SOURCE: "A MELUS Interview: Hisaye Yamamoto," in MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 73-84.

[In the following interview, Yamamoto and Crow discuss the author's life and work, and in particular how Yamamoto 's personal circumstances have influenced her writing.]

Hisaye Yamamoto's reputation as a writer of fiction grows, despite the relatively small body of her work and its original publication in little magazines and in regional Japanese-American newspapers. By 1980, as Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald and Katharine Newman noted in MELUS, she had been reprinted in at least twenty anthologies (23). The best-known of her stories are "Seventeen Syllables," "Yoneko's Earthquake," "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara," "Las Vegas Charley," and "The Brown House." The first collection of her fiction, Seventeen Syllables: 5 Stories of Japanese American Life, was published in Tokyo in 1985; unfortunately, no such edition has yet appeared in the United States.

Yamamoto is known as "Si" to her many friends in MELUS, of which she was an early member. She had agreed to meet with me at the first MELUS convention (24-25 April 1987) and so, as the first day's meetings ended, we sat together on a sunny terrace at Heritage Center of the University of California at Irvine. There was a babble of nearby students and their radios which was distracting, and Yamamoto was doubtless frustrated by the failure of her one remaining match to light the cigarette she continued to hold throughout the interview. The impression she gave, nonetheless, was of great calm and patience. Her voice was soft and carefully modulated, easily spilling into self-deprecating laughter; it took on a certain edge only when speaking of her incarceration in the Poston relocation center during World War II.

Like many writers, Hisaye Yamamoto seems to dislike theoretical discussion of her fiction. She is, however, very forthcoming about her life and the sources of her work.

This interview provides some insight into the personal background of her stories, and of little-known but significant elements in her career: her two-year participation in the Catholic Worker community on Staten Island founded by Dorothy Day (1897-1980), and her friendship with Yvor Winters (1900-1968) and his wife Janet Lewis (b. 1899). The Catholic Worker episode, from 1953-55, was the result of sharp decision and commitment and stands in interesting symmetry with the other communal experience, her involuntary three years in the Poston Relocation Center.

This decision meant declining to attend Stanford and study under the strong-willed poet and critic Yvor Winters, author of In Defense of Reason, a manifesto of his principles of classical order and moral absolutism. While Yamamoto depicts the impact of Winters' thought upon her, and her willing discipleship, it should be remembered, again, that Winters first wrote to her after reading "Yoneko's Earthquake" (1951), so she already had achieved her mature voice. Yamamoto's correspondence with Winter's widow, Janet Lewis, suggests on artistic kinship between these two writers, who share a quiet authority and individualism, and who both excel in sensitive treatment of domestic tragedy (compare, for example, "Seventeen Syllables" and The Wife of Martin Guerre.)

The following interview is edited from the transcript of the meeting at Irvine, and from five handwritten pages of follow-up notes provided by Ms. Yamamoto.

[Crow]: Did you once say that you had been writing and publishing since you were fourteen?

[Yamamoto]: Well, for the Japanese newspapers. On weekends they would have a feature page, where people would send in all kinds of things. They'd print anything, so that's how I got started, and I haven't stopped yet! I'm still writing for those newspapers. The one person who has kept me writing all these years is Henry Mori, now retired but at one time the English section editor of the Rafu Shimpo. He kept asking me every year for a contribution to the holiday edition, even when I pleaded surgery, new baby, nervous breakdown, whatever, so I managed to send him something every year. I don't think I would have kept writing, if he hadn't been so insistent. We met in camp during the war and he also wrote for the Poston Chronicle. I will probably be writing from time to time when asked, as long as I can shuffle over to the typewriter.

I see. You must have always known you were a writer.

(Laughing) No, I still don't think of myself as a writer. I guess I wanted to be when I was young, because I liked to read, and, you know, writing seemed like an ideal thing to do. And then I wanted to be famous, a famous writer. But I had a fellowship one year where I tried to write every day because I was obligated, and I decided that I really wasn't a writer. A man from Japan came to interview me—last month, I think. They're putting out a special issue of a magazine on "the Japanese-American imagination," or something like that, so he thought I should be included. And I told him I didn't have any imagination, I just embroidered on things that happened, or that people told me happened.

You're so modest about your fiction! Could this be a form of protective coloration, a smoke screen that you throw up when people ask you questions?

Oh . . . I don't know. 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.

I would like to ask you a little about your life in the relocation center. I've noticed that there are some Japanese-Americans—writers and others—who are interested in reliving that experience now and writing about it, or revisiting the camps, in some ways recreating that era.

Oh, yes, Lawson Inada wrote in one of his poems called "Japanese Geometry" that all these camps ought to be set aside as parklands or at least as a memorial, and one by one they've done that. Right now, this very weekend, they're having another pilgrimage to Manzanar, and they have a big ceremony every year.

Have you ever gone back to Poston, your camp in Arizona?

No. A friend went to the Grand Canyon once, and on the way back she and her husband and child visited Poston, where we were, and she said that the camp and grounds had all been taken back by the Indians, and they were growing alfafa on it, and they were living in the adobe school buildings that we all built with our own hands, and cooking in them, and about all that remains of us was the little plaque that dedicated the school, and told how it had been built.

You were in your teens when . . .

No, I was twenty when the evacuation order came, and I became 21 when I was in camp, so I think I was pretty bitter because—well, you know, people say "free, white, and 21." I wasn't white [laughing], but at 21 people are supposed to make their own decisions.

You were two or three years in the camp?

Yes, three years.

I know that many Issei families lost what they had worked for before the war—fishing boats and farms and so forth. Did your father suffer a great deal as a result of this?

Yes, well he was not a farmer on such a big scale, not like some of those that had huge farms, you know, but still he wasn't able to harvest the strawberries that he had planted himself. We lived on the land that is now Camp Pendleton, we farmed there, and there was a whole colony of Japanese there, growing strawberries mainly, and then the strawberries were bought up by a man from Montebello, Pearson I think, and then we all worked for him, picking the strawberries. And everybody used to pick strawberries together, before, but Pearson divided the Mexicans in one group, with a Mexican foreman, and the Japanese in another group, with a Japanese foreman, and that's the way we worked, until we got evacuated.

So he lost the crop.

Yes. Well, he got paid wages for picking it. And, I guess, his share of the price Pearson paid the farm cooperative. It wasn't much.

Did you father return to farming after the war?

No, first he went to a cannery in Utah, then he came back to L.A. and then he was a janitor for a while, and then started working in Chinese restaurants, washing dishes and busing.

Like the title character in "Las Vegas Charley."

Yes, it's based on my father, but not exactly, since I changed his background and the family structure. Yes, then he went to Las Vegas, where he worked for a Chinese restaurant. He worked for eight years, then got ill just like Charley in the story. That part is pretty factual. No, not factual but [laughing] . . .

It follows the outlines of his life in that "decline" period?

Yes.

That must be typical of many Japanese men of that generation who weren't able to get back their status or economic power.

Yes, well, the Issei started taking a back seat to the Nisei about that time. It started with the camps. Yes, I would say so.

Were you able to write while you were in Poston?

Yes, I did work for the camp newspaper, The Poston Chronicle. I remember that I wrote a mystery story, a serial, that the editor ordered [laughing], and later on I wrote a weekly column.

And do I understand that after the war you became a journalist for a Japanese-American newspaper in Los Angeles?

No, no, I worked for a black newspaper, the Los Angeles Tribune, which is no longer . . . it didn't last much longer after I left! [laughing]

I see: cause and effect?

No, no, it was a very good newspaper, and was considered the most creatively edited Negro newspaper in the county while it was alive.

What sort of journalism were you doing for the Tribune?

Everything. Writing stories, rewrite, and the longer I stayed the more I did: radio column, world news summary, man on the street, then I wrote a column, and I did book reviews, and about everything. There was just the editor, and me, and the secretary, and the publisher. Also the sports writer, who doubled as an ad salesman.

I had seen an ad in the Pacific Citizen, asking for a man to join the Tribune staff, and I think that the idea was that the man would go out into the Japanese community and get Japanese advertising, because while the Japanese were gone, Little Tokyo had become "Bronzeville," the blacks had moved into that area, and interracial friendship was the aim. They wanted an interracial paper, that was the ideal, but I wasn't the type to go out and get display advertising, so I don't think the paper got many Japanese subscribers on account of me. I was there from 1945 to 1948. I quit because I decided I wanted to go to school, but after I quit I didn't go back to school. I started writing. And there was something personal, too. There was a baby, Paul, born in the family, that nobody was in a position to care for, so I decided to take him, so I really couldn't go out to work any more.

And several years later you joined The Catholic Worker? Could you tell me about this, and your relationship with Dorothy Day?

The Catholic Worker came to the Tribune office as an exchange, and I got so addicted to it that I began taking it home instead of throwing it away with the rest of the exchanges. When I left the Tribune in 1948, I subscribed to The Catholic Worker and I had accumulated a seven-year file before I finally got up the nerve, in 1952, to write to the Workers to express my desire to join up. Dorothy Day didn't jump up and down for joy, but cautiously suggested I meet her later in the year when she was due in Los Angeles on a speaking engagement. I met her at a midnight mass at the Maryknoll Sisters in Boyle Heights, then later for lunch with a couple of others, one of whom was a priest she called a "fellow renegade." In September the following year, Paul (who was about five then) and I went to join The Catholic Worker, he as a Catholic and I as a worker.

Meanwhile, Yvor Winters had been encouraging me to accept one of the Stanford Writing Fellowships, but my heart chose The Catholic Worker, so when Richard Scowcroft contacted me to ask if I'd accept a fellowship if I were awarded one, I regretfully said no. I guess it was like the cliché about coming to the crossroads and choosing one road over the other.

Paul and I visited my brother and family in Springfield, Massachusetts, before going down to New York City. When the train was pulling into Grand Central Station—it was in the middle of a heat wave—we saw all these people leaning out of the windows of the endless brownstone tenements to get a breath of air. I thought, "What have I done?" And one of the first things we saw, on arriving at the Catholic Worker house (St. Joseph's House) was a man lying in an alleyway. Paul was very curious, and I was again thinking, "What have I done?" And our first night was spent in Dorothy Day's own room upstairs, where cockroaches and bedbugs dismayed us through the night (Dorothy Day was elsewhere). The next day, after the ferry ride to Peter Maurin Farm, on Staten Island, someone at the farm asked, "What's that on your neck?" I looked in the mirror and found my neck covered with red welts—bedbug bites, I was told. So, again, I thought, "What have I done?"

Well, it was a pretty good two years at the farm, even though I found out Dorothy Day never wrote about the darker aspects of living in community in her column, which had so enchanted me. When I confronted her about a similar author who wrote only about the joys of Catholic family life, she said those aberrations were not the important thing, only incidentals. That was why she was able to continue the work for so long, I guess, even though there were many times, I gathered, that she felt like running away from it all. She's written her own autobiography¹ and several books have been written about the movement. I don't think any one of them really defined her—she was too complex for words, but a really charismatic personality. The work goes on without her, it seems, rippling out in wider and wider waves, Los Angeles has a really dynamic Catholic Worker Group, for instance, with new houses in Las Vegas and Orange County as the most recent offshoots. I believe Dorothy Day is the most important person this country has produced.

If I had chosen Stanford, would I be saying the same thing about Yvor Winters? The ironic thing is that when I was going to Compton Jr. College before the war my friend Emily and I had printed in large letters on our notebooks, "STANFORD OR BUST!"

Could you tell me more about your friendship with Winters and his wife, Janet Lewis? As you know, I am especially interested in her work. You have corresponded with her as well, haven't you?

Yvor Winters wrote me in 1952,² I believe, after he read "Yoneko's Earthquake" in Furioso. (Elizabeth Bishop also wrote—she was consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress at the time. She is my favorite contemporary poet.) So we corresponded pretty regularly until I left for the Worker. He sent me Janet Lewis' books and his own. Winters' In Defense of Reason staggered me. He was very kind about answering all the questions I asked and sent me his reading lists and I even attempted The Rise of the Dutch Republic because he recommended it. The thing in Motley that impressed me was the Catholicism in Holland. But when I told him of my decision to join The Worker (which he didn't really think much of), he gave me his blessing.

I began writing to Janet Lewis when I read about Yvor Winters' death, because I felt as though I hadn't really expressed my appreciation to him for tolerating all those questions and for encouraging me to go on writing. We've had a sporadic correspondence ever since. I met her (I never met Yvor Winters) when my friend Chizuko Omori let Wakako Yamauchi and her daughter and me and my daughter stay at her place in Palo Alto while we attended the first Asian-American Writers' Conference at the Oakland Museum. She came to breakfast one morning bearing a jar of guava jelly.

I met her at another seminar at the same place a couple of years later, a seminar on the "relocation camp" experience, but no one else seemed impressed that Janet Lewis was there, so I felt kind of angry about our "ethnocentricity"—here was a great writer and no one even recognized her name.

I went to her reading at Huntington Library here a few years ago, and that was the third time we met, I guess.

If I may turn back to your writing, one thing I've noticed in two or three of your stories is a very sympathetic picture of girls who seem to be incipient artists, like Yoneko in "Yoneko's Earthquake."

You know, you are the only one that has seen that. You picked up Yoneko's inventing songs when she wanted to put her brother's death out of her mind.³ But I didn't particularly think of that as what she was going to be later . . . it was just a defense mechanism, so . . .

But Rosie does this too, doesn't she, in "Seventeen Syllables"?

She is more of a show-off who likes to perform for her friends. She's something of a mime.

Do you see yourself in either of those girls, and in their use of language?

Oh, yes! It's all based on me, and my friends, and what I've seen, and so I imagine there's quite a bit of me in there, but I wouldn't like to think I'm them.

Yes, I understand. But I am interested in the question of how writers find their voices, and it did seem to me that the issue is in "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara" too . . .

Oh, yes, that was based on a real woman, you know.

Whom you encountered in the relocation center?

Yes, and she later died at the age of 58 in a nursing home in Los Angeles. And I found out that she really was a writer, which I didn't know when I wrote the story, that she had written a lot of poetry when she was younger, for the same Japanese newspapers, but I had never seen the ones that she wrote . . . I guess she wrote a little before I started writing.

In the story the narrator discovers a poem by Miss Sasagawara in a magazine, so you had intuited that your model was a writer.

Yes . . . well, no, I invented that. I didn't know she was a writer.

Last summer I taught "Seventeen Syllables, " and my class was particularly interested in the whole question of artists and audiences, and how the mother in "Seventeen Syllables" can't find an audience for what she wants to say, except for her haiku in the newspapers, and that's shut off for her when her husband essentially murders her voice. That's a powerful episode.

You seemed to think I treated the father viciously.

Most of my students thought that too. They saw the murdering of the mother's voice as the great crime of the story.

It is, it is, yes, I felt that too. But I didn't think I was being vicious toward the husband, because he was only acting the way he'd been brought up to act, the way men were supposed to be.

One of my students said about "Seventeen Syllables" that you were giving a voice to an inarticulate person, that is, the mother and the child can't communicate with each other, but you are communicating their story, and so you are giving a voice to the voiceless, to people who can't speak their own words.

Well, aren't most stories like that?

I suppose so, but these characters are so obviously frustrated, by the language barrier between them, and they can't communicate to each other the nature of their own personal tragedies or longings. And . . .

And then, aren't most relationships like that?

Yes, although the language barrier makes it so obvious. But all mothers and daughters are like that, aren't they?

The one's I've heard about, yes. Well, even with my own children, we speak the same language, we both speak English, but I know they don't tell me a lot that's going on . . . and then I think, if I know this much of what they won't tell me, I wonder what else is going on.

Or do you really want to know?

[laughing] No, I don't, not really. Don't tell me.

That same term I was teaching Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, and at one point she says that the difference between sane and insane people is that sane people can tell their stories, and insane people cannot.

Maybe they can't put it in any kind of order. They can tell it but they haven't put it under their control. It's fragmented, and they haven't come to grips with it.

The dancer in "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara"— the title character—is an illustration of that, it seems to me, because she can't express whatever it is she's feeling, except in the poem that she writes which your narrator discovers later on.

Oh, I didn't see that. [Laughing] Because I didn't really consider her insane, I guess. I tried to say that if it weren't for being put in the camp, she might have gone on.

The camp is depriving her of her medium?

Yes, I would think so, yes. And the people that she knew outside, you know, who were her friends and co-performers.

One of the writers at the conference, Stephen Sumida, described you as an "aunt" figure to younger Asian-American writers. Are you impressed by the work of any such writer at the moment?

Well, a young writer named Cynthia Kadohata had a short story, "Charlie-O," in The New Yorker last year [10 October 1986] which Wakako Yamauchi sent me a photocopy of. I like her style very much deceptively simple. She must be a Sansei [third generation], and if she is any example of the way Sansei writers are going to be writing, there won't be any particular emphasis on the fact that the people in the story are Japanese.

In your short stories, what sort of audience were you seeking?

I don't know, I don't know if I had any audience in mind. I just wanted to be a writer, so I guess I was writing about the things that I knew. I don't think I envisioned any audience. I don't want anyone to see what I'm writing, until it's published, and then I don't care. It's over and done with. So I was really surprised when young people dug them all up And that's why I'm here today, I guess, [laughing] because in their research they found all these stories that I'd written.

But they were intended for the largest audience you could find, not just for the Japanese community in Los Angeles, presumably?

I don't even know that. I just wanted to write, and be published, that's all, you know. I wasn't very farsighted. [laughing]

Well, they finally did find a lot of people, obviously. By the way, I've tracked down only about 5 or 6 stories that you have written, so far, and there must be more that I haven't found yet . . .

I guess they were about all in the little magazines, and then the rest are in the Japanese newspapers. The Rafu Shimpo asked me every year for a contribution and I write short stories, poems . . . and then my nephew was until recently the acting editor of the Pacific Citizen (he's gone up to San Francisco now, and is the English section editor of the Ho Kubei Mainichi), so the last couple of years he has been asking for pieces, and then I used to write for The Pacific Citizen before, right after the war, and then there was a newspaper called Crossroads that would ask for contributions, and I wrote a few things for them, too.

Do you have any plans to collect any of the other pieces which have not been anthologized?

I don't, no.

Is there a scrapbook or file someplace where you have collected all these things you have written?

Oh yes, Emma Gee at UCLA xeroxed quite a few things for me—a whole big box full. They have the pieces that I wrote for the Japanese newspapers. They have the Rafu Shimpo on microfilm, at the Asian-American Studies Center, I believe.

I'm asking because there will be scholars who will want to learn more about your fiction, and it would be useful to know where materials can be found, aside from the anthologies. Of course the anthology published in Tokyo recently, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, is a great help. There must be a growing interest in your work in Japan.

Well, in all Japanese immigrant literature. It's been a fad for the past ten years or so. Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan was translated in Japan, also Toshio Mori's Yokohama, California. . . .

What is it, do you think, that interests the Japanese reader about the emigrant experience?

Well, more and more Japanese have gone abroad as tourists, too, and they've seen more of the world. And I'm curious too. I used to wonder, what if I'd been born in Japan, or what if my family had gone to Canada, or to Brazil, and it is just fascinating to hear about those other settlements, or . . . I don't know, I'm interested too. For example, a sansei writer named Karen Yamashita did her master's thesis, I believe, in Brazil, and she reported on the Japanese immigration there, and she said one of the things she heard about was a colony of Tolstoians from Japan which started a community in Brazil. I don't know what has become of it. It's interesting, because . . . it does give you alternatives . . . other things that could have happened. Possibilities.

Have you ever wanted to write a novel, or tried to?

Oh, I don't think I'm that serious a writer, that I could, you know, that I could do it.

But you are writing an autobiography, aren't you?

Yes, sort of, there have been three installments, in the Rafu Shimpo.⁴ Whenever they ask me for something, I get an idea that maybe I could write a continuation of the autobiography. But probably it will never get finished.

If you can imagine yourself writing a complete autobiography, would there be certain key episodes which you would want to highlight?

Well, I guess that camp would be . . . one of the . . . not the high point, but, what is it? Low point.

A time of trial, of frustration?

Yes. And then working for the Tribune. And Paul coming. Then going to The Catholic Worker. Then getting married and having children . . . I don't think I'll ever get that far, though.

I notice that Gary Soto, who is here at the conference, is only 35 years old, and he's already written an autobiography. It seems to me that most autobiographies aren't the telling of a whole life—after all they can't be—but are the discovery of a pattern, a theme. What would be the theme of your autobiography? Would it be a success story?

Oh, no, no, no! A story of bumbling! Period!

Notes

¹The Long Loneliness, 1952.

² In fact, 1951. The letter, dated January 24, 1951, was exhibited in a collection of Winters and Lewis memorabilia at Stanford in 1984. See the Brigitte Carnochan's exhibit catalogue, The Strength of Art, 36.

³ Yamamoto had read my article "The Issei Father in the Fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto," a copy of which I had given her.

⁴ Actually, several December essays in the Rafu Shimpo are autobiographical, at least in part. See list in Works Cited.

Works Cited

Carnochan, Brigitte Hoy. The Strength of Art: Poets and Poetry in the Lives of Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis. With an Introduction by N. Scott Momaday. Stanford, California: Stanford University Libraries, 1984.

Crow, Charles L. "The Issei Father in the Fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto." Opening Up Literary Criticism. Ed. Leo Truchlar. Salzburg, Austria: Wolfgang Neugebauer, 1986. 34-40.

Day, Dorothy. The Long Loneliness. New York: Doubleday, 1952.

McDonald, Dorothy Ritsuko, and Katharine Newman. "Relocation and Dislocation: The Writings of Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi." MELUS 7:3 (Fall 1980): 21-38.

Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. New York: The Swallow P and Morrow and Company, 1947.

Yamamoto, Hisaye. "Christmas Eve on South Boyle." Rafu Shimpo 20 December 1957: 9+.

——. "The Enormous Piano." Rafu Shimpo 20 Dec. 1977: 6+

——. "Having Babies." Rafu Shimpo 20 December 1962: 21.

——. "Life Among the Oil Fields." Rafu Shimpo 21 December 1979: 13+.

——. "The Losing of a Language." Rafu Shimpo 20 December 1963: 7+.

——. "The Nature of Things." Rafu Shimpo 20 Dec. 1965: 7+.

——. "The Other Cheek." Rafu Shimpo 19 Dec. 1959: 9.

——. Seventeen Syllables: Five Stories of Japanese-American Life. Ed. Robert Rolf and Norimitsu Ayuzawa. Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten, 1985.

——. "Sidney, The Flying Turtle." Rafu Shimpo 19 Dec. 1967: 15+.

——. "A Slight Case of Mistaken Identity." Rafu Shimpo 19 December 1964: 6.

——. "Writing." Rafu Shimpo 20 December 1968: 14+.

——. "Yellow Leaves." Rafu Shimpo 20 Dec. 1986: 36+.