THE LOOM AND OTHER STORIES by...

THE LOOM AND OTHER STORIES by R. A. Sasaki (Graywolf Press: $10). Ruth Sasaki’s brief, polished stories track the lives of three generations of Japanese-American women in San Francisco. In the title story, weaving becomes a metaphor for the life of the narrator’s mother: When World War II and the relocation camps dash her hopes of becoming a typical American, she withdraws to the silence of her home, to watch over her husband and daughters. The muted tones of the fabrics reflect her life: brown school-lunch bags, yellow summer grasses, green Northern California rivers--and unexpected flashes of brilliant color. In “First Love,” a high school girl discovers just how Americanized she is when she meets the immigrant teen-ager who becomes her boyfriend: “Jo and her friends, most of whom were of Asian descent, were stunned by him, as a group of domesticated elephants born and bred in a zoo might have been upon meeting their wild African counterpart for the first time.”