Hisaye Yamamoto, Part Two

Yesterday, I went to the memorial service for Hisaye Yamamoto. I was honored to be invited to attend by her family and even more honored when I was asked to sit with some of the family members. The service was held in a small, pleasant chapel in Little Tokyo and was well attended. Of the attendees I knew, I must not have seen them for ten years or so, and their appearances had changed — in one case, so much so that I didn’t recognize her.

At one point in the service, the officiating minister invited anyone in attendance to speak about Hisaye to everyone assembled. I didn’t feel the need to speak, satisfied that my blog post about her — which received some very nice comments from her family — said all I needed to say. This was also a rather awkward moment in the service because only two people got up to speak. Still, I remained seated and silent.

However, since the service yesterday, I’ve thought of a few more things I’d like to say, and I’m now sorry that they didn’t occur to me at that moment. For instance, I’d like to have recounted for her family and friends how I first discovered her writing...

When I first got interested in Asian American literature in the mid-1980s, about the time that I received my Master of Arts, I was able to get a hold of two anthologies: one was called Counterpoint, and the other Aiiieeeee! (both no longer in print). The standout in Counterpoint was a short story called “Seventeen Syllables,” and the standout in Aiiieeeee! was a short story called “Yoneko’s Earthquake.” Because my middle name is not Sherlock, it took me a while to notice that the two stories were written by the same author — which, looking back, would seem rather obvious, given that they had so much in common.

Not long after I realized this, I tried to see if there were any novels or short-story collections by anyone named Hisaye Yamamoto. Since this was about two years before Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories had been published, I couldn’t find any single volume by this author. So, I decided to see what other stories I could uncover on my own. Using the bibliography in the book Asian American Literature by Elaine Kim as a starting point, I tried tracking down as many of the original publications as I could.

I still vividly remember photocopying the Yamamoto short story “The High-Heeled Shoes” from a musty old 1948 copy of Partisan Review — where it had been originally published — in the main library at USC. Happening across another out-of-print anthology of Asian American writing in a used-book store introduced me to “The Brown House ” (1951). Learning of my literary hunt, a Chinese American friend xeroxed a copy of “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1950) from yet another out-of-print Asian American anthology. While I was searching, a collection of five Yamamto stories (in English) was released by a Japanese publisher, which is how I learned of “Life Among the Oilfields” (1979).

Between discoveries like these and what was available from UCLA’s Asian American Reading Room, I was able to amass about ten of her pieces from various sources. In fact, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories wasn’t published until after my radio production of the book’s eponymous short story. If the collection had come out a couple years earlier, it would have saved me a lot of effort — but it would have also robbed me of memories of some very satisfying detective work (maybe my middle name is Sherlock after all).

I think the attendees at the memorial service would have liked to hear that I put in so much to seek out Hisaye’s stories. Because they also liked accounts of her wit and way with words, I could have also told them...

When I was touring Europe in 1990, I thought that I would send Hisaye a post card from the picturesque city of Prague (which was then in the country of Czechoslovakia). My letters to Hisaye didn’t engage in a lot of leg pulling, but I began my card: “I was trying to get to Lompoc, but I made a wrong turn in Vernon and ended up in Prague.” When I got back to the States, Hisaye’s next letter to me began: “It must have been the slaughterhouse miasma in Vernon that made you lose your way.”

I might have mentioned that I knew a niece of Hisaye’s for years from another corner of my life, but didn’t learn that they were relatives until a month before the writer’s passing. (The things you can learn from Facebook...) Since Hisaye died, I’ve now come to regret not re-establishing contact with her after my major medical episode seven years ago. But at least, because of Hisaye’s niece, I didn’t learn of her death days or even months after the fact.

All during the memorial service, from two TV monitors perched above its altar, the chapel televised still photos from Hisaye’s life, starting with a baby picture taken in the 1920s through the days of her adulthood and on into her sunset years. The slideshow gave me a better feeling for her life as a wife and mother — as well as a literary figure. The photos made me wish that I had seen her in person more often. I’d also like to have met her husband — he passed on nine years ago, but the pictures of him in the chapel’s slideshow made him seem like a neat guy. The photos also showed a side of Hisaye that she wrote about but I’d never seen: how she was always beaming whenever she was around her grandchildren.

If I had communicated with her these last eight years, I’m not sure what I would have said to her that I hadn’t already said in my letters. If I had reminded her how much I like her writing, she would have probably just waived away any kind of kudos I gave her, as she usually did (while she kept talking about all these invitations she’d receive to make appearances and do readings at literary events). I guess that I would have just wanted to let her know that I hadn’t forgotten about her, that my sparseness of communication had more to do with medical issues on my end, that I still wished her and her family well. Because I was remiss in getting back to her, I didn’t get to say any of that. And I didn’t think about saying it during the memorial service. So, I’ll say it now.

Hisaye Yamamoto (1921-2011)

Hisaye Yamamoto
(photo by Joy Yamauchi)

Hisaye Yamamoto passed away in Los Angeles last Sunday. She was a pioneering Asian American author, an American-born nisei who wrote at a time, the 1940s and ’50s, when few others from her community were finding a nationwide readership. She was reportedly the first Asian American to publish in the Paris Review.

Ironically, last Sunday was also California’s first official Fred Korematsu Day, a day dedicated to the Japanese American who challenged his World War II internment all the way to the Supreme Court. Hisaye Yamamoto was also interned, at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona, at the age of 20, and her troubling memories of that ordeal never went away.

Her output of fiction was slim but impressive. She wrote a number of short stories in the ’40s and ’50s, including the haunting “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951), both stories told from the circumscribed perspective of a pre-adult nisei girl who has difficulty understanding the struggles of her immigrant parents. However, not long afterwards, Yamamoto turned away from writing as a vocation in order to raise a family, writing only the occasional piece, whether fiction or non-fiction, for specialized outlets, such as the Japanese American press. Her best short stories are collected in the volume Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories.

I was fortunate enough to know her. Back in 1988, I got the idea to record “Seventeen Syllables” for the radio program “The Morning Reading,” broadcast at the time by KPFK-Pacifica. I wrote to her asking for permission to record her story (like most of those at KPFK, I was a volunteer, so there was no money involved), and she graciously consented. I produced and directed the recording of the story with actress Jeanne Sakata giving a wonderful performance. The whole experience of producing the reading and working with Jeanne was enjoyable and rewarding. Hisaye liked the radio reading when it was broadcast, and we stayed in touch, corresponding with hard-copy snail mail over the years.

Early in our correspondence, I kept peppering Hisaye with questions about the internment — not hers specifically, but the historical incident in general. After a while, I thought to myself that if I continued writing about the subject, I’d just become an internment pest to her. So, I decided that the next line I dropped her would say nothing about the internment. I found a card with an arresting black & white Ansel Adams landscape photograph, filled it with non-internment talk, and sent it off to her. Her next letter to me began: “Did you know that Ansel Adams photo was taken in Manzanar?” The best-laid plans of mice and men...

The first time we met face to face was shortly after Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories was published, and she held a reading and book signing in Little Tokyo in 1989. By then, we had been corresponding for a few months, but she couldn’t possibly have known what I looked or sounded like. When she started signing copies of her book, I stood in line with the others and patiently waited my turn. Soon, I was finally in front of her and gave her my copy to autograph. “Who do I make it out to?” I told her my name and, without another word or even a glance in my direction, she leapt to her feet and ran across the room to tell the event’s host about my radio production of “Seventeen Syllables.” It’s a little humbling when someone runs away from you immediately after you say your name, but she eventually returned, and we had a pleasant conversation. We met a handful of times after that.

In 1991, a film version of “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” was made for PBS, a fusing of the two stories titled Hot Summer Winds, directed by Emiko Omori. I was dissatisfied with Omori’s take on the material. The most compelling element of both stories is their obliqueness: they each center around a naive young protagonist who is unaware of the dramatic tensions swirling around her, tensions which are only implied on the page. In Hot Summer Winds, Omori foregrounds those tensions and robs them of their dramatic power. I ended up writing an academic article about the differences between the stories and the film, an article which became my first piece to be anthologized.

For her part, Hisaye loved Hot Summer Winds and thought that I was making a mountain out of a molehill. I thought it was a bit odd that a writer who had obviously taken such care to craft her short stories the way she did would be so blasé about her narrative strategy being discarded for a less compelling one. But I suppose that she was just never that protective of what she wrote. She was also very modest, sometimes to the point of being self-effacing.

I had been out of touch with her for the last seven or eight years. Recovering from surgery and its after-effects, I just didn’t have all that much to talk about. How did I hear of her passing? Incredibly, within this past month — literally — I learned that someone I’ve known for a long time from a completely different context was a relative of hers. I knew that they had the same surname, but Yamamoto is such a common Japanese name that it never occurred to me to ask if there was a connection. Small world, eh?

I’d like to pay a small tribute to a writer who certainly deserves a larger one. My tribute may be tiny, but comes from the heart (as well as the brain). When you take time out of your life to write an academic article about someone — especially when you write something commendatory — you’re paying tribute to that person. So, I would like to close with an excerpt from my article about her writing. The article was originally published in East-West Film Journal in 1993. The same excerpt also appeared in an anthology of articles about Asian American women writers edited by Harold Bloom. It’s a bit wordy, but Hisaye loved words:

Because Yamamoto’s young main characters are not aware of all the important events influencing their lives, the reader of both “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and “Seventeen Syllables” must peer beyond the girls’ limited purview to discern the narratives’ crucial hidden content. Abandoning seamless narrative closure, Yamamoto crafts a writerly text that demands the participation of her audience to complement the written story with their own construction of the absent narrative.

Perhaps inspired by the evocative understatement of haiku, Yamamoto’s narrative strategy calls attention to the ethnic issues inherent to her stories. Her characters’ status as so-called ethnic minorities suggests a problematic relationship to their own Americanness: straddling but separated from the signifiers of two cultures, Japanese and American, the issei and nisei characters are crucibles of a new identity which must discover its own meaning and purpose. As personified by Yoneko, a Japanese American identity already exists, but it is still unfinished, growing, maturing. However, rather than unproblematically defining such a “Japanese American” identity, Yamamoto’s synthesis of disparate cultural signifiers ultimately turns in on itself: the constant exchange of culturally distinctive ideas and activities among the diverse characters implicitly questions the narrow idea of culture as a collection of fixed, insular ethnic groups. Furthermore, the possibility, however deferred, of intercultural/inter-ethnic unions in Yamamoto’s stories also indicates — and perhaps celebrates — the constantly fluctuating cultural and ethnic makeup of America’s human landscape. Yoneko may exemplify a synthesis of Japanese and American cultures, but she can’t contain the boundless fluidity of cultural interaction.

In this context, Yamamoto’s narrative ellipses take on an added resonance. Discussing the ambivalence of both narration and the national self-image, Homi K. Bhabha connects the loose-ended narrative to resistance against a nation’s narrative authority and its construction of an unquestioned, seemingly homogeneous national identity ...

The reader, then, may easily interpret Yamamoto’s crucial narrative absences as a correlation to the relative absence of Japanese Americans — and people of color in general — in the discourse of American history as it has traditionally been taught in mainstream education. In particular, the pedagogical absence of the Japanese American internment, only recently remedied, has long elided this crucial event in the history of the U.S. Constitution. Also, Yamamoto’s narrative lacunae are associable to invisibly oppressive power relations among the characters in her stories: the absence of important narrative information marks the missing alternative voice of the underling. Just as they suggest the amorphous space of an alternate literary discourse, the rupturous gaps in Yamamoto’s stories suggest the contours of a perceptually radical history denied by patriarchy, hierarchy, and racism. By drawing the reader to the silences within the open-ended narrative, Yamamoto’s stories quietly question what remains to be said beyond the narrative, and beyond the construct of American culture as fundamentally immutable and Eurocentric.