A Concrete Island: Hisaye Yamamoto's Postwar Los Angeles

Abstract

1950 HISAYE YAMAMOTO WROTE A SHORT STORY called Bus, its main character a young Japanese American woman resettling in Los Angeles after the wartime internment camps. In this deceptively modest tale of a bus ride down Wilshire Boulevard, Yamamoto sharply critiques postwar optimism and modernity. With irony and care, she exposes Los Angeles' racial complexities and the buried costs of World War II. Wilshire Boulevard's stark architecture obscures a recent past most city residents would rather forget.