Hisaye Yamamoto

Hisaye Yamamoto
Born	1921 Redondo Beach, California
Nationality	USA
Genres	short story
Notable work(s)	Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories
Notable award(s)	American Book Award, Lifetime Achievement.

Hisaye Yamamoto (b. 1921) is a Japanese American writer of short stories.

Contents 1 Biography and career 2 Notable individual works 3 References 4 See also 5 Critical Studies

Biography and career

Born in Redondo Beach, California, Yamamoto is a Nisei, a Japanese-American whose parents were born in Japan. She was interned in the Poston War Relocation Center during the Second World War, where she wrote for camp publications and began to publish her first short fiction. Her postwar career included journalism and urban-mission work, after which she spent many years as a homemaker in Los Angeles, California. Though she had no academic writing career and earned little from the sale of her fiction, she continued to write and publish short stories, several of which are frequently anthologized, taught in college curricula, and discussed by literary scholars.

Yamamoto has discussed the difficulties she has finding time to write:

"Most of the time I am cleaning house, or cooking or doing yard work. Very little time is spent writing. But if somebody told me I couldn't write, it would probably grieve me very much" ^[1].

Yamamoto's stories have compared to haiku, "layered in metaphor, imagery, and irony, but never wordy or given to digression." ^[2] She has also been praised "for her subtle realizations of gender and sexual relationships."^[3]

In 1986 Yamamoto won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Notable individual works

• "Seventeen Syllables" story (1949)
• "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara" story (1950)
• "Yoneko's Earthquake" story (1951)
• "Las Vegas Charlie" story
• "A Fire in Fontana" story (1985)
• Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (collection)

References

1. ^ Crow, Charles L. "A MELUS Interview: Hisaye Yamamoto." MELUS 14.1 (Spring 1987): 73-84.
2. ^ Thalheimer, Anne N. Review of Seventeen Syllables. MELUS 24.4 (Winter 1999): 177-179.
3. ^ Wong, Sau-ling C., and Jeffrey J. Santa Ana. "Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature," Signs 25.1 (1999): 171-226.

• Cheung, King-Kok. "Introduction," in Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001): ix-xxiii.
• Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
• Crow, Charles L. "A MELUS Interview: Hisaye Yamamoto." MELUS 14.1 (Spring 1987): 73-84.
• Thalheimer, Anne N. Review of Seventeen Syllables. MELUS 24.4 (Winter 1999): 177-179.
• Wong, Sau-ling C., and Jeffrey J. Santa Ana. "Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature," Signs 25.1 (1999): 171-226.

See also

Literature Portal

• List of Asian American writers
• Japanese American internment

Critical Studies

(as of March 2008)

1. Le forme della violenza: Il modernismo politico di Hisaye Yamamoto By: Izzo, Donatella. pp. 125-64 IN: Izzo, Suzie Wong non abita più qui: La letteratura delle minoranze asiatiche negli Stati Uniti. Milan, Italy: ShaKe; 2006.
2. Re-Signed Subjects: Women, Work, and World in the Fiction of Carlos Bulosan and Hisaye Yamamoto By: Higashida, Cheryl. pp. 29-54 IN: Lim, Gamber, Sohn and Valentino, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP; 2006. Also published in Studies in the Literary Imagination, 2004 Spring; 37 (1): 35-60.
3. Shichuanyuan xiao jie de chuan qi zhong 'feng' de duo chong yi yi jie gou By: Zhou, Xiaogang; Foreign Literature Studies/Wai Guo Wen Xue Yan Jiu, 2005 Apr; 2 (112): 118-22, 175. (journal article)
4. Hisaye Yamamoto By: Lee, A. Robert. pp. 327-31 IN: Madsen, Asian American Writers. Detroit, MI: Gale; 2005.
5. 'Nothing Solid': Racial Identity and Identification in Fifth Chinese Daughter and 'Wilshire Bus' By: Motooka, Wendy. pp. 207-32 IN: Goldner, and Henderson-Holmes, Racing and (E)Racing Language: Living with the Color of Our Words. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP; 2001.
6. Hisaye Yamomoto and Wakako Yamauchi By: Cheung, King-Kok. pp. 343-82 IN: Cheung, Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. Honolulu, HI: U of Hawaii P, with UCLA Asian American Studies Center; 2000.
7. 'Something Forgotten Which Should Have Been Remembered': Private Property and Cross-Racial Solidarity in the Work of Hisaye Yamamoto By: Hong, Grace Kyungwon; American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 1999 June; 71 (2): 291-310.
8. Esther's Smile: Silence and Action in Hisye Yamamoto's 'Wilshire Bus' By: Mullins, Maire; Studies in Short Fiction, 1998 Winter; 35 (1): 77-84.
9. Prison, Psyche, and Poetry in Hisaye Yamamoto's Three Short Stories: 'Seventeen Syllables,' 'The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,' and 'The Eskimo Connection' By: Usui, Masami; Studies in Culture and the Humanities, 1997; 6: 1-29.
10. Issei Mothers' Silence, Nisei Daughters' Stories: The Short Fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto By: Sugiyama, Naoko; Comparative Literature Studies, 1996; 33 (1): 1-14.
11. Reading between the Syllables: Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories By: Cheung, King-Kok. pp. 313-25 IN: Maitino, and Peck, Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P; 1996.
12. The Dream in Flames: Hisaye Yamamoto, Multiculturalism, and the Lost Angeles Uprising By: Cheung, King-kok; Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts and Sciences, 1995; 39 (1): 118-30.
13. The Unrepentant Fire: Tragic Limitations in Hisaye Yamamoto's 'Seventeen Syllables' By: Cheng, Ming L.; MELUS, 1994 Winter; 19 (4): 91-107.
14. Adapting (to) the Margins: Hot Summer Winds and the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto By: Payne, Robert M.; East-West Film Journal, 1993 July; 7 (2): 39-53.
15. A Conversation with Hisaye Yamamoto By: Osborn, William P.; Chicago Review, 1993; 39 (3-4): 34-43.
16. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa By: Cheung, King-kok. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP; 1993. xvi, 198 pp. (book)
17. Rebels and Heroines: Subversive Narratives in the Stories of Wakako Yamauchi and Hisaye Yamamoto By: Yogi, Stan. pp. 131-50 IN: Lim, and Ling, Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple UP; 1992.
18. Thrice Muted Tale: Interplay of Art and Politics in Hisaye Yamamoto's 'The Legend of Miss Sasagawara' By: Cheung, King-kok; MELUS, 1991-1992 Fall; 17 (3): 109-25.
19. Double-Telling: Intertextual Silence in Hisaye Yamamoto's Fiction By: Cheung, King-Kok; American Literary History, 1991 Summer; 3 (2): 277-93.
20. 'Seventeen Syllables': A Symbolic Haiku By: Mistri, Zenobia Baxter; Studies in Short Fiction, 1990 Spring; 27 (2): 197-202.
21. Legacies Revealed: Uncovering Buried Plots in the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto By: Yogi, Stan; Studies in American Fiction, 1989 Autumn; 17 (2): 169-181.
22. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories Latham, NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color P; 1988.
23. A MELUS Interview: Hisaye Yamamoto By: Crow, Charles L.; MELUS, 1987 Spring; 14 (1): 73-84.
24. The Issei Father in the Fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto By: Crow, Charles L.. pp. 34-40 IN: Truchlar, Für eine offene Literaturwissenschaft: Erkundungen und Eroprobungen am Beispiel US-amerikanischer Texte/Opening Up Literary Criticism: Essays on American Prose and Poetry. Salzburg: Neugebauer; 1986.
25. Home and Transcendence in Los Angeles Fiction By: Crow, Charles L.. pp. 189-205 IN: Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Original Essays. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P; 1984.
26. Relocation and Dislocation: The Writings of Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi By: McDonald, Dorothy Ritsuko; MELUS, 1980 Fall; 7 (3): 21-38.

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Hisaye Yamamoto dies at 89; writer of Japanese American stories

After WWII internment, she worked for an African American newspaper, where she developed an anguished awareness of racism and a multiethnic consciousness that colored her "slice of life" stories.

Hisaye Yamamoto published her first story at 14, wrote for the newspaper at her Poston, Ariz., internment camp and continued writing after the war. But she did not receive serious critical attention until the 1970s, when Asian American scholars began to study her work. (Mario Gershom Reyes, Rafu Shimpo / February 12, 2011)

Hisaye Yamamoto, one of the first Asian American writers to earn literary distinction after World War II with highly polished short stories that illuminated a world circumscribed by culture and brutal strokes of history, has died. She was 89.

Yamamoto had been in poor health since a stroke last year and died in her sleep Jan. 30 at her home in northeast Los Angeles, said her daughter, Kibo Knight.

Often compared to such short-story masters as Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O'Connor and Grace Paley, Yamamoto concentrated her imagination on the issei and nisei, the first- and second-generation Japanese Americans who were targets of the public hysteria unleashed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Yamamoto was 20 when the attack sent the United States into war and her family into a Poston, Ariz., internment camp. Her most celebrated stories, such as "Seventeen Syllables" and "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara," reflect the preoccupations and tensions of the Japanese immigrants and offspring who survived that era. Among her most powerful characters are women who struggle to nurture their romantic or creative selves despite the constraints of gender, racism and tradition.

"She wrote in a true voice," said Wakako Yamauchi, the Japanese American dramatist who wrote "And the Soul Shall Dance" and had known Yamamoto since childhood. "She wrote about what she knew and that was about us — Asians, Japanese Americans. Her stories were wonderful, beautiful legacies."

A private, somewhat taciturn woman with a wry outlook, Yamamoto began writing in the 1930s and published her earliest stories in such prestigious journals as Partisan Review as well as in anthologies, including "The Best American Short Stories of 1952." But she did not receive serious critical attention until the 1970s, when Asian American scholars began to study her work.

"She was the opposite of the self-promoting writer," said UCLA English professor King-Kok Cheung, recalling a woman who often responded cryptically, if at all, to questions and lacked flair in public readings. Yet Yamamoto was, Cheung notes, "a very unusual writer, especially given the times, when it was so hard for a Japanese American, not to mention a woman, to publish."

Yamamoto was born in Redondo Beach on Aug. 23, 1921. The daughter of immigrant strawberry farmers from Kumamoto, Japan, she was a voracious reader and published her first story when she was 14. At Compton College, where she earned an associate of arts degree, she studied French, Spanish, German and Latin. She wrote stories for Japanese American newspapers using the pseudonym "Napoleon."

During World War II, she wrote for the Poston camp newspaper, which published her serialized mystery "Death Rides the Rail to Poston." She briefly left the camp to work in Springfield, Mass., but returned when her 19-year-old brother died while fighting with the U.S. Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy.

After the war ended in 1945, she returned to Los Angeles and became a reporter and columnist for the Los Angeles Tribune, an African American weekly. Her experiences there deepened her awareness of racism to a point of nearly unbearable anguish. She wrote a story about the intimidation of a black family named Short by white neighbors in segregated Fontana. She attempted to hew to journalistic standards of impartiality, cautiously describing the threats against the family as "alleged" or "claims."

After her story ran, the Shorts were killed in an apparent arson fire. Yamamoto castigated herself for failing to convey the urgency of their situation.

"I should have been an evangelist at Seventh and Broadway, shouting out the name of the Short family and their predicament in Fontana," she wrote decades later in a 1985 essay called "A Fire in Fontana." Instead, she pronounced her effort to communicate as pathetic as "the bit of saliva which occasionally trickled" from the corner of a feeble man's mouth.

She left the newspaper and rode trains and buses across the country. "Something was unsettling my innards," she wrote of her dawning multiethnic consciousness. "I continued to look like the Nisei I was, with my height remaining at slightly over four feet ten, my hair straight, my vision myopic. Yet I know that this event transpired within me; sometimes I see it as my inward self being burnt black in a certain fire."

She drew from this well in the burst of writing that followed. Her breakthrough came with the 1948 publication in Partisan Review of "The High-Heeled Shoes, a Memoir," a shockingly contemporary story about sexual harassment. She weaved intercultural conflicts and bonds into "Seventeen Syllables" (1949), in which a nisei girl's blooming romance with a Mexican American classmate offers an achingly innocent counterpoint to her issei mother's arranged marriage. "Wilshire Bus" (1950) explores a Japanese American woman's silence during a white man's racist harangue against a Chinese couple on the bus they are riding.

Fifteen of her stories and essays were collected in "Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories" (1988), which an Amerasia Journal reviewer hailed as "a literary time capsule — an intimate slice of Japanese American history." Two of her stories — "Seventeen Syllables" and "Yoneko's Earthquake" — formed the basis of an hourlong drama called "Hot Summer Winds" for the PBS series "American Playhouse" in 1991.

With an adopted son, Yamamoto moved to New York in the early 1950s to be a volunteer in the Catholic Worker Movement. In 1955 she married Anthony DeSoto and returned to Los Angeles, where they raised four more children.

DeSoto died in 2003. In addition to Knight, of Los Angeles, Yamamoto is survived by children Paul of Simi Valley, Yuki of Los Angeles, Rocky of Sylmar and Gilbert of Arcadia; seven grandchildren and two brothers.

Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Fukui Mortuary Chapel, 707 E. Temple St., Los Angeles, with burial at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills.

Yamamoto often described herself as a housewife, not a writer. Not surprisingly, her output was greatly diminished during the years consumed by childrearing, but picked up again after her children were grown.

"I write when something sticks in my craw," she told A. Magazine in 1994. "Writing is a compulsion — or an itch."