Go

Uyemoto's (Rebel Without a Clue) prickly second novel focuses on generational differences among Japanese-Americans. Though therefore driven more by ideas than plot, it features a narrator--a Sensei, or third-generation Japanse-American, from Southern California--who illustrates her reflections with stories about her elders and cousins. Wilhelmina (``Wil''), 20, is recuperating from a nervous collapse brought on by an abortion and a broken love affair. But she's uncomfortable in the role of patient: ``For a woman of my culture in another era,'' she tells a therapist, ``what you people diagnose in me as a bi-polar disorder would have been dismissed as weakness of character.'' Wil's mother, aunts and uncles were taught to suffer stoically, but Wil, a product of demonstrative American culture, gives shockingly violent testimony to her cousin's fatal accident at a pool, her uncle's alcoholic rage and her mother's decision to club a badger to death after trapping it in her garden. Finally, Wil commits a spontaneous act of revenge against her mother, then defines the event as a mix of American ``guilt,'' Japanese ``shame'' and the signal to start life anew. The narrative is insightful overall, though Uyemoto stumbles in trying to explain Wil's sublimated desire to be a boy, and in using the Japanese game ``go'' as a symbol of the family's values. This cathartic novel does not chart a typical journey to recovery, but its heroine's storytelling finally does allow her--and, by extension, the reader--to accept her parents' cultural mores. (Feb.)