Lillian Howan on Wakako Yamauchi

(Guest post by Lillian Howan)

I like the dry heat, the bitter landscape. I like the still sorrow of emptiness. I was born to it.

  – Wakako Yamauchi, Rosebud and Other Stories 

Wakako Yamauchi wrote into her eighties, often about the desert farmlands of the Imperial Valley where she was born in October 1924. The date on her birth certificate is October 25, but she was actually born earlier: there was a delay in officially recording home births in farming communities. During her long life, Yamauchi would explore this gap between an official account and reality, with all its layers of ambiguity.

In her story “The Sensei,” from Songs My Mother Taught Me, Yamauchi contrasts the narrator’s husband’s description of Las Vegas with a more sobering reality:

Jim heard about Las Vegas from these boys at the House. They planned systems and worked out mathematical theories, and Jim would come home all excited and tell me about them. There was gambling around the clock, night lit like day, money flowing like water, free drinks, free breakfasts; we had to go.

It was winter. I cashed my fifty-dollar bonus check, and we agreed not to write checks or use the tuition money. I tucked an extra ten dollars in the secret compartment of my wallet. I’d also heard of Las Vegas, of people coming home broke and hungry and running out of gas the last mile and pushing the car home.

“The Sensei” is set during the years following the World War II incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans in ten concentration camps under Executive Order 9066. The narrator and her husband Jim struggle financially, cramped into a tiny basement apartment, but there’s a sense of cautious optimism in this paragraph that nonetheless ends on a foreboding note. Yamauchi depicts the hardships of the Issei and Nisei, first and second-generation Japanese-Americans, as they face the complete loss of any financial stability that they had struggled to attain before their incarceration, as well as racism and blatant anti-Japanese sentiment following World War II. Her characters are angry and grief-stricken, but often plucky and hopeful. Her narrator dreams of painting, and, with Jim, she plays penny-ante poker games with his equally impoverished colleagues.

Las Vegas becomes a metaphor for the United States and, more generally, life itself, where the narrator and her husband lose “most of our money at the gaudiest, plushest casino.” The odds are stacked, the specter of failure is ever-present, but there is excitement and the distant allure of riches, an illusory mirage, a terrain of addiction, sparkle and lights, sounds and sights and dreams. Driving out of Vegas, the narrator reflects that “this whole trip had been a pain – a pain in the pocketbook and a big pain in the ass.”

A playwright as well as a fiction writer, Yamauchi focuses on the power of the spoken word, the unadorned way that people actually talked, rather than an author’s idea of how they should be speaking:  

While we were walking to the door, Jim pulled my arm and said, “Look at the man at the water fountain.” I looked. He was small and thin, Japanese, about forty or more. His face kind of hung on his neck like a rag on a peg. He was deeply tanned, with creases like gullies on his face, his hair was thinning, and his eyes were terribly tired. His two-colored loafer jacket was faded and dirty; he looked like a strip of bent clay. “He asked me for money,” Jim said.

“Did you give it to him?” I asked.

“Hell no. I didn’t have any to give.”

Descriptions are written in the way the characters would speak: “his face kind of hung on his neck like a rag on a peg.” Poetry suffuses their words, but the voice remains informal, authentic, true: “Hell, no. I didn’t have any to give.” Yamauchi relies on the power of the plain word, on vernacular, everyday language. 

For several years, I edited stories that Yamauchi wrote during her seventies and eighties, and I had the great delight of conversing with her at her home in Gardena, California. She was always focused on getting to the heart of the story, cutting away any artifice and embellishment. She continually emphasized the strength of simple words while, at the same time, writing with deep perception and subtle literary sophistication.  

Concerned with the lives of women, Yamauchi wrote about housewives, women who cut and styled hair, women who worked in factories (including the narrator of “The Sensei,” who works at a shower curtain factory), and those who farmed in the harsh desert climate. Sensitive to the struggles faced by women and to issues concerning gender roles and identity, Yamauchi also wrote about the hardships that men experienced.        

In “The Sensei,” Yamauchi turns to the fall of a formerly influential leader. In the words of Jim, the sensei was once “a powerful man in camp – feared and respected. He had a big following.” In Las Vegas, though, the sensei appears broken, and in the years that follow, he slips further into poverty.

Yamauchi explains that “sensei means master or teacher,” and as circumstances and his own frailties grind the sensei into destitution, he offers a last, dignified gesture:

He got out of the car and bowed. “Thank you for your kindness,” he said. He nearly stumbled on a piece of sidewalk litter, then walked on toward the lights of Little Tokyo. The Ginza Club, Miyako Hotel, Mikawaya – green, red, yellow, green, red, yellow – alternating, the colors blinked on the sensei’s shapeless hat. He stopped, waited for a light to change, then disappeared in the pedestrian traffic.

Yamauchi is unsentimental about the tattered appearance of the sensei, with his “shapeless hat” as he almost stumbles “on a piece of sidewalk litter.” The sensei is last glimpsed as he disappears “in the pedestrian traffic.” Pedestrian, as a noun, describes someone who walks on foot, but as an adjective, pedestrian means dull, unremarkable, ordinary, and uninteresting. Isolated in a pitiless world, the sensei nonetheless bows to the narrator and her husband, thanking them for their kindness. Yamauchi concludes with a last image of “pedestrian traffic,” but not before portraying the sensei’s fleeting, dignified gesture.

Yamauchi’s sensei, a Buddhist priest, makes his way through the landscapes of illusion, ever-changing and ephemeral, “green, red, yellow, green, red, yellow.” Once revered, the master eventually becomes a beggar until his form disappears into ordinary, monotonous traffic, but his story lingers on within the reader. In Wakako Yamauchi’s words, life is unrelenting and unsparing and wondrous: 

“And all the tears that have stained the sleeves of men,” the sensei said. “Still I love Las Vegas.”

CELEBRATING WAKAKO YAMAUCHI, on October 3, 2024, will honor the centennial of the legendary playwright and author. Wakako Yamauchi (1924 – 2018) was a trail-blazing pioneer of Asian-American theater and literature who penned numerous short stories and plays, including the widely-acclaimed And the Soul Shall Dance. The event gathers poets and writers reading excerpts of Wakako Yamauchi's works, as well as original writings reflecting enduring themes of her legacy.

University of San Francisco on October 3, 2024, 6 pm PST, Fromm Hall 120, Xavier Auditorium, with Brian Komei Dempster, Lillian Howan, Brynn Saito, Maw Shein Win, and additional special guest. This event will be both in-person and live streamed. 

Lillian Howan's writings have been published in Alta Journal, Asian American Literary Review, Calyx, Jellyfish Review, the museum of americana, New England Review, South Dakota Review, Vice-Versa, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Wakako Yamauchi's collection, Rosebud and Other Stories. Her debut novel, The Charm Buyers, received the Ka Palapala Po'okela Award for Excellence in Literature. Her novel The Spellbound is forthcoming in 2025 from WTAW (Why There Are Words) Press.