Floating World - Softcover

In her first book, Kadohata works wonders in evoking the mysterious balance, imperfectly held, of a Japanese-American family drifting apprehensively during the 1950s in "ukiyo ," a "floating world" of menial jobs and humble yet hopeful upward mobility pursued at the edges of an enchanted but exclusive American normalcy. Twelve-year-old Olivia, the first-person narrator, is a storyteller by temperament and heredity: her sharp-tongued, hot-tempered grandmother, who in her heyday had three husbands and seven lovers, "owned a valise in which she carried all her possessions, but the stories she told were also possessions." Intelligent, impish, perpetually dislocated--"I wanted to stay where we were--where I didn't know anyone and no one knew me"--Olivia soon comes into possession of tales of her own: "I sort of salivated inside whenever I met someone new. I was nosy, and I thought new people might tell me interesting things." Her shrewd roadside appraisals as the family travels from the Pacific Northwest to Arkansas in search of employment (hard to come by for Japanese at that time), and, years later, when Olivia sets out on her own for Los Angeles, range from a delicate appreciation of the American landscape to a frank appetite for the crasser curios of a foreign culture. With equal sympathy, Olivia turns her eye inward on her own family, offering an artless, prescient running commentary that never strains in the pursuit. In striking and keeping the tone of Olivia's voice, a bewitching composite of American brashness and expatriate otherness, Kadohata achieves perfect pitch inconspicuously, telling of the lonely and comic immigrant experience of "moving from the hard life just past to the life, maybe harder, to come."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Olivia spends her childhood and adolescence in what her grandmother calls "ukiyo" or "floating world," traveling with her family across the United States as her father looks for jobs: "The floating world was the gas station attendants, restaurants and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the middle of fields and mountains... but it also referred to change and the pleasures and loneliness change brings." One of the beauties of this novel is its ability to recreate a rhythm particular to both travel and adolescence, a stop and flow combination of heightened sensitivity and languid introspection mirrored in Olivia's observations that are blunt, poetic, or philosophical, sometimes changing from one sentence to the next. The incidents and people are off-beat and colorful, events are both real and surreal. Olivia describes her grandmother's death, her job at the chicken-sexing factory, her brother who likes to hide places and sometimes gets left behind on trips, her first boyfriend, her second, her encounter with her father's ghost. It is a marvelous journey, filled with descriptions and ideas that make you almost believe that thoughts are separate, perfect things you can pick up and carry in your pocket like treasures. Holding it all together is Olivia, clear-headed and thoughtful, knowing her future has more potential freedom than her parents', but remembering what her grandmother used to say: "Watch out for life...It's harder than it looks." -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister