Sins of Omission: Hisaye Yamamoto’s Vision of History

In January 1951, the little-known writer and recent World War II internee Hisaye Yamamoto received an unexpected letter from the eminent Stanford English professor Yvor Winters. Having discovered Yamamoto’s story “Yoneko’s Earthquake” in the pages of a small literary magazine, Winters, one of the era’s most staunch defenders of formalism, wrote to express his admiration for the story, which he felt was “exceptionally good” thanks to her skillful use of structure, tone, and narrative technique (Letters 6–7, 16). Over half a century later, Yamamoto’s short stories and essays are widely anthologized as models of the well-crafted narrative,¹ and they have been the subject of over a dozen articles examining, from a variety of critical standpoints, some of the same qualities of Yamamoto’s prose and use of form that Winters was quick to appreciate.² Yet, beginning with Winters’s own comments in his letters to her, the critical response to Yamamoto’s politics, especially insofar as they inform her literary outlook, has been more divided and far less favorable, though the chief objections have changed dramatically over time. Whereas Winters insisted that Yamamoto was overly concerned with politics in literature, James Kyung-Jin Lee has recently argued that Yamamoto’s writing and even some of her life decisions were not politically radical enough, that they, in fact, reveal a lack of political will.

I challenge both critical views as I reconsider Yamamoto’s politics through an analysis of the vision of history evident in her work and in some key moments of her biography, with a focus on the postwar period that was the peak of her literary production as well as her political activity. Beginning with analysis of the debate over Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno that erupts in her communication with Winters, followed by a reconsideration of Yamamoto’s decision to leave her position as a journalist for The Los Angeles Tribune (which Lee portrays as her retreat from politics), I trace the emergence of Yamamoto’s decidedly counter-hegemonic and anti-racist perspective toward history. Turning to “Wilshire Bus,” “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” “Seventeen Syllables,” and “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” four of Yamamoto’s best known stories from this era, I examine how this critical vision is expressed through the predicament of the four Japanese American female protagonists. Each of these women is witness to or victim of an act of oppression; nevertheless, all become, as a consequence of their position within a hegemonic power structure, complicit in the erasure of this specific trauma as well as the broader history it reflects and extends. Read alongside some of Yamamoto’s biographical experiences and her portrayal of them in her memoir “A Fire in Fontana,” these stories suggest not only her long-held commitment to recuperating and articulating forgotten histories but also provide a compelling critique of hegemonic history-in-the-making, as dissenting voices in each story are subtly pressured or actively coerced to consent to what ultimately amounts to their own historical erasure. These sins of omission, as the narrator of “Wilshire Bus” describes one act of silence in the face of oppression, are a central dimension of Yamamoto’s work that requires further study; the politically-charged vision of history they reflect deserves recognition and appreciation alongside her more widely acknowledged mastery of form.

The conflict that arose between Yamamoto and Winters is particularly instructive for understanding Yamamoto’s vision of history and its relevance to both her work and her political outlook in this crucial period of her biography. Recalled in “A Fire in Fontana,” her 1985 autobiographical account of the era, as the “long distance tilting” that she “dared to engage in” with the esteemed scholar (155), this critical dispute erupted when Yamamoto offered her response to Melville’s classic tale of slave insurrection, which Winters, adopting the role of mentor in his letters, recommended she read as a model of successful literary form. To Winters’s evident annoyance, Yamamoto proved to be a resistant pupil, for her response to Melville’s tale, and especially her resistance to Winters...