Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature

(Michael S) #1

novel as well as to One Bird, in which a teenage
girl’s rehabilitation work with birds helps her cope
with the departure of her mother. Mori’s prose is
uncluttered and precise. Her focus on migration,
separation, and movement, however, connects her
to, and establishes her affinity with, Asian-Ameri-
can literature and culture.


Jeanne Sokolowski

Mori, Toshio (1910–1980)
A decade before Toshio Mori’s birth, his parents
had immigrated to the United States from Otake,
Japan, a hamlet just outside of Hiroshima, leaving
the care of their two oldest sons to the community
until the couple was financially able to support
them in the United States, a common practice for
Japanese emigrants at the time. Toshio Mori was
born in Oakland, California, on the floor of the
family-owned bathhouse, making him the first U.S.
citizen in the Mori family. This status played an im-
portant role in his writing since many of his stories
depict the ideological split between immigrant issei
adults and their American-born nisei children.
In 1913 Mori’s father sold his bathhouse to
open a flower nursery. Two years later, the family
moved 12 miles south of Oakland to the suburb of
San Leandro, the town Mori thought of as home
even though he still attended school in Oakland.
As a teenager, Mori could not decide whether to
become an artist, a Buddhist missionary, a major-
league baseball player, or a writer. After reading
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, however,
he made up his mind and set himself the schedule
of writing four hours a day, seven days a week, a
daunting task since he worked in the family’s nurs-
ery business 12 to 16 hours a day as a young adult.
Because he felt that most contemporary writ-
ers depicted Japanese Americans as caricatures,
Mori strove to undo such stereotypes by placing
his realistic stories in magazines geared toward
“white” audiences. Although offering encour-
agement, editors of such periodicals as Esquire
and The Saturday Evening Post rejected his work,
thinking that his slice-of-life vignettes about Japa-
nese Americans held little interest for their sophis-


ticated readers. It took Mori six years to place his
first published story, “Tomorrow and Today,” with
a “white” magazine.
As he further honed his craft during the late
1930s, Mori’s work began appearing in an increas-
ing number of periodicals. Consequently, Caxton
Printers, a small press in Idaho, agreed to publish
his first collection of short fiction, YOKOHAMA,
CALIFORNIA, in early 1942. On the brink of artistic
success, however, Mori’s career met with bad tim-
ing. Because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Har-
bor and the United States’s ensuing involvement in
World War II, Caxton Printers shelved Mori’s book
indefinitely. Moreover, along with 120,000 other
Japanese Americans who lived on the country’s
West Coast, Mori was confined in an internment
camp from mid-1942 until the end of the war in


  1. While housed in Utah’s Topaz relocation
    camp, Mori continued to write, finding plenty of
    new material to invigorate his stories. His work on
    the camp’s newspaper allowed him to master his
    characteristic minimalist style.
    Despite praise from William Saroyan and Lewis
    Gannett, both the literary establishment and Japa-
    nese-American readers ignored Yokohama, Cali-
    fornia upon its publication in 1949. For the next
    three decades, Mori wrote at night and worked as a
    florist by day, placing his stories in magazines and
    anthologies of varying quality. His work did not
    receive much recognition until such later writers
    as LAWSON FUSAO INADA and SHAWN WONG, mem-
    bers of the Combined Asian American Resource
    Project, established his importance as the first
    Japanese-American short story writer. They en-
    couraged the publication of his second book, The
    Chauvinist and Other Stories, in 1979 and helped
    to resurrect Yokohama, California posthumously
    during the mid-1980s. In 2000 Heyday Books pub-
    lished Unfinished Message: Selected Works of Toshio
    Mori, which illustrates Mori’s growing importance
    as a forefather of Japanese-American literature.


Bibliography
Barnhart, Sarah Catlin. “Toshio Mori (1910–1980).”
Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographic
Sourcebook, edited by Emanuel S. Nelson, 243–


  1. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.


200 Mori, Toshio

Free download pdf