Books
The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself
(Criticism, University of Minnesota Press, 2023)
In David Mura’s newest book,The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, out Jan. 31, 2023 from University of Minnesota Press, Mura grounds his work in historical and fictional narratives that whiteness tells society in order to uphold systems of oppression. Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy to show how white identity is based on shared belief in the pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions that allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities. White supremacy always insists white knowledge is superior to Black knowledge, Mura argues, and this belief dismisses the truths embodied in Black narratives.
We are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minnesota to the World
(Anthology, University of Minnesota Press, 2021)
Edited by Mura and Carolyn Holbrook, this anthology is a rich gathering of voices on the American experience from Indigenous writers and writers of color from Minnesota. In essays and poems, these writers bear witness to 2020— one of the most unsettling years in U.S. history— beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed Minneapolis into the epicenter of worldwide demands for justice.
A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing
(Criticism, University of Georgia Press, 2018)
Published by University of Georgia Press, this book on creative writing addresses our increasingly diverse American literature. Mura argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft, particularly in relationship to race, even as he elucidates timeless rules of narrative construction in fiction and memoir. His essays offer technique-focused readings of writers such as James Baldwin, ZZ Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Karr, and Garrett Hongo, while making compelling connections to Mura’s own life and work. This is a book for writers who want to engage with the issues with race and identity and writers who want to learn essential narrative techniques used in fiction and memoir.
Memoir and Novels
Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei
(Memoir, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991;
trans. in Japan, Hakurosya; Netherlands; paperback reissued, with a new afterword by Grove Press 2006).
David Mura's critically acclaimed memoir Turning Japanese chronicles how a year in Japan transformed his sense of self and pulled into sharp focus his complicated inheritance. Mura is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American who grew up on baseball and hot dogs in a Chicago suburb, where he heard more Yiddish than Japanese. Turning Japanese chronicles his quest for identity with honesty, intelligence, and poetic vision and it stands as a classic meditation on difference and assimilation and is a valuable window onto a country that has long fascinated our own. Turning Japanese was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of an Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award.
Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality & Identity
(Memoir, Anchor/Random, 1996)
In Where the Body Meets Memory, Mura focuses on his experience growing up Japanese American in a country which interned both his parents during World War II, simply because of their race. Interweaving his own experience with that of his family and of other sansei-third generation Japanese Americans-Mura reveals how being a "model minority" has resulted in a loss of heritage and wholeness for generations of Japanese Americans. Using his own experience as a measure of racial and sexual grief, Mura illustrates how the connections between race and desire are rarely discussed, how certain taboos continue to haunt this country's understanding of itself. Ultimately, Mura faces the most difficult legacy of miscegenation: raising children in a world which refuses to recognize and honor its racial diversity.
Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire
(Novel, Coffee House Press, 2008)
Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire is a sweeping tale of fathers and sons, of secrets and shame, and of unsung heroism. Ben Ohara is the sole surviving member his family. A troubled and brilliant astrophysicist, Ben’s younger brother has mysteriously vanished in the Mojave Desert. His father, one of a small group of WWII draft resisters (known as No-No Boys) during the internment of Japanese Americans, committed suicide when Ben was young. And his mother, who steadfastly refused to revisit the past, has died with her secrets. Realizing that the key to his future lies in reassessing the past, Ben retraces his steps through a childhood colored by the tough Chicago streets, horror movie monsters, sci-fi villains, Japanese folk tales, TV war heroes, and family tragedy. On this journey of forgiveness—leading him ever closer to his brother’s last days and the site of his father’s internment at Heart Mountain—Ben comes to understand the profound difference between coming of age and becoming a man.
Poetry and Criticism
Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity
(Criticism, University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series, 2002)
Contending that the boundaries of the traditional Anglo American canon seem narrow and parochial and even evince the tribalism that some claim multiculturalism fosters, Mura calls for the world of American literature to open itself up to the many, varied voices that are "great within us."Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto includes interviews as well as essays. In conversations with William Walsh, Lee Rossi, and Daniel Kane, Mura discusses the development of his own poetics; the influences on his work of various writers, such as Czeslaw Milosz, C. K. Williams, Aimé Cesaire, and Derek Walcott; and his view of the complicated, growing field of Asian American poetry.
The Last Incantations
(Poetry, Triquarterly, 2014)
The personal, historical, and artistic are all in dialogue in David Mura’s daring collection, The Last Incantations. In a variety of poetic modes, Mura harmonizes and contrasts multiple voices to form a powerful meditation. Certain poems speak from his experiences as a third-generation Japanese American and his family’s struggles to prove their "Americanness." Others speak from the intersections of our multiracial society—an Asian teenager in love with a Somali Muslim girl, an apostrophe to Richard Pryor, poems about a Palestinian American friend, Abu Ghraib, the hapa sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The result is a sustained multifoliate poetry, bursting with elegance, heartache, and truth.
The Colors of Desire
(Poetry, Anchor/Doubleday, 1995)
In The Colors of Desire, his second book of poems, Mura explores the connections between race and sexuality, history and identity, through the lens of desire. From an Issei farmer’s lament for an America he knew before internment to a French prostitute who speaks of her Asian lovers, the various voices of these poems reveal how cultural desire shapes personal history and how collective history shapes individual desire. In the title poem, Mura assembles a collage of memory and history that links America’s racism to our sexual culture, whose pornography equates whiteness with beauty and color with degradation. The book offers a powerful meditation on the nature of desire within the matrix of race and culture.
In Angels for the Burning, David Mura examines the experience of contemporary Asian-Americans and the various aspects of familial history between first-, second-, and third-generation Japanese-Americans. Mura believes one of poetry’s tasks is to explore the challenges to our identities as we encounter various “others” and other visions of ourselves and our world. Mura’s collection of poems attempts to accomplish this task.
Angels for the Burning
(Poetry, Boa Editions Limited, 2004)
After We Lost Our Way
(Poetry, E.P. Dutton, 1989; reprint, Carnegie
Mellon University Press, 1997).
In David Mura's startling first collection of poetry, After We Lost Our Way, we find a young poet far more willing than most poets to address complicated cultural, social and political issues. For Mura, human courage and human sympathy become the only currencies with which we can buy back the personal histories and our humanity, so often stripped from us by the world. If anger and indignation can help propel these currencies into more and more hands, Mura seems to say, then let our anger be clear and our indignation be fluent.