“Watching the world about them rock and sway”. Hidden Upheavals in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Short Stories

Abstract

The essay focuses on a re-reading of two of the most celebrated short stories written by Japanese American author Hisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951). While both short stories are characterized by a sustained use of indirection, by tracing in them allusions to that crucial event in the history of Japanese Americans which is their forced relocation during World War II, it is possible to add a deeper layer of meaning that can further testify to the emotional turmoil of the internment experience. In addition, the essay offers a comparison between “Seventeen Syllables”, “Yoneko’s Earthquake”, and their movie adaptation produced by PBS and titled Hot Summer Winds (Omori 1991), in order to understand how the implicit references to the internment of the Japanese Americans found in the short stories are consciously mitigated or even deliberately removed in the television film.

Keywords

• Japanese American literature, Japanese Americans relocation camps, World War II, Hisaye Yamamoto, Emiko Omori