In 1952, Hisaye Yamamoto came to a crossroads. A rising talent among Japanese American writers, Yamamoto had been offered a coveted writing fellowship at Stanford University by Yvor Winters, one of the period’s most esteemed critics. Winters had read her short story “Yoneko’s Earthquake” in early 1951 and began a correspondence with Yamamoto in which he praised the story as “exceptionally good.” (Elizabeth Bishop also wrote to express her admiration.) These kind words, paired with the opportunity to study at Stanford, must have felt like a triumph for Yamamoto, who, a few years earlier, had written in “large letters” on her school notebook “STANFORD OR BUST!”
And yet she did not go to Stanford that fall. If she had, Yamamoto’s writing career might have looked very different. The fellowship would have connected her to figures like Tillie Olsen, N. Scott Momaday, and Ken Kesey. Instead, that winter she wrote to Dorothy Day to express her desire to join the Catholic Worker movement. Years later, Yamamoto remembered their first meeting at Christmas Eve Midnight Mass with the Maryknoll Sisters in Los Angeles: “So this was Dorothy Day, this tall woman in a worn black coat and black beret, with the splendidly chiseled, ageless face, with her white hair braided in a coronet atop her head.” The following September, Yamamoto and her son, Paul, packed their bags and headed to New York to join the movement.
Yamamoto’s two-year stay at the Worker and her relationship with Dorothy Day have received little attention. Her writings were all but forgotten until Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong placed her fiction in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974)—a pathbreaking collection of works by American writers of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino descent. Only recently have critics considered how Yamamoto’s engagement with the Catholic Worker informed her writings. In “The Catholic Writer Today” (2013), Dana Gioia mentions Yamamoto alongside Flannery O’Connor and others as representatives of Catholic cultural production. Yamamoto wouldn’t have accepted the label “Catholic,” but her years at the Worker and her friendship with Day profoundly influenced her fiction and politics.
Hisaye Yamamoto (1921–2011) was born in Redondo Beach, California, the daughter of Japanese immigrants. The family earned a living through small-scale farming—a “pretty healthy life,” as she remembered it, and one that enabled her to explore her precocious literary talent. As a teen, she wrote a column in English for the Japanese-language newspaper Kashu Mainichi. But prejudice shadowed Yamamoto’s upbringing. California’s Alien Land Law of 1913 barred Asian immigrants from land ownership, forcing her family and other Japanese American families to move frequently (during her childhood, Yamamoto’s family moved at least eleven times). Then, in 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, catapulting the United States into World War II, an event with dire consequences for Japanese Americans on the home front. From 1942 to 1945, Yamamoto was incarcerated with her family at Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona.
Internment, Yamamoto wrote in a 1976 essay, “was a trauma which many Japanese who were incarcerated choose to ignore today, on the grounds that it is past history,” but others “have insisted on looking at it in the full light of day…to comprehend how such a thing could have ever happened in a country where one million speeches have been delivered on the delights of freedom.” Yamamoto was a leader in the effort to come to terms with this history. In 1950—just five years after internment ended—she published “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” in the Kenyon Review. Her short story represents life inside an internment camp from the perspective of a nineteen-year-old girl, Kiku. Like many in the camp, Kiku is fascinated by the eccentricities of Miss Sasagawara, a fellow internee who is eventually transferred to a sanitarium. Steadily we learn that Miss Sasagawara’s life is one of multiple confinements: first, the confinement of internment, and second, the confinement of family—particularly her father, a Buddhist minister. At the end of the story, Kiku comes across an “erratically brilliant” long poem by Miss Sasagawara in a magazine. The poem describes a man reminiscent of Reverend Sasagawara who views internment as his chance to “achieve Nirvana.” Though the poet describes this man as “noble,” she suggests that others might “describe this man’s devotion as a sort of madness.” Thus, Miss Sasagawara has been driven mad not only by Japanese Americans’ unjust imprisonment, but by her father’s mad drive for spiritual purification.
During internment, Yamamoto’s nineteen-year-old brother Johnny, who volunteered for the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, died while fighting in Italy. Half a century later, she returned to the subject of her brother’s death in “Florentine Gardens,” a story detailing the pilgrimage of American tourists to the U.S. military cemetery in Florence. In the story, Kimiko Jauregi visits the gravesite of her younger brother Tommy, and takes note of a monument etched with words from Pericles:
They faced the foe as they drew near him in the stretch of their own manhood and when the shock of battle came they in a moment of time at the climax of their lives were rapt away from a world filled for their dying eyes not with terror but with glory.
The monument’s glorification of war fills Kimiko with righteous anger. The experience of losing her own younger brother likely contributed to Yamamoto’s pacifism, a commitment she shared with the Catholic Workers.
After internment, Yamamoto worked at an African American weekly, the Los Angeles Tribune. Her 1985 story “A Fire in Fontana” reflects on her time with the paper and the racial politics of LA, particularly the 1945 murder of Helen and O’Day Short, along with their two children, by vigilantes targeting the African American family for moving to Fontana. The Shorts died in a fire that an NAACP investigation later showed had been caused by a flammable oil that was poured on the house. The Shorts were Catholics, and their surviving family called on George Dunne, SJ, for help. Dunne published two articles in Commonweal in 1946 and then wrote a play, Trial by Fire, to bring attention to the murders. Yamamoto’s short story, about a Japanese American writer working at a Black newspaper, suggests that she met Short just before his murder—after he had begun receiving threats and was seeking support from the Black press in LA. Her story notes that, after the murder, a priest had written a play because he was “so skeptical” of the “police theory” of events, but that “[n]ot long after it was presented on stage, the priest was suddenly transferred…. And that was the last time I heard mention of the conflagration.” The story closes by connecting the events of Fontana in December 1945 to the Watts riots of August 1965. The narrator watches the riot with fear but then comes to view the “tumult” as
the long-waited, gratifying next chapter of an old movie that had flickered in the back of my mind for years. In the film, shot in the dark of about three o’clock in the morning, there was this modest house out in the country. Suddenly the house was in flames and there were the sound effects of the fire roaring and leaping skyward. Then there could be heard the voices of a man and woman screaming, and the voices of two small children as well.
It was in this context—after internment, her brother’s death, and the Shorts’ murder—that Yamamoto began reading the Catholic Worker, first for work and then out of personal interest. Yamamoto left the Tribune in 1948 and received the John Hay Whitney Foundation Opportunity Fellowship in 1950. In these years, she adopted a boy, Paul—“a baby, born in the family, that nobody was in a position to care for”—by herself. Paul was “a cradle Catholic,” but Yamamoto “wanted him to become the best type of Catholic there was—a Catholic Worker.” As she recalled in a 1968 essay,
It was the Catholic Worker that had stuck in my craw for so many years, with its non-violence, voluntary poverty, love for the land, and attempt to put into practice the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, which beckoned me now like a letter from home. So, after the fellowship had run out…the child and I headed for Peter Maurin Farm on Staten Island.
When Dorothy Day visited California in June 1942, she was incensed. “I saw a bit of Germany on the west coast,” she wrote in the Worker after visiting the state’s internment camps. In her article, Day published parts of letters from Japanese Americans suffering inhumane conditions: glaring floodlights turned on them in the night, toilets and showers without partitions, and wretched living quarters. Tying her defense of Japanese Americans to the Worker’s uncompromising antiwar stance, she pronounced Japanese Americans “the first victims of war in this country.” Day held the uncommon distinction of having remained a pacifist during World War II. Her principles cost the Worker many subscribers and supporters, but they also earned the magazine admirers like Yamamoto.
In the years after the war, when Yamamoto was following the Worker, the paper published articles on racial justice, labor, and the draft. It also advanced an economic and environmental vision—what Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker, called the “green revolution” (not to be confused with the Green Revolution of industrial agriculture). Maurin believed that communal farming was the ultimate pro-labor practice: it would reacquaint workers with the means of production, correct capitalism’s excesses, and reinstill in workers a sense of the dignity of their labor. Yamamoto was inspired by Maurin’s theories, especially his scholar-worker ideal. In a 2000 interview, she remembered Maurin’s “synthesis of…‘cult, culture, and cultivation,’ which meant going back to the land. His ideal was that a person could work out in the fields maybe four days—four hours a day—and then go back to the farmhouse and paint or write or do printing or whatever, all centered around the Catholic Church.”
Maurin’s vision was utopian and romantic; reality at the Worker was more complicated. Yamamoto’s arrival in September 1953 was deflating. “[O]ne of the first things we saw, on arriving at the Catholic Worker house (St. Joseph’s House) was a man lying in an alleyway…. And our first night was spent in Dorothy Day’s own room upstairs, where cockroaches and bedbugs dismayed us through the night (Dorothy Day was elsewhere).” While many of the Worker’s volunteers came and went, the unemployed and the addicted were the Worker’s permanent residents. In a December 1954 column Yamamoto wrote for the Worker, she noted, “[I]t is still a daily miracle how we, coming from such a wide diversity of backgrounds and thrown together by our common needs, live as one family, struggling to respect one another’s personalities.” In January 1955, she wrote, “Advent—liturgically a season of joyous waiting—turned out to be rather grim at Peter Maurin Farm, with the communal nerves on edge and dissension prevailing.” As Yamamoto recalled in 1987, “Dorothy Day never wrote about the darker aspects of living in community in her column, which had so enchanted me.”
In the July–August 1955 issue, Yamamoto reported on the finer points of “the back-to-the-land aspect of the work”: soil conservation, ditch digging, and grass growing. Either communal tensions had been sorted out, or the Workers were too busy during the summer to squabble. The year before, in the April 1954 Worker, Day introduced Yamamoto to the readership and praised her work ethic:
Hisaye is a Japanese American and is our best example of manual labor around here. She works without effort, quietly, efficiently, taking care of rabbits, chickens, washing up the kitchen, diningroom, hall, and corridors with a concoction of boiled onion skins and water…. Our house is spotless, thanks to her, and yet she always has time to type articles, to read, both to herself and to little Paul. What an example of tranquility.
While Day saw “tranquility” in Yamamoto, who somehow managed to live out Maurin’s scholar-worker ideal, Yamamoto remembered her time at Peter Maurin Farm as a mixed bag: “The farm, with its daily Mass, cockroaches, weaving, bedbugs, homemade whole wheat bread, poison ivy, was home for us for a couple of years.” Still, Yamamoto admired Day greatly. She was “too complex for words,” Yamamoto explained in 2000, before adding, “I believe Dorothy Day is the most important person this country has produced.”
Day may have been too complex for words, but that didn’t stop Yamamoto from writing about her in the 1960 short story “Epithalamium”—so-named because the story describes protagonist Yuki Tsumagari’s tragic wedding day. Tsumagari marries a fellow “Zualet Community” member, a handsome Italian and recovering alcoholic named Marco Cimarusti, who was modeled on one of the unruly community members from Yamamoto’s Catholic Worker column. The story opens when Yuki receives a call from an inebriated Marco, who threatens to leave forever if Yuki does not marry him that very day. She agrees, and they are hurriedly wed at city hall. Through the remainder of the story, Yuki struggles to understand how she ended up with this wayward man and reflects on her years with the Community.
“Madame Marie,” Yamamoto’s alias for Day, is a towering figure in Yuki’s memory. Described as “saintly” and “gentle,” Marie warns Yuki not to marry Marco, citing examples of other women who fell in love with alcoholics while at the Community only to endure bitter separations, suffer regular abuse, or be left to raise their children single-handedly. When Yuki objects, arguing that leaving Marco will also lead to suffering, Marie offers a devastating reply: “You’ll never know how I suffered.” The comment sends Yuki back to Marie’s autobiography, the book that “had brought [Yuki] all the way across the country.” In a retelling of Day’s relationship with Forster Battingham, described in The Long Loneliness (1952), Yuki reflects on Marie’s decision to leave her lover when he refused to enter the Church: “[S]he had no choice but to leave him. And her autobiography had admitted that it had been many, many anguished nights before she had stopped yearning for the consolation of his arms.” In Yamamoto’s depictions of Yuki and Marie’s conversations, she hints at her intimate relationship with Day.
But Yuki is in too deep already; not even Marie can sway her. The magnetism between Yuki and Marco has resulted in her losing her virginity to Marco on the beach of a neighboring monastery—the same beach where Yuki had been so “enchanted” by seminarians “singing the psalms of the Tenebrae” during the Community’s weekly prayers. With shame, Yuki recalls that their attraction was so intense that “[t]here was scarcely a nook or cranny of the Community that they had not defiled.” Though Yuki fears “scandalizing the whole Community,” especially Marie, she and Marco cannot cool their passion, even after a brief pregnancy and miscarriage.
If there is any real epithalamium in this story, it is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur,” which runs through Yuki’s mind as she wakes up on the day of her wedding. At the story’s conclusion, with Yuki resigned to her fate, she returns to Hopkins. The poem captures aspects of the Worker’s hoped-for “green revolution” (“All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” writes Hopkins), and it offers some measure of solace in an otherwise distressing story. Yuki, for her part, “could not think of an epithalamium that she would more prefer.”
Hopkins’s poem also functions as a narrative device, setting off a chain of free associations in the story’s final paragraph. God’s grandeur, Hopkins promises, will “flame out like shining from shook foil”—a detail Yuki associates with the priest’s red vestments at Mass that morning, worn on August 29 for the feast day marking the beheading of John the Baptist. Yuki then thinks of the missal, which notes that August 29 also commemorates the life of St. Sabina, “a Roman widow who had been converted by a maidservant, beheaded under Emperor Hadrian, and secretly buried.” Yamamoto appears to be building to some sublime conclusion, but instead the story’s final sentence plummets into bathos: “However, the missal had added, it was not certain whether such a woman had existed at all.”
Years later, the topic of Yamamoto’s marriage came up in an interview. When the interviewer remarked to Yamamoto, “I guess you don’t want to talk about falling in love,” Yamamoto answered, “No, I don’t want to talk about falling in love…. [Sings.] Falling in love.” Presumably, the experience she didn’t want to talk about was her marriage to her fellow Catholic Worker, Anthony DeSoto, in 1955, the year she left the Worker. Her breaking into song in the interview is something like the apparent indirection the reader encounters at the end of “Epithalamium.” But whatever historians can or cannot prove about St. Sabina, Yamamoto’s love story, reflected in Yuki’s, had been painfully real.
Yamamoto remained on Dorothy Day’s mind after her departure and received several more mentions in the Worker before Day’s death in 1980. In a 1956 column reviewing the past year’s community news, Day mentions the marriage of Yamamoto and DeSoto. In 1976, Day records that Yamamoto and her six-year-old son traveled from California to attend a retreat in New York. And in 1979, a year before she died, Day reports that her granddaughter had visited Yamamoto while on a trip out West. In that piece, Day specifically describes Yamamoto and DeSoto’s relationship as “[a] good and happy marriage.” If “Epithalamium” is any guide to how that marriage began—and it might not be—this affirmation might be read as a late acknowledgment that Day concluded she had been wrong in her initial judgment. (No one knows if Day ever read “Epithalamium.”)
After Yamamoto left the Catholic Worker with her son and new husband in the fall of 1955, she returned to LA, where she had four more children and wrote as much as motherhood allowed. “I must in all honesty list my occupation as housewife,” she wrote in 1968. The domestic labor she cited when asked about her writing in these years suggests continuity with Maurin’s scholar-worker model. Then, in 1974, her story “Yoneko’s Earthquake” was featured in Aiiieeeee! Her other early stories of the Japanese American experience, like “Seventeen Syllables” and “Wilshire Bus,” soon received their due.
In interviews, Yamamoto repeatedly styled herself a “Christian anarchist,” much as Day did. In 1974, Day reflected on the Worker’s use of the term “anarchism”: “We ourselves have never hesitated to use the word…. Peter Maurin came to me with Kropotkin in one pocket and St. Francis in the other!” In 1992, Yamamoto defined “Christian anarchist” as one who believes that Jesus is the son of God and that “government by mutual consent in small groups—communities—is the ideal form of democracy. This includes pacifism”—clear references to the Worker’s mode of social organization and its political commitments. The Worker’s radicalism opened Yamamoto to Christianity, and it made her feel at ease with Day. As Yamamoto’s son Paul, a cradle Catholic, told everyone who asked, “I’m the Catholic and she’s the worker.” The gradual recovery of Yamamoto’s literary reputation that began in the 1970s has focused ample attention on Yamamoto’s engagement with radical politics (i.e., “the worker”). What has been understated in that recovery is how the Worker’s Catholicism, its “Christian anarchism,” informed both her politics and her writing.