A. Robert Lee's collection of essays on Karen Tei Yamashita is organized around the thorny question of how to categorize Yamashita's fictions into existing genres. The essays’ analyses suggest that traditional genre categorizations are inadequate to explain Yamashita's literary interventions, or they draw on theories from outside literary studies to account for Yamashita's avant-garde aesthetics. In so doing, the essays succeed in fulfilling Lee's intended aim of showcasing the “virtuosity” of Yamashita's imagination (7). For instance, the first chapter, by Cyrus R. K. Patell, situates Yamashita's oeuvre in the context of what he calls “emergent literature,” a genre that he says “can serve as a remedy to some problems posed by contemporary multiculturalism … that insist on separate ethnic, racial and sexual traditions” (11). For Patell, Brazil Maru (1992), Circle K (2001), I Hotel (2010), and Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance (2014) are examples of emergent literature that put the local stories of Asian immigrants in Japan, the US, and Brazil into transnational contexts. Another attempt to put content and form together for the understanding of Yamashita's transnational fictions is chapter 7 by Ruth Y. Hsu, which uses vocabulary from chaos theory, including “fractals” and “butterfly effect” (107), to explain the disparate-seeming and yet intricately connected plotlines in Tropic. Sandwiched between these two chapters are chapters that constitute a second narrative arc in Lee's collection, one that draws attention to the material traces that globalization left behind. John B. Gamber's chapter is the standout example; it examines how Through represents a jungle of nonbiodegradable junk like plastic “remains” and shows, in turn, a global ecological system that is forever “remade” by it (45). Bella Adams's chapter is also worthy of attention. Centering on Yamashita's Through and Ruth Ozeki's Meat (1998), the chapter reads the novels as climate fictions (“cli-fis”) that push back against what critic Ursula K. Heise calls the trope of the “ecological family romance” (85) – a tendency that some novels about the environment have in eliding natural crises from the center of the narrative with family reconciliation at the end. Adams asserts that Through and Meat are different from typical ecological family romances because they link quotidian “small moments” (88) to the slowness of “structural violence” (74) to illustrate the interconnectedness of nature and the family. By engaging with the ecocritical facets of Yamashita's work, Adams's essay yet again points at a global dimension of Yamashita's transnational fictions that has been occluded by the multiplicity of themes in Lee's collection. When introducing the collection, Lee himself uses descriptors like “ecologist” and “planetary fabulist” (2) to describe Yamashita's work. Lee's decision not to more explicitly connect his collection's intervention in relation to the nascent field of Asian American ecocriticism feels like a missed opportunity, especially since this would have helped to distinguish it from existing monographs like Jinqi Ling's Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Transnational Novels (2012) that were already published in dedication to the studies of the author exclusively. Taken as a whole, Lee's collection is at its most innovative when it engages with Yamashita's ecocritical work. This is crystalized in one of the concluding chapters that is originally a mixed-genre piece that Yamashita delivered for a conference as a keynote speaker; that piece, especially the section “I Kitty,” which is a reprint from Yamashita's 2014 science fiction, offers a neat echo back to the aforementioned essays about the environment while warning readers of a future of plasticity that an uncritical embrace of technologies like a cute plastic Hello Kitty caretaker with artificial intelligence can unleash. Consequently, although Lee's collection does not announce itself as a project that participates in the field's ecocritical turn, the majority of its essays arise out of thinking about Yamashita in relation to this trend.Footnote ¹ Given that, Lee's collection will be of interest to those who are thinking about the roles that globalization plays in cultural productions, for the collection gestures at Yamashita's choice of themes (like plastic) and avant-garde expressions (like genre mixing) as those which capture the sum total of the separate realities that make up our world's eco-social system in a neoliberal age.