American Scrapbook (book)

Novel set in Manzanar and Tule Lake by prolific writer Jerome Charyn and published in 1969.

The 177-page novel focuses on the story of the Tanaka family in Manzanar, who hailed from the coastal farming community of Watsonville, California, before the war. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the unnamed Issei mother of the family was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Montana; though her children think of her, no communication from her is noted. The unnamed Issei father chooses to live separate from the family in Manzanar, with the Issei bachelors. Each of the five Tanaka Nisei offspring ranging in age from 30 to 13 live in the same barracks apartment, along with the husband of the eldest daughter. The story in the novel is told through the perspective of these six Nisei, each of the six chapters written in one of their first person voices.

With both parents gone, eldest daughter Fumi serves as surrogate mother to the brood. Her husband, Mitsuo Arimoto is the block manager and a Boy Scout leader who was a Japanese American Citizens League leader in Watsonville. Eldest son Harold, who had been a student at Stanford, is the editor of the camp newspaper, The Patriot , while his younger brother, Chuichi, a prewar army enlistee, had been kicked out of the army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fourteen year old Napoleon idolizes Chuichi and wants to be a naval gunner, while thirteen year old Ruby has gotten pregnant by a Nisei zoot suiter named Wendell Haraguchi. The storyline follows the gradual disintegration of the family in the cauldron of Manzanar, climaxing with Chuichi becoming a no-no and going to Tule Lake, where the last chapter, told through his eyes, takes place.

The fifth of the New York native Charyn's nearly fifty books and his fourth novel, American Scrapbook was the first to venture beyond the New York Jewish world of his early works. It was published when the author was just thirty-two years old. It was widely reviewed at the time, with mainstream reviewers praising the choice of topic and lamenting the injustices bestowed on Japanese Americans, but mostly finding fault with the novelist's treatment of it. In particular, the device of having each chapter in the voice of a different character and Charyn's use of black humor were contentious elements for reviewers. The first was found to be "somewhat chaotic" by one reviewer and resulting in the reader being only "given a surface impression" while remaining "detached as if he were glancing through an old album of faded photographs" by another; on the other hand, Daniel Stern in Life writes that "Charyn dips in and out of the minds of multitude of characters—the author's voice never intrudes and the pitfalls of the moralizer are avoided." ^[1] On the latter, Thomas Lask in the New York Times thought that, "Too much of the book is reduced to a campus spree," adding, "Mr. Charyn's aim was undoubtedly to show the dark side through the humor, but the effect is that the comedy, which should be only a side to the novel, colors the whole." On the other hand, the reviewer in Time magazine wrote that "Charyn knows how to make a pratfall out of a pitfall, how to convert sordid realism into a sort of surrealism." ^[2] Other reviewers objected to the crude language. ^[3] Calling American Scrapbook "Charyn's one truly unsuccessful book," literary critic Albert J. Guerard wrote, "It would be excessive to say Charyn's Nisei always have the mentality and humor of New York Jews." ^[4]

Not surprisingly, reviewers for the Japanese American Citizens League organ the Pacific Citizen objected to what they argued were unrealistic portrayals of Japanese Americans the book. Allan Beekman found "the characters... lacking in qualities sufficient to render them human," and "motivated by blood-lust or unbridled sexual passion." "After all, the average reader has not picked up the book with the intention of reading an animal story," he concluded. Bill Hosokawa found the Tanakas to be "a remarkably untypical family," with the book giving the impression that "the evacuees were sexually preoccupied if not depraved, unable to cope with reality, given to wild flights of fancy and delusions of power, and either wildly anti-American or almost as wildly anti-Japanese." ^[5]

Though largely forgotten today, American Scrapbook anticipates Julie Otsuka's critically acclaimed 2008 novel When the Emperor Was Divine , which employs a similar structure.

Might also like: Tule Lake by Edward Miyakawa; The Climate of the Country by Marne Mueller; The Harvest of Hate by Georgia Day Robertson