When Katie Kitamura's parents left Japan for the United States they left behind three different generations: Katie's cousins, her aunts and uncles, and her grandparents. In "Japanese for Travellers," Kitamura re-acquaints herself with these relatives while using milestones in Japan's modern history to highlight their generational experiences. Pride wrestler Kazushi Sakuraba's crushing defeat in 2001 to a Brazilian introduces a chapter on a drastically changing younger generation; the sarin gas attack is described before an analysis of the burst bubble economy and its consequential social decay; and the bombing of Hiroshima prefaces an account of a guilt-ridden and graying Japan.
All this is contemplated as she speeds toward her parent's home on a bullet train, slipping in and out of past and present. It is a literary device that emphasizes not only Kitamura's absence from some of the scenes she describes but her emotional estrangement from Japan.
"I always have a feeling of displaced recognition upon returning to Japan, a place that is not my home, and yet for which I often find myself feeling something more than homesickness," she notes.