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Global Enterprise: Home and Human Relationship in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

Corresponding Author : Md. Ishrat Ibne Ismail (mismai29@uwo.ca)

Authors : mismai29@uwo.ca (mismai29@uwo.ca)

Keywords : Global, home, relationships, capitalist, miscommunication.

Abstract :

Asian-American writer Karen Tei Yamashita’s debut novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), problematizes local, national, and global concepts through representative characters from Asia, America, France, and Brazil. Published in 1990, the novel does not miss out on critiquing the global enterprise of capitalism. However, the author engages magical realism to examine the capitalist dynamics operating at different levels of relationships across the Amazon and the world. Setting up the significant actions at the Matacao in the Amazon, Yamashita uses magical realism in the characters’ physical and psychological dimensions. Kazumasa Tshimaru from Japan, Jonathan B. Tweep from America, and Michelle Mabelle from France are the non-Brazilian characters. Each of them embodies specific physical characteristics that could be described as magical. The Brazilian characters, Batista Djapan, his wife Tania Aparecida, Chico Paco, Mané Pena, are not non- Brazilian types of magical realist characters; rather, their magical realism depends on their strange behaviors. Both Batista and Tania establish a pigeon message business in Sao Paulo. They start with a single pigeon but eventually turn the company into a giant “Djapan Pigeons Communication International.” They display twentieth- century consumerism and economic globalization and its impacts on the local people. Through their business, the author thematizes the effects of global capitalism on family and relationships. This paper examines how the growing business or global enterprise problematizes the concept of home and human relationships resulting from miscommunication.

Published on July 1st, 2021 in Vol 32, No 1, Humanities