Legacies Revealed: Uncovering Buried Plots in the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto

LEGACIES REVEALED: UNCOVERING BURIED PLOTS IN THE STORIES OF HISAYE YAMAMOTO Stan Yogi* Between 1949 and 1961 the Nisei woman Hisaye Yamamoto gained national attention as a short story writer.1 Awarded a John Hay Whitney Foundation Opportunity Fellowship in 1949, Yamamoto’s stories depict­ ing the lives of Japanese immigrants and their children began appearing in national journals that same year.2 That Yamamoto would be the sub­ ject of interest in 1949 is intriguing given the general lack of enthusiasm for women writers and the lingering hostility towards Japanese Americans in the aftermath of World War II. As a minority woman writer, Yamamoto had to contend with both sexual and racial barriers. She not only faced sexism from the general society, she also confronted it in her immediate community. Japanese immigrants brought with them cultural beliefs that discounted the importance of women. In an autobiographical story, Yamamoto succinctly captures these sentiments when she comments, “I gathered that my father didn’t see any necessity of higher education for women.”3 Besides this devaluation of women, Yamamoto also had to deal with a mainstream culture that still viewed Japanese Americans negatively.4 In 1949, when Yamamoto’s stories were first published, World War II was still a fresh memory, and the antagonistic attitudes towards Japanese Americans that landed them in internment camps during the war still remained. Although the sexism and racism Yamamoto encountered could have discouraged her literary efforts, a vibrant group of Nisei writers emerged in the 1930s and 1940s to spur the development of a literary voice. Building on the tradition of their parents, who wrote haiku, tanka, and senryu (Japanese poetic forms) for Japanese language papers in America,5 young Nisei began a literary culture of their own. During the early 1930s, the English-language section editors of Japanese American papers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle encouraged young writers to submit poems and stories.6 As Elaine Kim notes, ironically, it was the segregation of the nisei that first encouraged their literary attempts. Among themselves, they did not need to fear being misconstrued according to some distorting stereotype or worry about having to preface each poem, story, or essay with an explanation of who they were, why they were writing in English, or how they differed from prevailing images ofJapanese Americans. The existence of a small but concrete, palpable, and known audience of fellow nisei gave many writers a feeling of confidence.7 *Stan Yogi is an independent scholar who is editing an anthology ofJapanese American Literature for Nikkei Review Press. He has compiled, with King-Kok Cheung, a book for MLA entitled Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (1988). As Nisei writers became more organized, publishing such journals as Reimei in Salt Lake City and Leaves in Los Angeles, they received encouragement from progressive non-Japanese writers and artists, including Louis Adamic, Carey McWilliams, William Saroyan, and John Fante. In 1939 the League of Nisei Writers and Artists formed “for the purpose of promoting in­ dividual and collaborative creative activity, of stimulating a critical outlook on matters of life, art and broad problems of society.”8 A peripheral associate of the League of Nisei Writers and Artists, Yamamoto was nonetheless one of the fewNisei to gain recognition beyond the Japanese' American community.’ This recognition is well deserved, for Yamamoto’s stories are not only powerful portraits ofJapanese American life, they are also technically fascinating. Through the use ofnarrators with limited perspectives, Yamamoto develops “buried plots,” veiled means of conveying stories that link her work with feminist critical theory as well as with Japanese American communication patterns.10 Yamamoto crafts stories with surface meanings that hint at powerful undercurrents. In uncovering the buried plots of Yamamoto’s stories, one can not only bet­ ter understand the experiences ofJapanese Americans but also explore the intersection of gender, culture, and language.11 Buried plots operate in different manners in Yamamoto’s works. Two of her stories, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951), exemplify the varying ways that Yamamoto uses this device. “Yoneko’s Earthquake” is deliciously ambiguous, containing hidden, often tragic, secrets. “Seventeen Syllables” begins with a focus on one plot but subtly...