“Watching the world about them rock and sway”. Hidden Upheavals in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Short Stories
Keywords:
Japanese American literature, Japanese Americans relocation camps, World War II, Hisaye Yamamoto, Emiko Omori
Abstract
The essay focuses on a re-reading of two of the most celebrated short stories written by Japanese American author Hisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951). While both short stories are characterized by a sustained use of indirection, by tracing in them allusions to that crucial event in the history of Japanese Americans which is their forced relocation during World War II, it is possible to add a deeper layer of meaning that can further testify to the emotional turmoil of the internment experience. In addition, the essay offers a comparison between “Seventeen Syllables”, “Yoneko’s Earthquake”, and their movie adaptation produced by PBS and titled Hot Summer Winds (Omori 1991), in order to understand how the implicit references to the internment of the Japanese Americans found in the short stories are consciously mitigated or even deliberately removed in the television film.
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References
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Welchman, John C. 1989. Turning Japanese (In), April. Yamamoto, Hisaye. 2001. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised and Expanded Edition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
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Yogi, Stan. 1994 [1989]. ““Legacies Revealed: Uncovering Buried Plots in the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto”.” In “Seventeen Syllables”. Hisaye Yamamoto. Edited and with an introduction, edited by King-Kok Cheung, 143–146. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Bromwich, Jonah Engel. 2016. “Trump Camp’s Talk of Registry and Japanese Internment Raises Muslims’ Fears.” The New York Times, https://nyti.ms/3FKZzTd.
Cheung, King-Kok, ed. 1994. “Seventeen Syllables”. Hisaye Yamamoto. Edited and with an introduction by King-Kok Cheung. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press.
Cheung, King-Kok. 2001. “Introduction.” In Hisaye Ya- mamoto. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised and Expanded Edition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Chin, Frank, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao lnada, and Shawn Wong, eds. 1974. AIIIEEEEE! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Washington: Howard University Press.
Creef, Elena Tajima. 2004. Imaging Japanese America. The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body. New York: New York University Press.
Daniels, Roger. 1988. Asian America. Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. 1996. Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in En- glish. New York: Norton.
Hennigan, W. J. 2019. “Trump Administration to Hold Migrant Children at Base That Served as WWII Japanese Internment Camp.” Time, https://bit.ly/3azuTWU.
Hough, S.E., and R.W. Graves. 2020. “The 1933 Long Beach Earthquake (California, USA): Ground Motions and Rup- ture Scenario.” Nature. Scientific Report 10:10017. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66299-w.
Hsu, Kai-Yu, and Helen Palubinskas, eds. 1972. Asian-American Authors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Izzo, Donatella. 2006. “Le forme della violenza: il modernismo politico di Hisaye Yamamoto.” In Suzie Wong non abita più qui. La letteratura delle minoranze asiatiche negli Stati Uniti, edited by Donatella Izzo, 125–164. Milan: Shake.
Kim, Elaine H. 1982. Asian American Literature, An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Lauter, Paul (General editor), ed. 2013. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Volume E. 7h. Boston: Cengage.
Lee, Erika. 2019. America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. New York: Basic Books.
Lin II, Rong-Gong. 2016. “Southern California’s Deadliest Quake May Have Been Caused by Oil Drilling, Study Says.” Los Angeles Times, https://lat.ms/3BJLVxy.
Lotchin, Roger W. 2018. Japanese American Relocation in World War II. A Reconsideration. Boston: Cambridge University Press.
Nakamura, Cayleen. 1991. Seventeen Syllables: A Curriculum Guide for High School Classroom Use. Los Angeles: KCET Television.
Okamura, Raymond K. 1982. “The American Concentration Camps: a Cover-up through Euphemistic Terminology.” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 10 (3): 95–109. https ://bit.ly/3mThRt7.
Omori, Emiko. 1991. Hot Summer Winds. Arlington: PBS.
Omori, Emiko, and Chizuko Omori. 1994. Hisaye Yamamoto Interview. https://bit.ly/3DCRFcY.
Payne, Robert M. 1993. “Adapting (to) the Margins: Hot Summer Winds and the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto.” East- West Film Journal 7 (2): 39–53.
Reeves, Richard. 2015. Infamy. The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II. New York: Picador.
Rothstein, Edward. 2011. “The How of an Internment, but Not All the Whys.” The New York Times, https://nyti.ms/ 2YLPF2V.
Scherer, Michael. 2015. “Exclusive: Donald Trump Says He Might Have Supported Japanese Internment.” Time, https://bit.ly/3mOlbFR.
Tateishi, John. 2020. Redress. The Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations. Berkeley: Heyday.
Welchman, John C. 1989. Turning Japanese (In), April. Yamamoto, Hisaye. 2001. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised and Expanded Edition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Yamamoto, Hisaye. 1994 [1976]. ““. . . I Still Carry It Around”.” In "Seventeen Syllables”. Hisaye Yamamoto. Edited and with an introduction by King-Kok Cheung, edited by King-Kok Cheung, 69–70. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press.
Yogi, Stan. 1994 [1989]. ““Legacies Revealed: Uncovering Buried Plots in the Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto”.” In “Seventeen Syllables”. Hisaye Yamamoto. Edited and with an introduction, edited by King-Kok Cheung, 143–146. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Published
2021-10-12
How to Cite
Becce, N. (2021). “Watching the world about them rock and sway”. Hidden Upheavals in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Short Stories. América Crítica, 5(1), 19-31. https://doi.org/10.13125/americacritica/4546
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