Tragicomic Autobiography: Kathleen Tamagawa’s Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear

In the early part of the twentieth century, Americans could not make up their minds about Japan. Was it a “fairy-land” filled with alluringly innocent, artistic people, or a nation that had rapidly modernized and now threatened to challenge European and American dominance in the Pacific and East Asia (Hearn 7, O’Brien 60–61)? Were Japanese immigrants desirable or dangerous (see Griffts; Locan)? Would their children, U.S. citizens by virtue of their birth on American soil, become a part of or be excluded from American life (Takaki 212–29, see also McClatchy)? Did interracial marriage produce mixed-race children blessed with “hybrid vigor,” or did it contribute to the “degradation” of Euro-American “stock” (see Popenoe, Popenoe, and Johnson 287; and Gardiner). Into this vortex of uncertainty, Kathleen Tamagawa, the daughter of an Irish-American mother and Japanese father, was born, raised (in both America and Japan), and came to be the first American of Japanese descent to publish an autobiography.

Initially serialized in the periodical Asia and later expanded and released as a book, Tamagawa’s autobiography, Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear, functions not only as a personal account of her life but also as an intervention in early-twentieth-century discourses about Japan and mixed-race identity. As Sidonie Smith reminds us, autobiographies by women on the margin often serve to “critique dominant discourses of identity” (40). Such is the case with Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear. Tamagawa effects this critique by working wryly with and against her readers’ expectations. On the surface, she appears to give readers an insider’s glimpse into what it is like to be a half-Japanese, half-Irish American woman in the early twentieth century. Curious readers seeking what they considered to be “exotic” or “other” may have been satisfied, at least at a superficial level, by the fact of Tamagawa’s mixed heritage, as well as the design of her book (fig. 1). After all, the book’s enigmatic title, rendered in an Orientialized font, is a translation of a Japanese proverb; the first edition’s title page features Tamagawa’s name in both Japanese and English; and photographs included in the book contain icons that many readers associate with the East—a kimono, a rickshaw, and a Japanese parasol, to name a few. Only a page into the book, however, readers get more (and less) than what they bargain for, as Tamagawa undercuts some of these expectations and presents a complicated and contradictory account of her life and identity. Yet one must not overstate the degree of Tamagawa’s critical intervention. She certainly gets readers to reflect on their assumptions, but she also demurs. Her “ambition” was to be “simple—insignificant—and to melt inconspicuously into some environment” (62). As critics have pointed out, Tamagawa attempts to achieve this desire by marrying F. R. Eldridge and assimilating into middle-class American life (Spickard 110, Robinson et al. xii–xiv). In some respects, then, Tamagawa’s book appears to be ahead of its time, for instance in its critical use of humor and nuanced characterization of mixed-race experience. In other respects, the work appears to be a product of its time, constrained, for example, by dominant ideals of heteronormative domesticity and rigid notions of race.

One way to understand the cultural work and limitations of Holy Prayers involves paying special attention to Tamagawa’s representation of the affective dimensions in her life story. With power and wit, Tamagawa’s work describes and reflects upon the emotional predicament of its mixed-race author, as well as the mixed reactions of those around her. Included among the latter are those whom she calls “dramatists . . . interested in what they call my ‘racial pulls’” (90). They ask her, “What am I feeling? In America, do I long for Japan? In Japan do I long for America? Or do my feelings explode when they clash somewhere in the middle of the Pacific as they rush violently in both directions?” (90). With muted frustration, Tamagawa responds to these interlocutors with...