Wakako Yamauchi

• Born: October 25, 1924
• Birthplace: Westmoreland, California
• Died: August 16, 2018
• Place of death: Gardena, California

Writer, playwright

Wakako Yamauchi endured the indignities of wartime internment to become one of the most respected Japanese American playwrights and chroniclers of immigrant life in California. Stressing precise detail, unadorned narration, and poignant realism, her writing captures a full range of complex, often devastating human encounters.

Full name: Wakako Yamauchi

Birth name: Wakako Nakamura

Early Life

Wakako Yamauchi was born in Westmorland, California in October 1924 (her birth certificate read October 25, though her parents told her she may have been born a day or two earlier), the third of five children. Her father, Yasaku, and mother, Hamako, were both natives of Shizuoka, Japan. Like other issei (first-generation Japanese Americans), they maintained cultural and linguistic ties to their homeland. These bonds were sustained through shared recollections of the past, food, social customs, and the arts, especially through song. Pressured to assimilate into American society, Yamauchi’s family found companionship in neighboring families throughout Southern California. Yamauchi’s later work would explore this sense of connection to Japan.

Like many Japanese immigrants who lived on the West Coast, the Nakamuras eked out a living as tenant farmers. They settled in Imperial Valley, suffering through drought, economic depression, racism, a major earthquake in 1940, and wartime suspicion. The Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited people of Asian descent from owning land, so the Nakamuras had to lease their property. This lifestyle required frequent moves and climate-dependent subsistence living. The work was arduous and socially isolating, especially for those without families. The Nakamuras briefly ran a hotel for migrant laborers, many of whom were desperate for companionship and kindness.

Yamauchi’s senior year of high school was marked not by graduation ceremonies but by World War II and detainment in Poston, Arizona. The internment of Japanese Americans had begun in 1942, after the Japanese attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In the camp, Yamauchi befriended Hisaye Yamamoto, a journalist with the Poston Chronicle, who later became an author. Yamauchi became a layout artist for the newspaper. After earning an early release from the internment camp in 1944, she moved to Chicago to work in a candy factory. She returned to California a short while later to attend her father’s funeral. He had succumbed to drink, illness, and the emotional trauma of war. Yamauchi then accompanied her remaining family to San Diego after the camps were disbanded in 1945. Working as a photo developer, she expanded her creative talents, eventually reuniting with Yamamoto in Los Angeles, rooming with her friend, and attending night classes at the Otis Art Center.

Introduced to Chester Yamauchi through her brother, Wakako married in 1948. The couple had a daughter in 1955. While her husband studied, Yamauchi became the breadwinner, working temporary jobs. Her writing was not a priority. Henry Mori, editor of the Los Angeles-based Japanese newspaper Rafu Shimpo, solicited Yamauchi’s graphic arts expertise for this local newspaper. After some negotiation, he agreed to publish Yamauchi’s stories in exchange for artwork. This agreement provided Yamauchi with steady publication opportunities from 1960 to 1974. After editors Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, and Jeffrey Paul Chan included one of her works in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974), Yamauchi’s identity as a nissei writer rose to sudden prominence.

Life’s Work

Yamauchi and her husband divorced in 1975. She continued to write, infusing her work with emotional sensitivity and philosophical irony. Yamauchi’s work explores emotional turbulence and the residual stress of internment camp life. She adapted her popular short story "And the Soul Shall Dance" into a full-length play with a Rockefeller playwright-in-residence grant. The story details the miserable pairing of a brusque farmer and his artistic, temperamental wife. Transplanted to America to replace her dead sister, the character Emiko finds her new rural homestead devoid of inspiration. Without financial means and any possibility of return to Japan, her only solace is drink and traditional music, which accompanies her recollections.

In 1977, the Asian American theater group The East West Players of Los Angeles staged a performance of Yamauchi’s And the Soul Shall Dance to great acclaim. It won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award that same year. Shortly thereafter, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) produced a version for television, which aired nationally between 1977 and 1978. Yamauchi composed six other full-length plays that were performed at major venues in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. The Music Lessons, based on her short story "In Heaven and Earth," focuses on family struggles in a farming community. Kaoru, a musician and migrant, joins a widow and her children in the fields. Pushed into an awkward love triangle with the mother and her underage daughter, he catalyzes the release of repressed sexuality, anger, and accumulated disappointments. Drama departments at Yale and the University of California Los Angeles produced the work, cementing Yamauchi’s status as major American playwright.

Yamauchi’s oeuvre includes numerous short stories and plays. Her major works illuminate the disparity between a rich inner life and scarcity of resources in the external world. The ambitions of many Japanese Americans during her upbringing were not far-reaching: boys usually worked in farming or manual labor and girls married or became domestics. The tragic heroes of Yamauchi’s work are rootless bachelors gambling away their loneliness and social emasculation, or artistic, sensitive women who find their secret delights crushed by the weight of daily survival.

In 1994 Yamauchi published the anthology Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir. It collected many of her seminal works, and her later output was minimal. Yamauchi died at the age of ninety-three on August 16, 2018, in Gardena, California.

Significance

Yamauchi wrote as a historical witness invested in recuperating compromised human dignity. Her texts explore the difficulties of the early Japanese immigrants to the West Coast, conveying their stories as a heavy braid of longing, loss, and self-restraint. Her literary depiction of Japanese American internment proved both influential to other writers and important as documentation of the human effects of such a policy. Scholarship on her work has appeared in feminist, genre-based, and ethnic literature monographs and periodicals. The symbolic scarcity evoked in such stories as "That Was All," "The Sensei," and "Otoko" is not just material; often, the deficiency Yamauchi illuminates is in fundamental sympathy for fellow human beings. Bitter but not cynical, her camp survivors explain their shame and silence. Other speakers, usually mature women, expose the foundations of failed love as insufficient flexibility and faulty communication. Many of Yamauchi’s characters desire to express themselves through art, but are prevented from doing so by their limited circumstances.

Bibliography

Genzlinger, Neil. "Wakako Yamauchi, Playwright on Japanese-American Life, Dies at 93." The New York Times, 9 Sept. 2018,www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/obituaries/wakako-yamauchi-dead.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.

McDonald, Dorothy Ritsuko. "Relocation and Dislocation: The Writings of Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi" MELUS 7.3 (1980): 21–38. Print. Comparative analysis of these literary contemporaries in the context of internment and other thematic continuities.

Osborn, William P., and Sylvia A. Watanabe. "A MELUS Interview: Wakako Yamauchi." MELUS 23.2 (1998): 101–110. Print. Discusses Yamauchi’s primary inspirations and understanding of historical and personal witnessing.

Wakida, Patricia. "Wakako Yamauchi." Densho Encyclopedia, encyclopedia.densho.org/Wakako‗Yamauchi/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.

Yamauchi, Wakako. Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir. Ed. Garrett Hongo. New York: Feminist Press of CUNY, 1994. Print. Features Yamauchi’s stories and two major plays, extracted from over three decades of writing.