American woman that describes her childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood while growing up in a Japanese immigrant family in Seattle" (vii). He regards the story as both a statement and a search for identity by a woman whose race, culture, language, and ancestry became the central factors in her fate.
Since the time of the European conquest of North and South America there has been continual conflict between races, cultures, languages, and social classes. The English and other northern Europeans effectively exterminated the indigenous peoples in the land now occupied by the United States. Only a tiny percentage of these remnant peoples survive on reservations. From James Fenimore Cooper's novels to the film Little Big Man by Arthur Penn Americans have been trying to make sense of the enormity of this culture clash.
After freeing the Atlantic seaboard from indigenous control black African slaves were forcibly brought to the New World to work on labor-intensive sugar and tobacco plantations in the South. The artistic legacy of this Holocaust and its aftermath has been African-American music from blues to be-bop to hip-hop. Writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin devoted their literary careers to cracking the metaphorical nut of what it means to be black in a white world. Latin American immigrants have had their music and customs and leaders like Cesar Chavez, as well as a recent spate of books and films concerning the Latino-Anglo polarity.
Sone's vivid and charming account of her coming of age in the shadow of the Japanese-American internments of World War II fulfils the same function. Her search for identity has the added irony of being brought to a head by the unjust and racist imprisonment of her people. Born the daughter of a Japanese flop-house own...