Traveling Identities: Between Worlds in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Circle K Cycles

This article addresses issues of hybrid identity and globalization with particular attention to the immigration of Japanese families to Brazil in 1908 and the return migration of Japanese Brazilians to Japan during the 1980s. Writing autobiographically in Circle K Cycles (2001), Yamashita draws attention to the position of the Japanese Brazilian dekasegi who return to work in an ancestral homeland as temporary manual laborers. Yamashita’s text focuses on the significance of plural identities, cultural difference, and global economics while also contemplating the ways in which movement and cultural hybridity shape her own life.