[In this review, Uba asserts that the "principal concerns " of Yellow Light are "the quest for a personal identity and the desire to build and retrieve a collective identity by sifting through the past."]

A few years back a popular weekly newsmagazine ran an article on Japanese Americans, treating them as an American success story. The article was headlined—"Outwhiting the Whites." Garrett Kaoru Hongo's book of poetry, Yellow Light, demolishes the onesidedness of such headlines and grapples with the underlying problem toward which they unintentionally point: the problem of an ethnic group whose own identity remains ill-defined.

Not that Hongo merely trumpets the familiar tune of ethnic pride. Rather, he excels at balancing a passionate interest in ordinary working-class people performing ordinary activities, with a deep-felt concern over what they are often the unknowing victims of. In the title poem, "Yellow Light," for instance, an unidentified Los Angeles woman returns with a load of groceries to her "neighborhood of Hawaiian apartments, / just starting to steam with cooking" but fails to observe the "war" being waged between the "dim squares" of kitchen light in the barrio and the "brilliant fluorescence" emanating from the wealthy Miracle Mile district. Neatly skirting both the sentimentality and the obvious partisanship that this scenario invites, Hongo concludes the poem without even a glimmer of awareness on the woman's part of the class conflict to which she seems heir, but instead with a riveting, ambiguous image of the yellow moon, at once minatory and transfiguring, that devours "everything in sight." In "Off from Swing Shift," one of several fine poems written about his father, Hongo combines an incisive portrayal of a factory worker who, only within the safe confines of home, dares remove "the easy grin / saying he's lucky as they come," with a genuinely moving depiction of hope seasoned with despair, as the man, a Japanese American war veteran gradually growing deaf "from a shell / at Anzio," listens for the late race results on the radio.

The balance Hongo strikes between the individual's private experience and the larger cultural matrix of which tne individual constitutes a part refers the reader to the principal concerns of the book as a whole: the quest for a personal identity and the desire to build and retrieve a collective identity by sifting through the past. In his search for personal identity, Hongo not only jockeys back and forth through time but also through space, traveling from California to Japan and back again. In Japan he finds himself inescapably the outsider, reduced, at least at first, to writing "postcards" back home. But these "Postcards for Bert Meyers" are not filled with the banalities of the ordinary tourist; instead, they define both what has been lost and what has been retained in modern Japan's headlong rush for technological advance. At one point the poet is the bemused foreigner caught in the literal crush of rush hour commuters, able to recover his equilibrium only at the moment when the train stops "And lets out a small puff / Full of tiny Japanese people" ("Yamanote Sen"). At another point he is a lone human figure magically transformed in an urban landscape itself transformed by a sudden rain: "All around me / the ten thousand things / of the universe go slack / in the day's new lagoon, / and I seep out of myself like / water from the soaked earth …" ("Alone in a Shower"). Gradually, the poet achieves a harmony with that part of the Japanese past that remains alive to the mutual imagination of its descendants on both sides of the Pacific.

Throughout the book, Hongo's wit and humor leaven the more programmatic elements of his quest. In "Crusing 99," even as he journeys toward the California town called Paradise, he playfully admits that he is inclined to allow his "mind to wander" and at one point even grumbles that the "Dodgers / haven't made it to Vero Beach." And in the marvelous, whacky tour de force, "Who Among You Knows the Essence of Garlic," he savages the pretensions of foreigners by converting their interest in exotic foods into a weapon turned back upon them.

While Hongo's personal quest carries him afar, his attempt to build a collective identity leads him to concentrate wholly upon the Japanese experience in America. Except for the long, hortatory poem "Stepchild," Hongo resists the twin temptations to script an Asian American history at a single stroke and to lash out at those elements of American culture that have worked to deprive Japanese Americans not only of their identity but, more insidiously, of their awareness of their need for one. Instead, he concentrates on individuals and on fragments of lives, and allows their interconnections steadily and silently to accumulate. Within this compass, Hongo ranges widely, from a memorable portrait of a hard-drinking plantation laborer in Hawaii named Kubota who "laughs and lights a cigarette, / breathes out a wreath of smoke / for his funeral, fifty years away" ("Kubota") to an evocative description of a visit to the Nippon Kan in Seattle's Astor Hotel, where yellowing programs and an "open tray of greasepaint," lonely artifacts from a final stage performance in the fall of 1941, help lead to a surrealistic epiphany, a moment of total engagement within the past ("On the Last Performance of Musumé Dojoji …"). "And Your Soul Shall Dance" is a hymn to the artist and writer Wakako Yamauchi, who, as a child, yearns so intensely to escape the unpoetic confines of her environment, a "flat valley grooved with irrigation ditches," that when she enters the schoolyard her "classmates scatter like chickens, / shooed by the storm brooding" on her horizon.

Occasionally, Hongo slips. The poem "Roots," which celebrates the links the poet has forged with his Japanese past and the self which has come into his possession, is overburdened finally by the weight of its message. Simply to affirm that there is "a signature to all things / the same as my own" is not enough when the reader expects to be shown that this is so. The long "Crusing 99" suffers from the opposite problem: despite its boisterous humor, it is never completely clear of purpose and ultimately grinds to a halt before a mystifying "scarecrow / made of tumbleweeds" and its own disconcerting mixture of poetic styles. And perhaps more poems on the war-time internment of the Japanese on the West Coast are in order too, given Hongo's avowed concern with curing the condition of "amnesia" within Japanese American culture. Nevertheless, this is an excellent volume of poetry, make no mistake. Hongo applies wit, intelligence, and craftsmanship to his serious theme as few others have been able to do. His book is certain to gain a privileged station in Asian American literature courses, as well as to fuel the continuing controversy over enlarging the American literary canon.