From My Grandmother's Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo by Norma Field; 204 pages; hardcover; $24.95.

"From My Grandmother's Bedside," a memoir, is a quilt of a thousand scraps, a photo album of experience, a kaleidoscope, and an instructional tour across an expanse of years which always returns to the author waiting and watching at the bedside of her dying grandmother.

Author Norma Field arranges the book, an attractive hardback of comfortable size, into fragmented vignettes which muse upon the personal, the social, and the political implications of being of both Japanese and American.

These short chapters (sometimes only a few lines) have titles like "Bicycles," "Temples and Social Realism," "The Postwar Garden," and "The History Contained in Animals" and they form a meditation on what it means to be the daughter of an American G.I. and a Japanese woman, to care for a dying family member, to analyze Japan as outsider and insider. Field manages multiple perspectives: child, adult, scholar, Japanese, American, mother, daughter. Underlying the broad, deep, rich, and varied narrative is a grief for many things--the war, Field's grandmother, another way of life, the death of childhood innocence, the unsayable. Field's range of interconnectedness is astounding and satisfying.

Field's writing is lyrical, evocative, sometimes Proustian: "It's true that stepping into a cascade of cicada song is like walling yourself inside all the summers since time began." A reader drawn in by language like this may also feel pushed back again by Field's ivory tower perspective and esoteric language (she is a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago). Her analysis sometimes takes on a distinctly academic flavor: "Step back for a minute and argue that Domon's art instantiates a general modernist formalism." This kind of shift can be disconcerting for readers, who, up to this point, felt included in Field's audience.

This may not be the ideal book for anyone casually interested in Asian culture, or someone looking for a breezy memoir. The delighted audience is someone who speaks the language of the academy but is looking for something new that defies and expands it.

As a collage of experience and cultural analysis that recurrently remarks upon the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, "From My Grandmother's Bedside" would make an accessible, groovy textbook for an Asian Studies course that would present Field's words in context. In the end, however, the book is not for scholars alone, for it pursues the personal with the academic in ways which link sociologists, bi-cultural people, experimental writers, and anyone who's lived long enough in another culture to feel both belonging and other.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.