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The Shino Suite: Japanese-American Poetry

by Ronald Phillip Tanaka

Summary

Japanese-American poetry. Winner BCF American Book Award 1982.

Ronald Phillip Tanaka, a third-generation Japanese-American. His father was a Boy Scout, ran track and played football for Glendale High School in Los Angeles. His mother was the daughter of a Methodist minister. And yet, like many Sensei, Tanaka was born in a Relocation Center in Arizona in 1944 behind endless coils of barbed wire.

The Shino Suite is a collection of love poems that chronicle the private battles that the poet had to wage to try define his role in American society. It is ironic that these Sensei poems were written in the late 1970s after Tanaka attended Pomona College, Claremont, obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkley and begun a long career as a Professor of English. Looking back through Tanaka's eyes, the reader sees what was lost during those years in the bleak desert of Arizona was much more than what could be measured in political or economic terms. As the single parent of a young daughter, Shino, and as the lover of an imaginary Japanese woman, Tanaka constructs poems that reflect the almost whimsical hope that he can find love in a world in which he is totally invisible and takes up nothing but virtual space.