Holy Prayers in a Horse's Ear: A Japanese American Memoir

Introduction

introduction I Kathleen Tamagawa’s1 memoir Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear, originally published in 1932, holds a special place in Asian American history. While much less known than the now-celebrated works of the Canadian Eurasian sisters Edith and Winifred Eaton,to which it is inevitably compared, Holy Prayers is the first published autobiographical narrative by a Nisei (American of Japanese descent). In addition to its presence as a landmark early twentieth-century Asian American literature text, its Irish-Japanese author’s complex and quirky record of selfrepresentation makes it a pioneering contribution to the growing field of mixed-race studies. A kind of multiracial bildungsroman, Tamagawa ’s narrative, like Winifred Eaton’s memoir Me: A Book of Remembrance ,2 chronicles the development of its protagonist from girlhood to womanhood (and finally motherhood) through a series of adventures across a range of communities that straddle early twentieth-century Chicago, Japan,Washington, D.C., and suburban New York. Tamagawa’s memoir is unique in several respects. First, it allows us an unusual glimpse into her parents’ interracial marriage, at a time when such unions were rare—when not illegal. Tamagawa depicts her mother in poignant terms as a formidable, if ambivalent, figure: a headstrong Irish daughter who marries outside her race in defiance of family objections and strategies of interference, and pays the price for it. It also represents an unusual contribution to a characteristically American school of writing of the early twentieth century—the literature of expatriates. Standing alongside the works of Henry James and Lost Generation writers such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who described the unstable identities and complex allegiances of Americans abroad, Tamagawa offers a rare window into early twentieth-century international communities of travelers and residents in Japan. Still,what makes Holy Prayers such a compelling work for scholars and students some seventy-five years after its initial publication is the way it xi combines the travel history of the author with the metaphorical journey of what might be called a “divided self”—a theme that reverberates throughout much of the subsequent literature by mixed-race authors. Tamagawa asserts that, as the daughter of a Japanese father and an Irish American mother, there is no one place on the racial map she can comfortably call“home.”The sense of home and belonging that she missed as a child in the United States,then hoped she would find as a young woman in Japan,did not come to her.One might compare her plight with that of James Baldwin a generation later. Baldwin fled America for Europe, only to discover in Europe how completely American he was.3 By the book’s final chapter, Tamagawa slips completely out of view. In this genealogy of self, her origins and her legal claim on Japanese identity are negated through her father’s failure to register her birth in Japan: They say, that I am the non-existent daughter of my parents, that I am not their lineal descendent. No, I am not illegitimate, but just an outlawed product of a legal marriage. (chapter 1) Therefore, in an ultimate act of self-erasure, the author hands over the authority of her pen to her husband Frank Eldridge (or his persona),who concludes his wife’s memoir with a playful litany of double negatives: The daughter of my father-in-law, not being in legal existence, I couldn’t have married her, yet certainly had children by her. She, therefore, becomes a sort of ghostly concubine. . . . If I can never marry the ethereal daughter of my father-in-law, nobody else may. (chapter 15) Through this final observation in her husband’s voice, Tamagawa’s divided self becomes a ghost of itself, bringing her life story to a curious and rather disquieting close.4 Tamagawa’s reflections on her divided self reverberate throughout the narrative with the same complexity and force that mark Edith Eaton’s turn-of-the-century autobiographical essay, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.”Yet Eaton closes her essay with a powerful articulation of the value of non-belonging: “After all I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is more than xii • introduction nationality.‘You are you and I am I,’says Confucius.I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the...