Mura’s “Fictive Fragments of a Father and Son”: Be Yourself, Don’t Lose Yourself

When we try to be somebody we're genuinely not, the result is that we end up losing who we really are: our identity. That is the problem that surrounds the story “Fictive Fragments of a Father and Son” by David Mura. The son is attempting to find who he is when he went to visit Japan, the place where his ancestors were from. By doing so, the son begins to historically analyzing who his father was and what has he become throughout time. Another typical prose that the narrator uses is to compare his father’s experiences with his own. One significant part of the text the narrator analyzes is the dropping of the atomic in early August 1945. While many people were celebrating in America of the event, the father seemed helpless, almost as if there is a part of him who feels that what happened in Japan affected in deep down. The father felt the need to ignore and reorient his feelings in a different direction that would justify who he wants to be, his desired American identity. “I am American…[the father] says to himself. I am glad we won…The sounds all over town joyous. He repeats his mantra over and over. He learns to believe it” (p. 352).    

            This event is significant, especially to the son, because it is a moment in which the son admits that “something changed.” It’s interesting because the father wants to be “American,” and despite that this story happened, at least in the son’s perspective, the father would claim these stories of him neglecting his ethnic heritage as stories of “fictions. Completely untrue” (p. 351).  This shows that in a sense the father is embarrassed of denying his ethnic background.

            The story transitions to the son when he attempts to understand his experiences within America. Particularly, the son thinks back to a moment when he found a Playboy magazine that belonged to his father which he described to be typical of American lifestyle: “like many other American boys, I discover my sexuality in the presence of a picture” (p. 353). What is interesting about this line is the language. The son identifies himself being American by saying “like many other American boys.” Although, this line also signifies how complex the term “American” is, as it is vaguely described. Not even the people celebrating the end of WWII are described racially or ethnically.  Nevertheless, the son was surely attracted to the white blonde woman in the magazine. Yet he felt guilty and/or shameful at the time because of that attraction.  Perhaps because of the fact that like his father (who was married to a woman who is “Asian”), the son felt that the white woman (like the white culture in America) is superior, “more prestigious” (p. 353). This also shows how the father, who wanted to be “American” so badly, felt guilt as he had an Asian wife.

The son realized that his father was oblivious to the racism around him. He had really believed he had become American. He had friends who were “less Japanese” and enjoyed American sports such as baseball; the father did not just adopt new lifestyles, he assimilated as much as he could.  Another big moment in the father’s life was his conversion to the Christian church, which not only made the father realize how much he associates with being American and less Japanese, but it sheds light on the narrator’s own personal identity crisis.  

He will convert, he will take up the cross, he will bring us to Church all through my childhood, up until the time we move from our middle class home in Morton Grove to our upper class one in Northbrook, a time when he is finally a vice-president, when religion is no longer needed. By then I will be estranged from the Church, an atheist, wondering what brought him to think a white man must be God (p. 356).

The conversion possibly symbolizes the father conversion to white America and its white God. And since the father, and as a result, his family (including the son), stopped going to church, it left in turmoil of finding his own identity, not completing a full conversion like the father. While the son got older, gained more consciousness and as he’s exploring and thinking back at these past experiences, it makes the son realize how frustrated he is with his father. The father broke from his history, his people and ultimately his ethnic heritage. As the son wrote in a poem, “’my father… worked too hard to be white, he beat his son’” (p. 353).

While the son is trying to make meaning out of his father’s complicated stories of identity, he realizes at the end his father was trying so hard to be something he was not that he has completely lost who he was. He lost his identity. That was his crime. As demonstrated by the breaking down of the father's name from Katsuji Uyemura all the way to Tom K. Mura. The assimilation in Anglo-American culture led to the father to lose himself as a person. The story represents problems of relations in regards to culture, gender, sexuality, relationships (especially between father and son), naming and most importantly the issue of identity within American society. Perhaps what we can learn from this story is something that has been told to us since we were young but is still significant and relevant today: don't be afraid to be yourself.  We often want to fit in within mainstream culture, but it is finding who we are that makes us unique as individuals. But at times that is even hard in itself.