Circle K Cycles

American Book Award-winner Karen Tei Yamashita considers various cultural exchanges between Japanese and Brazilians in Circle K Cycles. Focusing primarily on the descendants of Japanese immigrants living in Brazil who leave to find factory work in Japan, it is at once short story collection, memoir and scrapbook charmingly enlivened with snapshots, advertisements, signs, random factoids and graphics. The situations Yamashita describes are as diverse as the people who experience them from how to cook rice to what to do if you lose your fingers in an industrial accident and she brings it all together with humor and heart. National advertising; author tour.