(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.