What makes a Japanese person pure? Is it their lineage? Is it the fact that they live in Japan? Circle K Cycles written by Karen Tei Yamashita revolves around the concept of what is pure. Yamashita uses his personal encounters, along with stories, to try to understand the concept of what makes an ethnicity pure and the hybridization of ethnicities. As a writer, Yamashita seeks to explore the essence of purity using different forms of writing. Yamashita, throughout the book, refers to his own experience of migrating to Japan and Brazil. While reading we can see different levels of racism between the two countries. To explore the importance of purity between Japan and Brazil within Circle K Circles, Yamashita uses his personal encounters, narratives, form and language. Yamashita begins Circle K Circles with the concept of introducing the term "purely Japanese". Yamashita is a Japanese American who has traced her father's "family back fourteen generations" (Yamashita 11). Tracing the lineage of both of her family members, Yamashita came to the conclusion that she was pure Japanese, "They were Meiji Japanese" (Yamashita 11), with no foreign blood. The only thing different was that she was a third generation American. When Karen returned to Japan, she physically resembled a “typical American sansei from California” (Yamashita 11). As a result, it was not unusual for her to be asked about her ancestry. When Yamashita tells his ancestry to the questioner and justifies that his family originates from Japan, they exclaim: "Ah, then you are a pure Japanese" (Yamashita 12)! It is here that Yamashita asks us "What might it mean to be a "pure Japanese" (Yamashita 12)? Yamashita, around... halfway through the paper... we are given an idea of ​​how "impure" Dekasegi are treated in Japan through Miss Hamamatsu and Ze Maria. Not only Yamashita's use of short stories, but he also uses the form to show the clash of cultures we see how the different conservative Japanese contrasted with the animated Brazilians the Japanese need to try to maintain “everything that is Japanese”, we have shown that Japanese is a language that is not pure in itself Yamashita plays with the idea of ​​impure language by hybridizing Japanese with Brazilian words Japan's attempt to keep it pure is shown to fail in some way. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. March 17, 2011..Yamashita, Karen Tei. Circle K Cycles. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House, 2001. Print.