And the Soul Shall Dance: Thomas Wolfe's Influence on Wakako Yamauchi (Critical Essay‪)‬

Since its inception in 1977, the Thomas Wolfe Review has published several articles that trace Wolfe's influence on such later American writers as James Agee, Herman Wouk, Carson McCullers, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac, and Pat Conroy. After perusing this list, with its Eurocentric male orientation, readers may think Wolfe's influence on women of color negligible. However, one author who has acknowledged him as an important early influence is National Book Award-winning playwright, short story writer, and memoirist Wakako Yamauchi, who read Wolfe as a teenager "for his enormous passion" (Osborn and Watanabe 102). Not only did his exuberant novels Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) awaken "tumultuous feelings" in Yamauchi, which allowed her to cultivate "an instinctive feeling that there was something waiting, greater than was dreamt of in [her] philosophy" by acknowledging a hidden self that was both "unknown" and "unexpressed" (Letter 20 Aug.), but these books also offered an autobiographical template through which she explored the loneliness and nostalgia of Japanese Americans who experienced the disorienting cultural effects of hopeful immigration, failed assimilation, and forced internment during the first half of the twentieth century. Wakako Yamauchi (nee Nakamura) was born in Westmoreland, California, on 24 October 1924, the daughter of first-generation Japanese immigrants (referred to collectively in Japanese as Issei). Because of the state's Alien Land Law, (1) which prohibited Issei from owning property, the Nakamuras worked as tenant farmers throughout California's Imperial Valley Region, moving often because of the widespread discrimination they faced and the diverse needs of such agricultural crops as lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, and beets (Berg; Osborn and Watanabe 101). Because assimilation into American culture proved difficult, mainly because they were denied citizenship on racial grounds, Yamauchi's parents longed to return to Japan (Cheung 348). Consequently, the family spoke only Japanese at home, and Yamauchi did not learn English until she started school, where her great love affair with books began (Osborn and Watanabe 101). Because the small local libraries in southern California were unsophisticated (Yamauchi, Letter 7 Aug.), most of her reading came from school assignments given by white teachers, which included works by Sir Walter Scott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the western writer Zane Grey (Letter 7 Aug.; Osborn and Watanabe 102). Although she admits to having been an unrefined reader as a child, she eventually learned to love words, "the sounds they made and the places they took [her]" (Letter 7 Aug.), away from the hot, dusty, sage-territory of Imperial Valley and the immense loneliness it engendered in her family, who barely made a living in such a forbidding terrain so far away from home.