Reviewed by David Loftus

     In conversation, Los Angeles playwright Perry Miyake himself proves to be much more affable and good-humored than the atmosphere of his first novel, 21st Century Manzanar, a dystopian tale of a "ReVac" of Japanese-Americans under Executive Order 9066-A.

     A grim, brooding, and gritty story that veers from historic realism to action thriller, and from slapstick surrealism to dreamy spirituality, with considerable humor, Manzanar depicts a not-too-distant future when the United States and Japan are at economic war and the U.S. Government decides to put Japanese-Americans into detention camps "for their own good".

     The body count is high, even among the pricipal characters, and the novel pulls no punches in depicting the hard life of camp and what it can make people do to one another - not just the officials and trustees, but the prisoners as well.

     When discussing his book in person, Miyake speaks easily and laughs a lot.  "I really enjoyed the process of writing a novel," he says, after a career that has focused primarily on theater work with East West Players, Seattle Group Theater, and the comedy group Cold Tofu.  "There's just so much internal monologue that you can't do on stage."

     When I pointed out that Shakespeare did a lot with internal monologue, Miyake responded that the other actors have to wait around for the speaker to finish.  "It just seems that on stage you have to shout everything.  In a novel you can whisper."

     Miyake conceived of the story as a play eleven years ago.  He was inspired both by the case of Vincent Chin, the Asian American who was beaten to death by unemployed auto workers in Detroit, and by murmurs of rounding up Iranian-Americans on the eve of the Gulf War.  A three-act play that consisted of evacuation from Los Angeles, life in camp, and escape from camp seemed a reasonable task.  but "the scope of it got too big, and there were too many driving scenes," he says, so the play turned into a novel.

     At times grimy and realistic, at others lyrical or surreal, Manzanar also features tribute to Miyake's hometown and family.  There is a strong sense of place and a wealth of detail, particularly in the opening chapters set in L.A. Miyake acknowledges he chose to recall "places I grew up with that are gone and I have seen no mention of since."  Such as Kenny's Cafe on Centinela Avenue and Ketchie's hamburger joint at the corner of Sawtelle and LaGrange.

     Miyake first discovered Ketchie's in the early 1960's.  His father was a gardener who sharpened his blades at George's Hardware and purchased plants at the S&M Nursery across the street, a block away from Ketchies, when the entire Sawtelle neighborhood in West LA was a huge Japanese-American enclave.

     Kenny was a "true neighborhood diner" that, still going in the 1990's closed only a few years ago. "And all that's gone now, it's all strip malls now."

     In a similar way, Miyake drew heavily from his own family tree for details of his characters' lives and their forebears.."Since this was my first novel, I didn't want to have to keep checking back to see what characteristics I'd given them," he admits with a chuckle.

His novel's hero, David Takeda, grew up in Venice, California and is a 1971 graduate of Venice High, just like his creator.  Similar to Takeda senior, Miyake's father was a 1942 grad of Venice High, and both Nisei had a yearbook photo that said "Evacuated in April."  Both older men were baseball players whose classmates brought a copy of their yearbook signed by various friends to the Santa Anita race-track where their buddy was being processed.

     Miyake's parents and relatives were interned at Tule Lake, Roehr, and Heart Mountain, not Manzanar, as was Takeda's family.  Two uncles were already serving in the U.S. Army when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

     Not surprisingly, the book provides plenty of Japanese-American color (Miyake includes nearly six pages of glossary at the back).  Camp internees fantasize about their favorite rice dishes, and Sansei characters muse on classic Issei and Nisei bahavior.

     "I was really surprised, when it came to doing the glossary, that what I thought were regular Japanese words were actually slang," Miyake recalls.

     The author makes a point of the physical and behavioral similarities between Japanese-Americans and Native Americans of the Southwest.  There are strong black and non-Asian female characters, as well as the startling figure of Bradley Kuwata, a homosexual who is reportedly half Korean, half Chinese, and who serves as both clown and sort of a deus ex machina for the plot.

     The camp's executive director, a Nurse Ratched figure called Lillian Bunkum, bargains with troublemaker activists to accept sterilization in return for a pass to work outside the camp.  I expressed curiosity about a reference in the story to a mass sterilization plan having failed in Congress by one vote in the 1940's.

     Miyake responded that he heard this story while in college, "back when the Zapruder film came out" and all sorts of conspiracy theories were in the air. He was never able to verify it, so he employs it merely as a literary device.

     I just used it as a metaphor for what happens to Asian-Americans in the media.  They're Castrated.  They never have families or girlfriends.  The Asian-American males are all underhanded corporate raiders or kung fu killers."

     Although the novel depends on a whopper of a premise, and take some pretty incredible turns, at times Miyake felt himself overtaken by real events.  While he was working on the story, the Rodney King beating and resulting riots occurred and "I had to revamp, 'cause reality had kinda passed me by."

     Something else happened shortly after he turned in the manuscript to his publisher on Sept. 9, 2001, so during the editing phase Miyake added a few nods to the altered international situation.

     Miyake is currently visiting West Coast cities to promote 21st Century Manzanar.  He visited Elliott Bay Bookstore on August 4 and plans a trip to Berkeley's East Wind Bookstore for August 31.

     Seriously, what does he think are the chances another Japanese-American internment could happen?

     "You know, I don't think it will.  While I was writing this book I worked in a record store and I saw a lot of kids there.  It's encouraging to see the younger generation growing up with Nintendo and anime.  Kids with backpacks carry around their own chopsticks!  A lot of it the first time around was just fear of the unknown."

     Then Miyake's impish side reasserts itself: "But for the sake of the book I'll say, 'yeah, we're just one step away.  Any day now!

NOTES ON PACIFIC READER INTERVIEW