|
| Rosebud and Other Stories
ISBN: 9780824860943
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Hawai''i Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Japanese Americans; Japanese American women;
The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII forms the bitter knot around which Yamauchi's characters fashion their lives in this reflective, late-career collection of elegiac tales about the sorrowful mismanagement of love, marriage, motherhood, and friendship, sewn through with the grit of hard-won experience. The title story tracks the lives of two young Nisei (first-generation Japanese-American) women-one a "country clod," and the other the adorable, proficient Marian-who finally compare the bumps and unraveling in their long journeys. Similarly, in "Pain and Stuff," the narrator and her occasional friend Maisie wonder how "Nisei ladies... all seem to have such great lives" until repercussions from divorce, suicide, and heartbreak crack the surface. Many of the stories have an autobiographical bent (Yamauchi was sent to an internment camp during the war), such as "Onna," and recount again and again the trauma of itinerant farm families during the Depression, and the shame of internment and racism in America, all handled, admirably, with an unfussy accessibility and low-key forthrightness. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Wakako Yamauchi was born Wakako Nakamura in Westmorland, California on October 25, 1924. Her parents emigrated from Japan and worked as itinerant farmers. During World War II, she and her family were interned at the Poston camp in Arizona. She drew cartoons for the camp newspaper. After the war, she got married and moved to Los Angeles. She briefly worked for The Los Angeles Tribune and wrote the occasional short story for a Japanese-American newspaper, Rafu Shimpo. She became a playwright. Her plays included And the Soul Shall Dance, The Music Lessons, and The Memento. Her book, Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays and Memoir, was published in 1994. She died on August 16, 2018 at the age of 93. (Bowker Author Biography) |
