MPR’s Beth Friend profiles St. Paul poet and essayist David Mura. Mura is interviewed about his experience getting a writing grant and moving to Japan for a year.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) Everybody looks like me. This is exhilarating.
(00:00:03) These were writer David Morris first thoughts as he stepped off the plane in Japan. He had traveled from his home in Saint Paul to the land of his ancestors on a years writing Grant. He was nervous and fearful on the flight over reading start all the way but within a few hours of arrival that changed there was a
(00:00:20) feeling of comfort of realizing how much I'm constantly sort of dealing with not looking like everybody else especially growing up here in the the
(00:00:30) Midwest Maurice year in Japan proved to be a challenging and meaningful one. He studied the language became intrigued by no drama and Bhutto dance. He read Mishima and other Japanese authors. He listened to Japanese music our utsu people would say when Maria introduced himself and explain the purpose of his visit. They were right to make the analogy to Alex Haley's African pilgrimage Maria's discovery of his cultural Legacy was akin to a revelation growing up in the 1950s and 60s in a middle-class suburb of Chicago. Maria had considered himself an All-American kid like in baseball and hot dogs. He prided himself on not knowing Japanese and not eating Japanese food. The Murray family went to an all-white Episcopalian Church. They were just like everyone else except they ate rice more frequently and several times a year served tempura or Sukiyaki. Nobody remarked on the meaning of these and other small differences.
(00:01:23) We took our shoes off at the door and I just simply thought that everybody did that. And I thought we did it because my mom has this thing about cleanliness and we had right quite rugs. I mean, nobody said we do this because we're Japanese Japanese take their shoes off at the
(00:01:37) door as long as being part of the in-group was based on athletic skill Maria felt fine, but in junior high school when sexuality became important, he started to feel that there was something wrong with him internally, but no one was talking about issues of difference and assimilation and Maria's feelings remain done verbalized. He went to a high school attended primarily by Jews. And was more conscious of their cultural identity than of his own he knew more Yiddish than Japanese and his favorite author was Philip Roth
(00:02:05) and identified with the hero in goodbye Columbus because he is an outsider in a Jewish middle-class suburb. I mean, he is an outsider by virtue of being a working-class Jew from Newark rather than the Jew from but that sense of being an outsider in a Jewish suburb was as close as I could get. At the time to finding any sort of analog to my own
(00:02:31) experience in graduate school Mariah thought of literature by minorities as a ghetto his role models were the poet's Robert Lowell and John Berryman, but at the same time he was writing poems about the Japanese relocation camps of World War II and about his japanese-born grandparents gradually over the years the writing provided the route to his identity and that's how he found himself on a plane to Japan. They are he uncovered the family history that was never spoken about they are He articulated the struggle that has been and will be going on inside him for a long time,
(00:03:03) which is to continually look at the ways in which I try to think of myself as a white middle-class person and to really realize Who I
(00:03:12) Am David Murray tells the story of his year in Japan in his newly published book turning Japanese. He will be reading from the book tonight at 8 p.m. At The Loft in Minneapolis. I'm Beth friend.