Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is a novel by Japanese-American author Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer and Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature...

. The novel follows several characters over the course of several years - including a man who discovers the healing properties of feathers, a pilgrim named Chico Paco, pigeon caretakers and the three-armed creator of an industry. It is narrated by a small, plastic ball that floats in front of the head of the character, Kazumasa Ishimaru, a Japanese man who makes a home in Brazil near the Amazon rainforest where a mysterious plastic flatland exists called the Matacao.

Further reading

• Murashige, Michael S. Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita. Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. Ed. King-Kok Cheung. Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 2000. 320-42. Print.
• Rody, Caroline (2000). "Impossible Voices: Ethnic Postmodern Narration in Toni Morrison's "Jazz" and Karen Tei Yamashita's "Through the Arc of the Rain Forest"". Contemporary Literature 41 (4): 618-641. University of Wisconsin.
• Chen, Shu-Ching. “Magic Capitalism and Melodramatic Imagination – Producing Locality and Reconstructing Asian Ethnicity in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest.” Euramerica 34.4 (2004): 587-625.
• J. Edward Mallot. "Signs Taken for Wonders, Wonders Taken for Dollar Signs: Karen Tei Yamashita and the Commodification of Miracle".