A MELUS Interview: Hisaye Yamamoto

Abstract

Hisaye Yamamoto's reputation as a writer of fiction grows, despite the relatively small body of her work its original publication in little magazines in regional Japanese-American newspapers. By 1980, as Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald Katharine Newman noted in MELUS, she had been reprinted in at least twenty anthologies (23). best-known of her stories are Syllables, Yoneko's Earthquake, The Legend of Miss Sasagawara, Las Vegas Charley, and The Brown House. first collection of herfiction, Seventeen Syllables: 5 Stories of Japanese American Life, was published in Tokyo in 1985; unfortunately, no such edition has yet appeared in the United States. Yamamoto is known as Si to her many friends in MELUS, of which she was an early member. She had agreed to meet with me at the first MELUS convention (24-25 April 198 7) so, as thefirst day's meetings ended, we sat together on a sunny terrace at Heritage Center of the University of California at Irvine. There was a babble of nearby students their radios which was distracting, Yamamoto was doubtless frustrated by the failure of her one remaining match to light the cigarette she continued to hold throughout the interview. impression she gave, nonetheless, was of great calm patience. Her voice was soft carefully modulated, easily spilling into self-deprecating laughter; it took on a certain edge only when speaking of her incarceration in the Poston relocation center during World War II. Like many writers, Hisaye Yamamoto seems to dislike theoretical discussion of her fiction. She is, however, very forthcoming about her life the sources of her work. This interview provides some insight into the personal background of her stories, of little-known but significant elements in her career: her two-year participation in the Catholic Worker community on Staten Island founded by Dorothy Day (1897-1980), her friendship with Yvor Winters (1900-1968) his wife Janet Lewis (b. 1899). Catholic Worker episode, from 1953-55, was the result of sharp decision commitment stands in interesting symmetry with the other communal experience, her involuntary three years in the Poston Relocation Center. This decision meant declining to attend Stanford study under the strong-willed poet critic Yvor Winters, author of In Defense of Reason, a manifesto of his principles of classical order moral absolutism. While Yamamoto depicts the impact of Winters' thought upon her, her willing discipleship, it should be remembered, again,