During this summer term, I attended the course “Japanese Americans” at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. The overall aim of the course was to introduce us students to the literature of Japanese Americans in America now and then. In this article I would like to comment on one short story by Hisaye Yamamoto which I liked in particular: “Wilshire Bus” (in Seventeen Syllables and other Stories, 1988).
In the aftermath of World War II, life in general was not an easy matter. War time had shaken up basic and fundamental values, power structures had shifted around the globe, and the notion of humanity was called into question. Every country having fought in the war had to rearrange its social structures and had to come up with new ideas of how a post-war society was to look like. Of course, the United States faced different problems than European countries did.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 caused the United States to eventually enter the war and fight at the side of the Allied Forces. It was from this point on that the life of Japanese Americans in the United States began to change radically. With the internment of many thousand Japanese Americans on the grounds of espionage and treason, a war crime was committed. Even though the end of the war saw the official release of all Japanese Americans from the internment camps, the effects upon the Japanese population were rooted far more deeply and left distinct traces which are still felt today.
The short stories by Hisaye Yamamoto are as subtle as they are blunt. Even though the shortness of her stories does not allow for digression, she never rubs the problem in our face but beds it beautifully in the context of experience. She neither accuses nor evaluates. However, she creates vivid images which prompt our imagination so that the reader is left to find his own truth. The sharp conciseness of her style forces the reader to take a stand and also creates the dynamics of her writing.
The short story “Wilshire Bus” explores racial tensions in post-war American society. We are presented an excerpt of someone’s life, nothing but a fragment on which to construct a story. We encounter a middle-aged Japanese woman, Esther Kuroiwa, who rides the bus every Wednesday to visit her husband in the nearby hospital. Her husband is a war veteran who served in the United States Army during World War II. An old war injury began troubling him again so that he had to stop working to get treatment in the hospital. At one stop an apparently drunk man gets on the bus and takes his seat next to a Chinese couple. He starts harassing the couple verbally giving voice to his racial prejudices.
“Wilshire Bus” provides an insight into the way racial hierarchies are constructed. Yamamoto tentatively suggests that there is a frightening tendency for ethnicity to be defined in superiority to other ethnic groups. Esther is shocked to find relief in the fact that it is the Chinese who are discriminated against and only wonders whether she can be distinguished from the couple as being Japanese. So instead of feeling sympathy and compassion for the Chinese couple, Esther tries to set herself apart and hopes not to be considered like them. Hence, even though both ethnicities form part of a minority when compared to the predominantly white population, they do not support and help each other but rather search for ways to establish clear-cut boundaries between them.
Yamamoto points at a vicious cycle that the human race seems to be caught in. She reveals how, by drawing distinct lines between various ethnic groups in order to have a feeling of belonging and a sense of identity, hatred and otherness are inevitably fuelled. Yet identity should not be motivated in negative terms towards “The Other” but rather derive from affirmative and positive attitudes towards oneself.
However, when Esther tries to make up for her moral failure by smiling at the Chinese woman, the latter refuses to meet on the level of mutual understanding, thereby conveying a silent reproach. “But the woman, in turn looking at her, presented a face so impassive yet cold, and eyes so expressionless yet hostile, that Esther’s overture fell quite flat.” (Yamamoto 37).
When the drunk man eventually gets off the bus, a fellow passenger addresses the Chinese couple and reassures them that not all Americans are like the other passenger and that they should not take his words seriously. Still Esther begins to wonder whether the man might not simply have voiced what many Americans secretly feel. The fact that he was drunk might just have eased the words out of his mouth. Contemplating this speculation, Esther is suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of utter helplessness, realizing that there is nothing solid to cling to in her life, nothing to provide comfort and shelter from a deeply rooted isolation. In a way Esther is forced to realize that racism does not only prevail between Whites against Orientals but also among the different minority groups. The sense of solidarity and shared fate that she tried to establish by greeting the Chinese couple with a smile when they got on the bus does not exist. When Esther finally arrives at the hospital to see her husband she cannot help but burst into tears about the “grave sin of omission” (Yamamoto 34) she committed.
Yamamoto quietly implies a sense of disappointment and pessimism in the end when she calls into question the interaction between ethnic communities in America. So at first glance “Wilshire Bus” is a story about regret and human failure. However, on a deeper level it also raises the question of ethnic belonging and identity in post-war America.
* Yamamoto, Hisaye. “Wishire Bus” 1949. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998. 34-38.
© 2010 Lara Mylord
