A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

immediate postwar years:” 181 Milton Murayama of Maui self-published his Pidgin
plantation novelette All I Asking for Is My Body as early as 1959, but had to wait for
recognition until the 1970s. Incorporating the fundamentally Local text into the Japanese
American canon, Yogi summarizes its theme: “Through the antagonistic dynamic that
develops between issei and nisei, Murayama explores the complex interaction between
traditional Japanese values of family loyalty and the exploitative and racially stratified
plantation system.” 182 He also recognizes the text’s linguistic significance: “Like writers
who have legitimized regional dialects and black English in literature, Murayama
pioneered the use of ‘pidgin English’ as a literary language.” 183 No wonder someone like
Frank Chin who had called for a kind of ‘nation language’ for Asian Americans would
want to claim Murayama as one of their own. 184 The 1970s sansei writers such as poet
Lawson Fusao Inada, a member of the Aiiieeeee! group, were as influenced by the
progressive and radical politics of the time as the Chinese.
Approaching the present, Yogi identifies a sense of place and the urgency “to
capture Japanese American communities that are either disappearing or changing in
dramatic ways” 185 as central issues of the 1980s and 1990s. However, his main examples
of these tendencies are Sylvia Watanabe’s 1992 story collection Talking to the Dead and
Juliet Kono’s 1988 book of poetry Hilo Rains. Both writers are Local sansei, both books
are fundamentally about Hawai’i. In the islands, the centrality of sense of place is not a
recent development. Neither is the desire to portray the lost or vanishing things of life.
And lastly, the communities portrayed in these works are not merely Japanese American,
but complexly mixed as Hawaiian communities inevitably are. A genuinely recent
development in Japanese American writing is the turn to postmodern forms and styles.
181 Stan Yogi, “Japanese American Literature,” in Cheung 1997: 125-55, here 134. In 1964, Kazuo
Miyamoto, a Kaua’i-born doctor who worked as a physician in Tule Lake camp, wrote the immigrant epic
Hawaii: End of the Rainbow. Jon Shirota is the author of two novels, Lucky Come Hawaii and Pineapple
White. Other examples are Bob Hongo’s 1958 Hey Pineapple!, Shelley Ota’s 1961 Upon Their Shoulders,
and Gail N. Harada’s 1960 The Sun Shines on the Immigrant. All these are briefly analyzed in Sumida
1991: 113-4, 202-22, and passim, and in his shorter essay on Local Asian literature (in Chock/Lum 1986:
302-21).
182 Yogi in Cheung 1997: 138.
183 Ibid.: 139.
184 A similar case can be made in relation to Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa and her 1981 novel
Obasan. Because the book is viewed as a central text on the wartime relocation experience, it is included in
Japanese American literary history. At the same time, Obasan figures as a central Canadian text. Such
examples problematize the value of establishing and maintaining tagged (national) categories, as well as the
perception of texts as belonging to one body of literature or one tradition.
185 Yogi in Cheung 1997: 143.
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