At Peace Finally? Gene Oishi’s Fox Drum Bebop and the Last Memories of Japanese American Internment Camps

Abstract

Gene Oishi’s autobiographical and episodic novel Fox Drum Bebop (2014) will likely be one of the final novels published by someone who was an internee in the detention camps in which the US government imprisoned Japanese Americans during the Second World War. As such, it presents complicated questions about temporality, representation, and the processes of trauma. Through focusing on the protagonist Hiroshi Kono (largely, though not restrictively, based on Oishi’s own life experience) and his siblings who have distinct ideological reactions to their ethnic identity and their wartime experience, Oishi explores how internment at once lasted for a determinate period but continues to extend in space and dilate in time for as long as the memories of it endure. The novel uses the musical aesthetics of jazz as a correlate for this discontinuous processing of experience. Oishi’s narrative asks if those who suffer oppression and trauma can ever find peace, and how, if at all, having a long life and reflecting upon the past can alter one’s sense of what happened.

Keywords

• gene oishi
• trauma
• japanese american internment
• nisei
• aesthetics of jazz
• temporality