SOURCE: A review of The Floating World, in Belles Lettres, Vol. 5, No. 3, Spring 1990, p. 20.

In the following review, Lim discusses the regional and ethnic specificity of The Floating World and hails the novel's depictions of working-class life.

The Floating World. Cynthia Kadohata's first novel, appears with bona fide credentials from mainstream America. In fact, chapters had previously appeared in The New Yorker. Unsurprisingly, her strong prose style is reminiscent of The New Yorker's influence on contemporary American fiction in its plangent syntactic economy of effect.

Although the book is called a novel, it is more precisely a series of eighteen linked stories forming a loose configuration of intersecting moments amounting to a bildungsroman of sorts. What distinguishes it from other first novels on growing up in America is its regional and ethnic specificity.

Olivia Ann, the narrator/protagonist, is a young girl in an extended Japanese-American family...