Written as a tapestry of narrative discourse, haiku, metaphors, and academic discourse, this book offers a unique approach to exploring second-language (L2) learning and identity construction. As a participant in her own research, Yoshimoto draws on her own experiences learning English as a L2 and living in both Japan and Canada to understand what it means for Japanese women to be English language learners. She explores the narratives of Japanese students as they emerge in in-between spaces and how Japanese metaphors relate to Japanese women’s identity construction.

Yoshimoto takes a postmodern theoretical stance different from much of the traditional SLA research. She situates her research amid sociocultural theory and critical theory perspectives; Foucauldian discourse theory plays a prominent role as well as Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism, multiple voices, and heteroglossia and the inseparability of language, discourse, and identity. Bhabha’s (Reference Bhabha, Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler1992, Reference Bhabha, Hall and Gay1996) notion of culture and the third space, which attacks binary oppositions in cultural analysis and proposes a process of hybridity, is also key to how Yoshimoto interprets the language learning experiences of her participants and their emerging selves that possess hybrid characteristics of both Japanese and Canadian cultures.

Yoshimoto provides a comprehensive and useful overview of studies related to (L2) learning and identity, interrelated with other topics such as ideology, race, gender, and (L2) writing. She considers ethnicity, power, status, gender, language, and class as factors in the continued development of identity while learning English. Instead of using motivation as a factor, she describes how she chose Norton’s (Reference Norton2000) concept of investment to better explain the complex relationship between identity and language learners.

Using a hybrid of autoethnography and case studies with three other Japanese women, Yoshimoto’s research methods also differ from most traditional SLA research. She describes herself as a boundary-crosser, given that autoethnography allows her to be both inside and outside her research and connect her own experiences to a larger context. Yoshimoto’s data include diary entries, e-mail messages, and transcripts of group conversations as well as in-depth interviews. She invited participants to write in a diary at least three times a week, in their native language of Japanese, regarding their day-to-day experiences as they negotiated the multiple contexts of Canadian life on and off campus. She met with her participants a total of four times over the course of 1 year to have conversations about their language learning experiences and topics that arose in the diary entries. Additionally, Yoshimoto conducted two in-depth interviews with each participant near the beginning and the end of the study and exchanged many e-mail messages, talking about various issues that had come up in their personal and academic lives.

Yoshimoto devotes four chapters of the book to the examination of the emerging selves of her participants through haiku, narratives, and metaphors, and their constantly shifting, layered voices. The third space in which the participants find themselves is full of both pain and bliss. Yoshimoto describes many examples of feelings of alienation, exclusion, and repression and some of the assimilative pedagogy employed by certain hegemonic institutions.

This beautifully written and engaging work offers something unique to SLA and will interest researchers concerned with the connections between SLA and identity, narrative discourse, poetic discourse, and autoethnography as a useful and valid research method.