Dying in a Strange Land is the final book in Murayama's tetralogy of the Oyama family, and it's told from three different points of view: mother Sawa's, eldest son Toshio's (who also goes by Steven), and third son Kiyoshi's (aka Morris). This coincides with the perspectives of the three earlier books, All I Asking for Is My Body being Kiyo's story, Five Years on a Rock Sawa's, and Plantation Boy Toshio's. The shifting perspectives in Dying are sometimes effective and sometimes just repetitive; although I liked this book a lot, I thought it was the weakest of the four.
Dying covers roughly a 40-year period, from the end of World War II through the mid 1980s. For anyone who has not read the earlier books, much of it will be confusing. The rhetorical tension in the saga has always been based on Toshio and Kiyoshi's respective relationships with their parents, Sawa and Isao, and explores the concept of filial duty that often becomes a source of conflict between Issei pare...more
Dying in a Strange Land is the final book in Murayama's tetralogy of the Oyama family, and it's told from three different points of view: mother Sawa's, eldest son Toshio's (who also goes by Steven), and third son Kiyoshi's (aka Morris). This coincides with the perspectives of the three earlier books, All I Asking for Is My Body being Kiyo's story, Five Years on a Rock Sawa's, and Plantation Boy Toshio's. The shifting perspectives in Dying are sometimes effective and sometimes just repetitive; although I liked this book a lot, I thought it was the weakest of the four.
Dying covers roughly a 40-year period, from the end of World War II through the mid 1980s. For anyone who has not read the earlier books, much of it will be confusing. The rhetorical tension in the saga has always been based on Toshio and Kiyoshi's respective relationships with their parents, Sawa and Isao, and explores the concept of filial duty that often becomes a source of conflict between Issei parents and their Nisei children. For the Oyamas in particular, the conflict centers around a $6000 debt incurred by Isao's father and passed down to him and later to his sons. Although the debt has long since been paid off, it is referenced more than once and remains a symbol and a sore point, particularly for Toshio. Dying continues to examine the idea of filial duty, but perhaps because this novel has become more clearly autobiographical (Kiyoshi/Morris's life mirrors Murayama's in many respects, including the publication of a novel that is identical to All I Asking), the tone has shifted away from the more subtle stance taken in the earlier novels that each of the children has been filial in his or her own way. The character of Toshio suffers the most from Murayama's harder line; in Dying, he has become consumed by bitterness that plays out in cruelty. Arguably the most sympathetic of the Oyama children in the earlier books, he becomes, towards the end of Dying almost one-note in his hatefulness, and he probably will be hated by anyone who hasn't read the earlier books.
Dying's major flaw is that Murayama either explains way too much or way too little. Too little, in the sense that this book does not stand on its own without the other three, and too much in that Murayama is overly detailed, particularly in the Kiyoshi chapters, when trying to set the time and place. He starts many of the chapters with a laundry list of current events, and I get that he's trying to show that Kiyo's outlook, unlike Tosh's, is concerned with more than just his own business and success, but once he's getting down to things like how many electoral votes McGovern got in the 1972 election, your eyes can't help but glaze over. Similarly in the Sawa chapters, there's a ton of detail about who's related to whom and which cousin was adopted out to whose family after their son died, etc. but since none of these people are important to the story (or even get mentioned again), it's a distraction. Nonetheless, I think this is an excellent and important book, particularly for anyone interested in Japanese-American and/or Hawaiian history and literature.(less)
