Variations in the Expression of Inka Power by Richard L. Burger, Craig Morris, and Ramiro Matos Mendieta (eds.)

revolutionary days, in their Rio apartment. Here we see ironies of Japanese-Brazilian ethnicity played out in the often tragic twists and turns of individual lives. The book offers many other fascinating insights into little-explored historical nooks and crannies. Yet further questions arise. How important, really, was ethnic self-definition in the motivational mix of the people discussed by Lesser? How much does that matter? What was the full range of responses to these ethnic militants within Japanese-Brazilian circles, both inside and outside São Paulo? What more can we know about the attitudes of police and authorities, and especially of their Nikkei members? Lesser’s book is wonderfully concise, but even brevity has its (minor) discontents. Some of these questions may be unanswerable; for full answers to others, we will have to await new monographs, which we can only hope are equally imaginative, lucid, well conceived, and impeccably researched. How will Japanese-Brazilian ethnicity turn out? Lesser wisely tells us: It won’t. Today, Japanese Brazilians are no longer seen as immigrant rural traditionalists; indeed, the quarter million Nikkei who have seized the new opportunity to work in hypermodern Japan are at Brazil’s ‘‘imaginary forefront’’ (150). In the ethnic hall of mirrors, the reflections cascade endlessly, uncertainly, into the future.