A

YAMAMOTO, Hisaye

Born 23 August 1921, Redondo Beach, California

Wrote under: Napoleon

Daughter of Kanzo and Sae Tamura Yamamoto; married Anthony DeSoto, 1955; children: Paul, Kibo, Elizabeth, Anthony, Claude

Hisaye Yamamoto has been described as "not just one of the best Nisei [second-generation Japanese American] writers, not just one of the best Asian American writers, but…among the best short story writers today." Although she has written short stories over a span of more than 50 years, her work long remained relatively unknown. Most of it, which also includes some essays and poems, has appeared in West Coast Japanese American newspapers, literary magazines, and World War II camp publications. It was only with the publication of Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (1994, reprinted 1998)—a collection of 15 stories dating from 1948 to 1987—that Yamamoto's work became generally accessible to American readers.

Yamamoto has tended to minimize her identity as a writer; in interviews she underscores the importance of her family life and describes herself as a housewife. Yet Yamamoto was among the first Japanese American writers to reach a national audience after World War II and one of the early few to receive national acclaim. During the late 1940s and 1950s, when anti-Japanese sentiment inhibited the publication of work by Japanese Americans, her stories appeared in such major journals as Partisan Review, Harper's Bazaar, Furioso, and the Kenyon Review. Four stories from this period were included on Martha Foley's annual list of "Distinctive Short Stories," and "Yoneko's Earthquake" (1951) was selected for Foley's 1952 collection of the Best American Short Stories. Yamamoto was awarded a John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship in 1949 to support her writing. In 1952 she declined a Stanford (University) Writing Fellowship in order to join the Catholic Worker in New York. She received the 1986 American Book Award for lifetime achievement from the Before Columbus Foundation. When pressed, Yamamoto will admit to having her "little madness" for writing, and she concedes "if somebody told me I couldn't write, it would probably grieve me very much."

Born to immigrant parents, Yamamoto grew up on her father's strawberry farms among the Japanese American agricultural community of Southern California. She began publishing stories when she was still in her teens under the pen name "Napoleon." Before World War II, she earned an associate of arts degree at Compton Junior College, and she was writing columns for a Japanese American newspaper when the evacuation order relocated her family to the internment camp at Poston, Arizona. During her almost three years in Poston (1942-44), Yamamoto continued writing stories and columns for the camp paper, the Poston Chronicle. After the war, she worked three years for an African American newspaper, the Los Angeles Tribune, and spent several years writing full time before moving to New York in 1952 to join Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker community on their Staten Island farm. Returning to Southern California in 1954, she married and subsequently combined writing with rearing five children. Her work has appeared regularly in West Coast publications, and she has continued a tradition established in the 1950s of contributing to the annual holiday literary issue of Rafu Shimpo. Yamamoto gives readings from her work throughout the country. Hot Summer Winds, a 1991 film shown on PBS' American Playhouse, was based on two of Yamamoto's stories.

Yamamoto's carefully crafted stories—delicate yet dense, small in scale but multilayered, spare of language yet laced with irony—portray the Japanese American experience. They are told by Japanese American narrators, most of them second-generation (nisei) women like Yamamoto herself; the narrator's age and the time and place of events tend to parallel the author's own life. Although not overtly political, the stories touch on issues of racism and the distribution of power in American society.