SOURCE: "Pearls and rocks," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. VII, No. 2, November, 1989, p. 5.

In the following review, Matsumoto praises The Floating World emphasizing the novel's Japanese American elements.

There is a book I have been hoping to find for years, every time I walked past a rack of new releases. It would be, I felt, a novel in the voice of a Japanese American woman of my generation (third, or Sansei) who came of age after World War Two. In her writing I would catch glimpses of Sansei children playing games like jan-kenpo (paper-scissors-rock) and lugging sacks of rice into the kitchen. They and their Nisei (second-generation) parents would be making their way in postwar America, seeking to escape the shadows of the concentration camps. What I was looking for was a kindred experience in print, a literary cousin.

When The Floating World appeared, I pounced...