Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara”: The Collective Silence of Japanese Internees and Its Literary Representations

Abstract

This paper pays close attention to the fact that Japanese internees had long been silent about their internment experience during and after World War II. Reviewing the few fictional narratives about the Japanese internment that were written from the time when the war ended until the 1970s, this paper approaches their silence and amnesia not simply as a heritage of Japanese culture. Rather, it reads the internees’ silence as the latency of trauma, in which dynamic processes of repression, fragmentation, omission, distortion, etc. take place. Their collective silence becomes a discursive site that discloses their untold stories and feelings that are bound with diverse losses of their ideals, wishes, and loved people, as well as with their compulsory spatial displacement and dislocation during the war. These psychological dynamics are teased out as this paper analyzes Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara.” Even though a nisei writer who belongs to “the silent generation,” Yamamoto expresses her criticism of American racism by implanting a covert plot that contains unraveled stories and feelings of the title character under the explicit narrative of the story. The silent, implied narrative will be explored as an aesthetically invented form to reveal the psychological dynamics in the internees’ silence. In addition, reading the relations between the title character and other internees in the camp as a synecdoche, this paper will disclose how the double plot in the story metonymically portrays the relations between the Japanese internees and American society.