Toshio Mori was born in Oakland, California, in 1910, to parents who had emigrated from Hiroshima, Japan. This makes them issei (born in Japan, emigrated to America) and him nisei (first generation born in America). I'm guessing his parents were not educated people, since many early immigrants were laborers seeking a better life, but I don't know that. They ran a Japanese bathhouse in Oakland and later, in San Leandro, a nursery, like many Japanese Americans at that time. Mori worked full-time in the nursery and eventually inherited it, but always wanted to write. He published his first story in a magazine in 1938 and completed a collection of short stories and had it accepted by Caxton Printers in Idaho in 1941 for publication in 1942 -- but then came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the banishment of all people of Japanese descent to internment camps. His publisher cancelled the contract (they had been hoping to sell copies to those Japanese Americans who were now in the camps), and Mori and his family were shipped off to Topaz, in Utah. After the war Caxton finally brought the book out, with two new stories added (about Pearl Harbor and the camps).
So there was almost a Japanese-American book of fiction that didn't have anything to do with the camps, but not quite. And every book since has had something to say about those camps, which shaped the Japanese-American experience forever.
William Saroyan wrote a glowing introduction to the original version of the book, and updated it for the version that was published. The book quickly went out of print, but was rediscovered and reprinted in 1985 and again in 2015, both times by the University of Washington press. The copy I read included the introductions to the 1942/49, 1985, and 2015 editions, so that I had to wade through a lot of fluff before getting to the stories. I didn't find any of it terribly illuminating. I think the UW press should keep the Saroyan intro for historical reasons, scrap the other two, and get someone to write a useful, insightful introduction, something that really explains the book's place in literary history.
I think the problem with writing about Yokohama, California is that it isn't very good -- and yet it is. One issue is that Mori doesn't seem to have a very good grasp of English. Saroyan comes right out and says it:
Of the thousands of unpublished writers in America there are probably no more than three who cannot write better English than Toshio Mori. His stories are full of grammatical errors.
And he's right. Based on my own experiences with nonnative-speaker writing, I assume Mori had an editor, because there are stretches with no obvious errors. But elsewhere there are a lot of clunky sentences, sentences that just don't feel like English, article errors, misplaced commas -- the works. I don't know how much education Mori had. I don't think he went to college. I'm assuming he finished high school, but I don't know that either. His family would have spoken Japanese in the home, and members of the Japanese community stuck together and mostly spoke Japanese, so it's understandable that his English would have been something less than native -- even though he was born in the U.S.
In an essay on "Japanese-American Literature" included in New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage, ed. Alpana Sharma Knippling, Benzi Zhang argues that Mori's "funny English" was deliberate, not a mistake. He claims that Mori was attempting
...to find an immigrant language that reflects a critical self-consciousness of ethnic elements--linguistic and social--that may be directed to oppose the force of a canonizing cultural hegemony.
I just don't know about this. When Mori's characters speak, of course we would expect them not to speak with perfect grammar (although probably they are actually meant to be speaking Japanese much of the time, but never mind that). But should his omniscient narrator make article errors? I don't think I understand the logic behind that.
There's a lot I don't know about Mori, and I think Benzi Zhang knows a little more, because he has apparently read more of Mori's works than just Yokohama, California. I wonder whether Mori could read and write in Japanese. There were Japanese-language newspapers in California, so perhaps he could, or were those read only by the issei? His parents would have had to teach him, I think. There were after-school Japanese-language schools in some places, but I don't know if they would have existed when Mori was the right age for them (Post-note: he attended one from age 8 to about 16). Would he have had any knowledge of Japanese literature? I don't know.
Despite grammatical problems, the stories are interesting. Some more than others, I'll give you that. Some are very simple and unsophisticated, but others are more complex. I was trying to choose a favorite, and I realized that I didn't really like most of them, though I didn't hate them either. They just didn't grab me.
The last story (of 22) in the book, "Tomorrow and Today," might be my favorite. It is a brief, poignant portrait of a young unmarried woman, Hatsuye, who is not at all attractive, perhaps ugly. The last sentence of the story is clearly important, but the English is so odd that I don't understand it. Here is the sentence:
While she is moving about day in and day out it is not whether she is brave and courageous or tragic and pathetic that is important about her life, but it is her day that is present and the day that is tomorrow which is her day and which will not be.
What does that mean? What "will not be" what?
...it is now considered one of the most influential portraits of pre-industrial small-town life in the United States.
Oh, come on. Am I missing something? The book consists of roughly 25 stories about some of the residents of a small town (pop. 1800) in Ohio in the 1890s. The stories are mostly about the people's thoughts and feelings, not about external things that happen to them, and because of that the book is considered modernist. But it's a little hard to take. Every single character is depressed and comes from a depressed family. Every single character is obsessed with sex and disappointed in life. There are no happy marriages. There are no happy people. Everyone wants to get away. After a while, every person starts to sound like every other person.
I think it's a book that was important for its time, but seems hopelessly outdated now that we have reliable birth control. Also, it's horribly sexist. But I guess that was the time.
Does this help me with Yokohama, California? Not really. Like Anderson's work, Mori's stories are portraits of people and their psyches. Not a lot happens. But unlike the zombies of Winesburg, a number of the people of Yokohama are happy, content. A few, such as Teruo in the story titled "Toshio Mori," could walk into Winesburg and feel at home. But most are more nuanced.
Another way in which Yokohama differs is that the people seem like individuals. Sherwood Anderson supposedly based the characters in Winesburg, Ohio on people he knew -- but they all sound like the same person, probably a version of himself. I assume that many of the characters in Yokohama, California are people Toshio Mori knew, and they sound like real people. If "Teruo" in the above-mentioned story is a portrait of the author, as the title of his story suggests, Mori did a better job than Anderson of distinguishing between himself and the other people he wrote about. Also, the women are human beings, unlike the women in Winesburg, who are mostly monsters, trying to eat men alive, or else merely stupid.
Of course, Sherwood Anderson was writing critically about Winesburg, Ohio and Mori was writing fairly positively about Yokohama, California.
In one of the stories in Yokohama, "Nodas in America," the character Papa Noda is talking about his seven children and how they are healthy and growing, and he says "Maybe one a Noguchi. Who knows?" His kids ask who Noguchi is, and Papa Noda says he is like Lincoln: "Lincoln or Noguchi--one man. The real man, I hope to grow in my family."
So I thought, who the heck is Noguchi? Wikipedia has a long list of people named Noguchi, but none of them sound anything like Abraham Lincoln. But in the process of looking them all up, I found a writer called Yone Noguchi who interested me. This Noguchi was born in Japan in 1875, but traveled to the U.S. in 1893, staying until 1904, first in the San Francisco Bay Area (including Oakland), then Chicago, and finally New York. Mori, born in 1910, couldn't have met Noguchi, but I suppose it's barely possible that his parents did.
It's really a curiosity, such an odd little book. The premise is that a rich young Japanese woman, who calls herself Morning Glory in English, travels from Japan to America on a lark and spends several months there (she arrives in October 1900 and the book ends in March 1901, but she's still in the U.S. at that point). Most of the book takes place in California, where Noguchi spent 7 years, and many of Morning Glory's experiences are fictionalized accounts of Noguchi's. The book has no plot -- nothing very exciting happens. I had trouble staying awake through much of it. But at the same time, it's delightful. I really liked the character of Morning Glory, who takes great pleasure in almost everything but doesn't take anything very seriously (we may be kindred spirits).
I wanted to know more about Yone Noguchi, so I found a cheap copy of a biography of him on Amazon: Yone Noguchi: The Stream of Fate (Volume I: The Western Sea) by Edward Marx (who also edited the version of Noguchi's novel that I read). I've started reading it and it's interesting, though it includes a lot of extra information about Japanese history that is less interesting. But I'm working my way through it, slowly. (Post-Note: I finally finished it on Dec. 28th. What a strange book, and what a very odd person Noguchi was.)
Going back to An American Diary, the Introduction and Afterword plunged me into a controversy I didn't know existed: the definition of Asian-American (or in this case Japanese-American) literature. I guess I had assumed that Japanese-American literature was literature written by Americans of Japanese descent. But I hadn't thought about whether that only includes literature written by people who were born here, the nisei, sansei, etc. What about people who emigrate here from Japan, the issei generation? What about people who were born here, went back to Japan to be educated, and then returned to the US (there's a term for them as well but I've forgotten it)? And what about people like Noguchi, who spent 11 years in this country but then went back to Japan? Apparently some people think his books in English should "count" as Asian-American literature, while other people think they shouldn't, because he didn't stay, among other reasons.
Since I've set out to read classics of Japanese-American literature, I really want to understand this question. So I ordered a few books about Asian-American literature from Prospector. Benzi Zhang, in the essay I mention above, defines immigrant literature as being concerned with...not only the movement across the borders of a country but also the experience of traversing the boundaries and barriers of space, time, race, culture, language, history, and politics and the complexities and ambivalences associated with defining an (im)migrant identity between and beyond boundaries.
In other words, it isn't just literature by immigrants, it's literature about the immigrant experience. Later in the essay he claims that Noguchi and other writers like him are actually "Americanized Japanese" rather than "Japanese American,"
...because they did not express the concerns of Japanese Americans.
That seems like a rather circular definition. Noguchi was trying to succeed in white literary society, so he tried not to step on white people's toes. He mostly avoided the topic of racism and didn't write a lot about other Japanese in America, though he certainly interacted with them. Though he came to America to study, he worked off and on as a servant and often lived in boarding houses with other Japanese workers. As Edward Marx explains in Yone Noguchi, many Japanese came to America to study in the late 1800s -- Noguchi wasn't unusual in that sense. And some of them stayed, while others went back to Japan. Noguchi stayed for 11 years.
At what point do you get to be a "Japanese American"? In Noguchi's novel, Morning Glory is a rich Japanese woman who is presumably going to return to Japan (although she does discuss the possibility of marrying an American and staying). She interacts mostly with European Americans, but occasionally with Japanese Americans. I guess not enough to satisfy Benzi Zhang.
This is definitely something I will continue to think about.
So, what's my final word on Yokohama, California? I'm not sure. It's a minor work, not really very good, but I'm glad I read it.
I want to know more about Toshio Mori. He published another book of short stories called The Chauvinist and Other Stories, in 1979 (I've requested it from Prospector), and a novel called The Woman from Hiroshima, in 1978, and then there's one more book called Unfinished Message: Selected Works of Toshio Mori, which was published after his death in 1980. None of these other works seem to have gotten much attention, and they may not be very good. But perhaps just to get back at Sherwood Anderson, whose work really wasn't very good (OK, in my opinion) but got plenty of attention, I'd like to give Toshio Mori a little more of my time.
**********
...let me make clear at the outset that I happen not to agree with the young ones on this one point of language. I think Toshio, just as I, was trying to use the very best English of which he was capable, and we have both run aground on occasion. Probably this was because we both spent the pre-kindergarten years speaking only Japanese, and, in such cases, Sprachgefuhl is hard to come by.
I had hoped that the stories in Chauvinist would be better than those in Yokohama, that Mori's writing would improve with (his) age, but that isn't the case. For one thing, most of the stories in Chauvinist were written in the 30s and 40s, but the few from the 50s aren't any better. But I did find some that I liked. My favorite from this collection is "Oakland, September 17," which is about three young Japanese-Americans (Nisei), two men and a woman, accidentally meeting in a cafe in Oakland and forming a connection which is then immediately broken. Somehow, Mori got that story exactly right, even though he almost never did again.
I don't think I'm going to pursue Mori further, probably won't read the novel he wrote about his mother.
Oh, well, I'll see. He does tend to grow on you. He must have been such a sweet man.
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