Wakako Yamauchi


Wakako Yamauchi was a Japanese American writer. Her plays are considered pioneering works in Asian-American theater.

Biography

Yamauchi was born in Westmorland, California. Her mother and father, both Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrants, were farmers in California's Imperial Valley. Many of her stories and her two plays, And the Soul Shall Dance and The Music Lessons, are set in the same dusty, isolated settings". Her plays and stories examine the hardships that Japanese Americans faced in California's agricultural communities and in the internment camps during the second World War. In 1942, at seventeen, Yamauchi and her family were interned at the Poston, Arizona camp; the title of her play 12-1-A refers to the family's address in the War Relocation Authority camp. While there, she worked on the camp newspaper, the Poston Chronicle, alongside fellow writer Hisaye Yamamoto.
After a year and a half in Poston, Yamauchi resettled outside camp, first in Utah and then in Chicago, where she began to take in interest in theater. In 1948, she married Chester Yamauchi, with whom she had one child before the couple divorced. She returned to the Los Angeles area, where she studied painting at Otis Art Institute and continued to write. Her first published story, And the Soul Shall Dance, appeared in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Encouraged by East West Players director Mako, she soon after adapted the story into a play. The stage version of And the Soul Shall Dance was first performed at the East West Players in Los Angeles in 1974, and won the 1977 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for best new play. It was later produced for public television.
, a collection of stories she wrote in her seventies and eighties, was edited by Lillian Howan and published by University of Hawai'i Press in 2010. A collection of her plays and stories was published in 1994 under the title Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays and Memoir.
In 2018, Yamauchi died in Gardena, California at the age of 93.

Works

Some of Yamauchi's best-known short stories depict the tensions between the aspirations of Issei women and the patriarchal norms of Issei culture. The stories And the Soul Shall Dance and Songs My Mother Taught Me both depict Issei women struggling to fulfill ambitions that contradict traditional gender roles. And the Soul Shall Dance represents one of the most straightforward depictions of an Issei woman's rebellion. By depicting the complex relationships among the female characters, Yamauchi portrays Issei women's resistance and containment.

Scholarly studies

The following articles are listed in the MLA database and are arranged from most recent to oldest: