Introduction

I am a Japanese-American, a third generation sansei born in 1956 in Detroit, Michigan -- the deteriorating urban sprawl in the heartland of America known colloquially by African Americans as "Motown", or by the Silent Majority as "Motor City", the birthplace of the modern factory assembly line, Rhythm and Blues, and once home of America's fallen and iconic auto industry.

I am the product of two parents of pure Japanese ancestry and amusingly think of myself as "Made in America with All Japanese Parts".

My paternal grandfather was a Buddhist priest of the Jodo Shinshu Pure Land sect, and my family have been Buddhist priests in Japan for 29 generations, over 700 years. My maternal grandparents are gone; my mother's mother died when she was barely a teenager, and her father, a destitute photographer, abandoned his wife and 7 children years earlier and never returned. To this day we don't know where he went.

As an American of Japanese ancestry I have straddled two cultures and two identities with vastly different points of view. My disconcerting ambivalences have forced me more than once to take The Middle Path, and in so doing I have developed a degree of subjective-objectivity (yes, this is possible, but totally schizoid), introspection, and insouciance. However, more often than not, in my youth I was left confused and undecided and in emotional disarray.

I have spent my entire life engaged in a process of self-definition and -examination in the search for the essence of who I am, where I came from, and where I am going.

To keep things interesting, I have combined memoir and fiction, imagining ancient ancestors whose stories were spoon-fed to me by relatives in bitesize morsels, enough to get the flavor and texture, but always leaving me hungry for more.

I believe that my story and the story of my family, though unique, is a universal story of the American Immigrant Experience -- that forging of an identity within the simmering ethnic melting pot of the New World, the gold paved mountain, skyscrapered metropolis, and idealized land of plenty that beats in the heart of every foreigner who longs for opportunity, riches, and freedom -- and the right to call themselves an American.

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I have a confession to make. In my haste to get off my butt and do something, damnit! I put up this blog/website and posted chapters that are not quite completed; I'm sure those of you who have read ahead will realize this. I apologize.

I've been working on this novel for over 20 years and have only 7 chapters to show for it. Those of you who are writers will understand. We all believe that writing our novel will happen when things are just right: when your kid has graduated high school and is away at college, when you retire and never have to work again, when you have a long break and can just sit down and do nothing but write till your keyboard explodes.

Writers procrastinate endlessly. The smallest excuse like, Geez, that LOST re-run I've seen 3 times is gonna be on again -- or -- God-dangit, my car does need a wash right now. Need I go on? So, having taken Buddhist impermanence to heart, I realized that I could be mowed down by a 40 foot semi at any time and then, by golly, no one would ever even know I was working on my opus novel.

Yes, I promise to complete those incomplete chapters. I will make them whole and they will sing like Caruso. I will make time. Because this matters.

Thank you for reading. If you're so inclined, please subscribe to stay tuned for future chapters -- if I ever get around to them (I will).

Your confidante on this voyage,
Bruce Hidemi Sakow