Circle K Cycles Karen Tei Yamashita Coffee House Press 147 pp. Available from Powell's Books.

Yamashita explains in her forward that originally Japanese had been lured to Brazil to work on the coffee plantations, when the Japanese economy was largely poor and agrarian. In 1990, the Japanese government initiated a law that enabled both nisei and sansei to more easily acquire visas to perform unskilled labour in Japan. At the same time, the government tightened strictures on other foreign workers who were considered illegal aliens. (Perhaps Japan had witnessed the Arbeitsbuch debacle that has gripped Germany -- where Turks, Iranians and other foreigners who have come to Germany on unskilled labour visas have been terrorized in race wars -- or simply anticipated similar difficulties.) As Yamashita puts it, "It was a solution probably well-intentioned but perhaps purely in favor of race," although the qualifier "perhaps" seems like politesse. The Japanese community in Brazil is the largest in the world outside of Japan, and at the time of her writing, thirteen percent of that population had immigrated to Japan to work as dekasegi (migrant laborers). The employment offered is mainly assembly line work in factories for companies like Toyota, Mitsubishi, Yamaha, Sony, Subaru, Sanyo and Suzuki, thereby earning the jobs their 3K rating.

Yamashita's essays originated from her monthly postings for the Website Cafe Creole, and run the length of her stay, from March to August. Fiction pieces are interspersed with the essays, varying in form as well as content. There's the tale of Miss Hamamatsu '96, a Eurasian beauty queen who illegally videotapes copies of Brazilian telenovelas all day long for the dekasegi. She plans all day for her future as Miss Nikkei and a world-class model, and we learn incidentally about the inability of Brazilians to purchase jeans in Japan that fit their larger, gaijin bodies, as well as learning the status of women in the Brazilian Japanese community. Crafty Maria Maravilha runs a phone sex business, sells phone ads for Paginas Verdes-Amarelas, and chats to a girlfriend who works as an obento lady (businesswomen who deliver Brazilian-style lunches to the workers), all at the same time, via call waiting. When reading this story, it's hard to decide whether you should be laughing harder at the phone-sex customer falling asleep on Maria, or at the way she hustles her phone book ad clients. A lesser success is "Hantai", in which there's more telling than showing and little humour (it's the first half of a murder mystery, but you won't know that until two chapters later). Both "Hantai" and its counterpart, "The Tunnel", share an omnipotent shift into all of the characters' minds that left me feeling Sybil-ish.

Ms. Yamashita's fiction is so packed with facts about her subjects' lives that it might as well be one of the essays. The essays are no less entertaining than the fiction, because of the type of information Yamashita brings to the reader's attention (rules of apartment living, how to use a Japanese toilet, Brazilian and Japanese recipes). No facet of life was left unaffected in the cultural diaspora of these people, and that's both comedic and tragic, as Yamashita points out over and over in the course of the book. The July essay, "Circle K Rules", presents four sets of broad rules for daily life; the shifts between Japanese conservatism, Brazilian laissez-faire and North American whatever-goes-as-long-as-it-has-a-corporate-sponsor attitude are hilarious. "His opinion is her opinion is my opinion is your opinion. I agree," the Japanese rules instruct, while the Brazilian rules include, "Nothing is sacred. Tell a joke," and, "There are no rules." Americans believe everything will be okay if you "Speak English," and remember that "He who has makes the rules." Circle K rules, the rules of the traveled and tolerant, are simple: "Immigrate into your own country -- Learn to cook your favourite meals -- Ask the next question."

If you've surmised that the book is negative or depressing, you'd be only partially correct. Yamashita mines the dekasegi situation for its positive aspects, such as in her discussion of relationships between dekasegi who seek to be more Japanese, more Brazilian, or who seek out Japanese partners. The way she describes them, however, it seems that the partners are linked to each other through a business deal, rather than love. Her discussions about food and toilets are funny. Brazilians call traditional Japanese toilets "motoquinha" because the Japanese squat over them like motorcycle riders (and don't even ask about the new Toto toilet). In her essay on food, she observes that even the Brazilian and Japanese approaches to cooking rice reflect their attitudes: "Japanese rice: Juntos venceremos! / Together, we will succeed! Brazilian rice: Sozinho, consigo! / I can do it myself!" The food essay comes with simple Japanese and Brazilian recipes, which is fun even as your realize that food can be more than a fluff subject, because food, Yamashita points out, is not just food, but a social construct. Throughout the text little cartoon drawings, Brazilian-Japanese posters, and Japanese statistical graphs litter the pages, making the book more fun to read.

Despite her search for the positive, Yamashita left me with the feeling that there's little good in this Japanese-Brazilian relationship, which seems built more from a parasitic viewpoint than a symbiotic one. There was the clear suggestion that Japanese companies pay low wages, expect much labor and are greatly annoyed by people they find too loose and lazy in their behaviour. These people are the same, moreover, who were chosen by the Japanese government for their similarity to the Japanese -- a paradox that pleases my individualistic North American sensibilities. At the same time, I found Yamashita's book tremendously valuable. Not only is it a captivating and quick read, but she displays the anthropological skills of a Zora Neale Hurston or Stith Thompson when writing about the people: she's affectionate, respectful, humorous and highly attentive to detail. If you only know about the Japanese in South America via news clips about Alberto Fujimori, you'll walk away from this book feeling educated. If Yamashita teaches nothing else, the reader should be reminded of the crucial tenet that tolerance and adaptability is key to a culture's survival.

-- Jennifer Davis

Coffee House Press is an award-winning, nonprofit literary publisher dedicated to innovation in the craft of writing and preservation of the tradition of book arts. Coffee House produces books that present the dreams and ambitions of people who have been underrepresented in published literature, books that shape our national consciousness while strengthening a larger sense of community.

Coffee House Press was founded in 1984, and took its name from the long tradition of coffee houses as places for the free exchange of ideas, where each individual had equal time for expression, regardless of station or background. The English coffee house of the 1600s was a place of fellowship and discussion of the events of the day. The Parisian cafes of the early 1900s witnessed the birth of Dadaism, cubism, and surrealism. The American coffee house of the 1950s, a refuge from conformity for beat poets, exploded with literary energy. This spirit lives on in the pages of Coffee House Press books.