Hisaye Yamamoto, pioneering Japanese American writer, dead at 89

Hisaye Yamamoto, a master of the short story whose most moving work delves into the psyches of Japanese Americans who lived through the World War II years, died in Los Angeles on Jan. 30 at age 89.  

In this excerpt from one of her most admired stories, "Seventeen Syllables," Rosie, the teenage daughter of a Japanese immigrant farmer and his poetry-writing wife, has just witnessed her father's violent reaction to her mother's first-place prize in a haiku contest -- he smashes the prize with an ax, douses it with kerosene and burns it:

 Rosie ran past him and toward the house. What had become of her mother? She burst into the parlor and found her mother at the back window watching the dying fire. They watched together until there remained only a feeble smoke under the blazing sun. Her mother was very calm.

"Do you know why I married your father?" she said without turning.

"No," said Rosie. It was the most frightening question she had ever been called upon to answer. Don't tell me now, she wanted to say, tell me tomorrow, tell me next week, don't tell me today. But she knew she would be told now, that the telling would combine with the other violence of the hot afternoon to level her life, her world to the very ground.

It was like a story out of the magazines illustrated in sepia, which she had consumed so greedily for a period until the information had somehow reached her that those wretchedly unhappy autobiographies, offered to her as the testimonials of living men and women, were largely inventions: Her mother, at nineteen, had come to America and married her father as an alternative to suicide.

Read more about Yamamoto's life: "Hisaye Yamamoto dies at 89; writer of Japanese American stories."

-- Elaine Woo 

Photo: Hisaye Yamamoto in 2007. Credit: Mario G. Reyes / Rafu Shimpo

One year ago: Karla Kuskin

Karla Kuskin was a children's book author and illustrator who had a celebrated read-aloud writing style that reflected a rare understanding of a child's perspective. She died one year ago at age 77.

Kuskin first achieved fame with "Roar and More," a 1956 book about animals and the noises they make that was her senior project at Yale.

She could "think herself into a child's skin" by using memories of her childhood as inspiration, Margaret F. Maxwell wrote in the "St. James Guide to Children's Writers" (1999). "That she has been able to distill these memories into simple yet lighthearted verses . . . is Kuskin's lasting talent."

Her flowing, simple and readable style is reflected in an early work, "James and the Rain" (1957), which Publishers Weekly called "one of the best read-aloud stories" for children:

James pressed his nose against the pane
and saw a million drops of rain.
The earth was wet,
the sky was gray,
it looked like it would rain all day.

For more, read Karla Kuskin's obituary in The Times.

-- Michael Farr

Photo: Karla Kuskin. 

One year ago: Harold Norse

San Francisco poet Harold Norse, who died a year ago today at 92, was considered a mentor or peer to many great talents in 20th century American literature.

"He was an absolute pioneer in the use of American language," said Gerald Nicosia, a poet and biographer of Jack Kerouac who knew Norse for more than 30 years. "He was writing good, strong poetry before the Beats were."

A literary beacon in the gay community, Norse wrote openly of his sexual adventures in the 1940s and '50s.

"He was essentially an expatriate voice in American poetry," Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and bookseller who published a volume of Norse's poems in the mid-1970s, told The Times' Elaine Woo for Norse's obituary. "He had an original voice because he ventriloquized what a lot of other poets were saying. ... He could sound in one poem like T.S. Eliot ... or in another poem like William Burroughs."

Norse's 1972 poem "I am not a man" included these lines:

I'm not a man. I don't like football, boxing and cars.
I like to express my feeling. I even like to put an arm
around my friend's shoulder.

I'm not a man. I won't play the role assigned to me -- the role created
by Madison Avenue, Playboy, Hollywood and Oliver Cromwell,
Television does not dictate my behavior."

Norse's obituary appeared in The Times on June 13, 2009.

-- Keith Thursby

Photo credit: Neil Hollier

Ai, poet and National Book Award winner, dies at 62

Ai, 62, a poet who won the National Book Award in Poetry in 1999 for her collection called "Vice," died suddenly on Saturday in Oklahoma. Ai, who had a master of fine arts from UC Irvine, had been teaching creative writing at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater since 1999.

Her other works included "Cruelty," "Killing Floor," "Sin," Fate," "Greed" and "Dread."

Click here to read more from Carolyn Kellogg at the Times' book blog, Jacket Copy.

-- Claire Noland

Poet Lucille Clifton's sly humor

Lucille Clifton, the widely anthologized poet who died Feb. 13 at age 73, was descended from slaves and wrote many poems that addressed indignities and injustices in African Americans' lives. But the mother of six also was noted for her humor, which she directed at subjects not usually considered inspirational, including hot flashes and menstruation.

Her earthy wit powers her "wishes for sons":

i wish them cramps.

i wish them a strange town

and the last tampon.

i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early

and wearing a white skirt.

i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes

and clots like you

wouldn't believe. let the

flashes come when they

meet someone special.

let the clots come

when they want to.

let them think they have accepted

arrogance in the universe,

then bring them to gynecologists

not unlike themselves.

Read the news obituary here and more of Clifton's work here.

-- Elaine Woo

Photo: Lucille Clifton in 2000. Credit: Associated Press