Kicking Up the Dust: Generic Spectrality in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms—An "Asian Canadian Prairie" Novel?

Abstract

While Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms has received widespread acclaim both in and outside the academy for the past two decades, the text has yet to be conceived of as a work of Canadian prairie literature in the regionalist tradition. My article situates Chorus of Mushrooms in reference to its publication date, just six years after the passing of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, suggesting that such a coincidence caused the novel to be labelled as a work of ethnic, namely “Asian Canadian” literature, as opposed to that of Canadian prairie literature. I argue that Chorus of Mushrooms problematizes both of these labels by reimagining traditional prairie conventions through immigrant, feminist, and queer conceptualizations. I develop a method of reading Goto’s novel through the intersections of “rural,” “regional,” “Asian Canadian,” and “prairie” literature, suggesting that Chorus of Mushrooms refutes such “generic violence.”