Rosebud and Other Stories (Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies, 31) - Softcover

Yamauchi, Wakako

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0824832604 ISBN 13: 9780824832605

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press, 2010

Synopsis

In your heart there will always be a small ache reminding you that a place waits for your return. The dancers pause. The singers call. The fireflies await.

Secret desires, unfulfilled longing, and irrepressible humor flow through the stories of Wakako Yamauchi, writings that depict the lives of Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans. Through the medium of Yamauchi’s storytelling, readers enter the world of desert farmers, factory workers, gamblers, housewives, con artists, and dreamers. Elegantly simple in words and complex in resonance, her stories reveal hidden strength, resilience, and the persistence of hope.

About this title

About the Author:

Lillian Howan is an attorney and writer whose parents immigrated to the United States from Tahiti and Raiatea. She spent her early childhood in Tahiti and later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She is the editor of Wakako Yamauchi’s collection, Rosebud and Other Stories (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011). Her writings have been published in the Asian American Literary Review, Café Irreal, Calyx, New England Review, and Under Western Eyes, an anthology edited by Garrett Hongo.

Review:

The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII forms the bitter knot around which Yamauchi's characters fashion their lives in this reflective, late-career collection of elegiac tales about the sorrowful mismanagement of love, marriage, motherhood, and friendship, sewn through with the grit of hard-won experience. The title story tracks the lives of two young Nisei (first-generation Japanese-American) women--one a "country clod," and the other the adorable, proficient Marian--who finally compare the bumps and unraveling in their long journeys. Similarly, in "Pain and Stuff," the narrator and her occasional friend Maisie wonder how "Nisei ladies... all seem to have such great lives" until repercussions from divorce, suicide, and heartbreak crack the surface. Many of the stories have an autobiographical bent (Yamauchi was sent to an internment camp during the war), such as "Onna," and recount again and again the trauma of itinerant farm families during the Depression, and the shame of internment and racism in America, all handled, admirably, with an unfussy accessibility and low-key forthrightness. --Publishers Weekly, November 29, 2010

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0824832604
• ISBN 13: 9780824832605
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Howan Lillian