Songs My Mother Taught Me

In her eloquent fiction and drama, Yamauchi, a Nisei (second-generation Japanese American), illuminates the neglected social and emotional history of two generations of Japanese in the United States. Informed by her own family history, she re-creates the harsh lives of rural immigrants, the war-time relocation of Japanese Americans, and the ambivalences of contemporary Nisei. Without bitterness, and often with quiet humour, Yamauchi's human-sizes dramas open into larger social histories and the great narrative myth of culture.