About the Story
About the Author
Wakako Yamauchi is an Asian-American female playwright, short-story writer, poet, and painter. Through her creative work, Yamauchi draws portraits of people who struggle with their dreams and passions, while facing the psychological trauma of prejudice, economic depression, and the concentration camps of the Second World War. As a young child and adult, she witnessed the overt racism and harsh labor conditions her parents endured, and later built all these personal memories into the details of her work.
Wakako Yamauchi was born to immigrant parents in California, United States, where her parents worked farmed in the Imperial Valley. Her mother also taught Japanese on Sundays. When Wakako Yamauchi was seventeen years old, she and her family were imprisoned at Poston concentration camp in Arizona, where she met a young writer, Hisaye Yamamoto, who was already established in the Japanese-American press. Both women worked on the camp newspaper, the “Poston Chronicle”, and shared an interest in art and literature. After a year and a half at Poston, Wakako Yamauchi’s family was relocated to Utah and then to Chicago, where she worked in a candy factory and began attending plays, marking the beginning of her love for theatre.
Wakako Yamauchi’s live experiences in the American concentration camps influenced her writings later in career as a playwright and short-story writer.
Summary and Analysis
The story is autobiographical. It begins by the narrator, Masako, an adult by now, telling us that her family had been living in America, the place that her parents had migrated to from Japan (perhaps even before she was born), where her father works on a farm and her mother teaches Japanese at a Buddhist temple every Sunday. She also has a little brother, who is five years younger to her.
The narrator begins the story with “It’s alright to talk about it now. Most of the principals are dead, except, of course, me and my younger brother, and possibly Kiyoko Oka…” From this line itself, we realise that the narrator is going to tell us something that had happened years ago (when she, her brother, and Kiyoko Oka) were all children, because now, it would not matter, since many of the people involved are no longer alive. This leads us to believe that she might be narrating to us something disagreeable about one of them. She then, she goes on to explain who the Okas were. As we read through, we realise that the story is all about the Okas, as the narrator knew them.
Mr. and Mrs. Oka were neighbours of the narrator’s family. Masako describes them as being strange, but she does not yet know how. Her mother, though, never liked them, and Masako never knew why, although she does speculate that it could be because Mrs. Oka would not be hospitable; she was also not very social with Masako’s mother, like women often tended to be. Masako wonders if it was only because Mrs. Oka was shy.
It so happens that one day, Masako’s family bathhouse is destroyed in a fire, and Mr Oka offers them the use of his, since it took quite some time to rebuild theirs. As her family starts visiting the Okas, so does Masako begin to see the true picture: that both Mrs. Oka and Mr. Oka are drunkards. Her mother comments on this by saying that women in Japan would never be allowed to drink, which shows that she is highly caste-conscious. This is understandable, since she might have been missing her life back in Japan. Masko then realises that her mother dislikes Mrs. Oka because the latter is not behaving like a “true Japanese woman”. It is also revealed in the story that both Mr. and Mrs. Oka fight a lot. The narrator comments on this when she says, “In spite of her masculine habits, Mrs. Oka was never less than a woman. She was no lady in the area of social amenities; but the feminine in her was innate and never left her. Even in disgrace, she was a small broken sparrow, slightly floppy, too slowly enunciating her few words… Her aberration [a state or condition markedly different from the norm] was a protest of the life assigned to her; it was obstinate but unobserved, alas, unheeded, ‘Strange’ was the only concession we granted her“.
However, by the time winter begins to set in, Masako’s parents decide that they need to rebuild their bathhouse. It is at this time that we realise what actually had been going on in the Oka family; Mr. Oka comes in to help Masako’s father, when he begins to tell the former his story. Mr. Oka had had a wife, who was the sister of the present Mrs. Oka. They had a daughter together. He had left his wife in Japan in order to set up a new life in America; however, as soon as he left, the wife had contracted a disease and died a few days later, leaving the daughter in the hands of her parents. The present Mr. Oka, who had wanted to elope with a man her family rejected, was then wedded to Mr. Oka in his absence, as a replacement for her sister. That was how she had come to be his wife in America.
Mr. Oka then tells Masako’s father that he had at last sent money for his daughter’s flight from Japan, and that she would be arriving in a few days. Now, this is a significant part of the story, since it is the point where the spotlight begins to draw away from the present Mrs. Oka and begins to focus on Kiyoko Oka, Mr. Oka’s daughter by his first marriage. Then, as the story progresses further, the narrator also starts to forget Mrs. Oka, as she relates to us how she used to teach Kiyoko English and, in turn, learn Japanese from her. She also describes how Kiyoko used to get frightened of her parents quarrelling. Gradually though, as seasons changed, so did Kiyoko, who began to be more cheerful, as she accepted her parents’s attitude and tried to ignore it all as much as she could. She was trying to get along with her life despite all that. Eventually, even the Okas themselves begin to ignore Mrs. Oka, as the father and daughter go off on their own.
Then, one day, Masako happens to see Mrs. Oka in her garden, picking flowers and dancing. Masako, afraid of what would happen if the latter saw her, hides in a bush nearby. Mrs. Oka then begins to sing in “A voice sweet and clear cut through the half-dark of the evening” the following song:
“Red lips pressed against a glass
Drink the purple, purple wine
And the soul shall dance”
(This song is, as we realise, how the title of the story has been derived.) Mrs. Oka seems strangely happy and ecstatic. Masako explains Mrs. Oka’s behaviour like this: “The picture of her imagined grandeur was lost to me, but the delusion that transformed the bouquet of tattered petals and sandy leaves, and the aloneness of the desert twilight into a fantasy that brought such joy and abandon made me stir with discomfort.“
At this moment, Mrs Oka describes her own position when she sings:
“Falling, falling, petals on a wind“
Shortly after this little incident, Mrs. Oka dies. Mr. Oka and his daughter move on to another place, and Masako tells us that they never saw them again.
Themes in the Story
The Lives of the Japanese-Americans
In 1941, the Japanese, who were fighting alongside the Germans and the Italians against the Allied forces, were afraid that the United States, which had been isolated since the First World War, might change its mind and ally itself against them alongside England and Russia. So, to prevent such a thing, the Japanese air forces sneaked into the port city of Hawaii, Pearl Harbour, and bombed it, killing thousands of innocent civilians in the process.
As a result of this, the Americans began to fear that the Japanese residents in their country might try and back up the army of their native land. Thus, on the order of President Roosevelt on 19 February 1942, the American government forced the Japanese-American people into camps, which the government called “relocation centres”, and deprived them of their liberty, a basic freedom of the American Constitution.
Surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers, families lived in poorly built, overcrowded barracks. The barracks themselves had no running water and little heat. There was almost no privacy, and everyone had to use public bathrooms. However, as time passed, the Japanese-Americans were given some sort of freedom, before 1946, when these camps were completely liberated, after the United States army sought revenge by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and taking over Japan.
It is important to remember, though, that this was before the civil rights movement. Racism against people of colour – Asians, Latins, and African-Americans – was common. Because they were easily identifiable as being Asian, Japanese-Americans felt more racial hatred than German-Americans and Italian-Americans. In addition, Japan put together an impressive string of victories in the first six months of the war, overwhelming the American troops in the Philippines, sinking many American ships, and conquering much of Southeast Asia. Their victories led to American paranoia, and many people thought their Japanese neighbors could be spies. These victories, combined with racism, created a war hysteria. People were afraid, and they thought that the only way that America could be safe was to put the Japanese Americans in camps.
Caste System in Japan
Caste system is a closed communal stratification system, where people of a region inherit their position on the basis of some specific rules that are followed by it since time immemorial.
Like India, Japan also used to practice a twisted caste system, which had developed since the inception of the first Japanese empire.
The Japanese caste system consisted broadly of two categories: the Touchable class and the Untouchable class (“Burakumin” in Japanese). While the Touchable class is the actual four-tier hierarchical system–the samurai, the peasants, the craftsmen, and the merchants (the ascending order), the Untouchable class was shunned and ostracised by the Touchable class–the executioners, workers in slaughterhouses, the undertakers, the tanners, and the butchers.
Although this evil system was formally abolished in the 1870s, yet people could not get out of the habit, and so, discrimination continued on indirectly, through surnames and the like. After the Second World War and the establishment of a parliamentary monarchy, the caste discrimination is said to have been reduced. However, there have been cases disproving this statement, one as recent as October 2015, when butchers had been receiving “hate mails”.
References:
- Densho Encyclopaedia
- http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/wwii/ahf/mineta/background.htm
- https://www.pbs.org/thewar/at_home_civil_rights_japanese_american.htm
- http://www.annefrankguide.net/en-US/bronnenbank.asp?oid=18466
- http://www.hierarchystructure.com/castes-japanese-feudal-hierarchy/
This post is by V. Ananya (1413744).