Toshio Mori

This chapter analyzes the work that the writer Toshio Mori produced before, during, and after the war and argues that the incarceration derailed a promising literary career. Mori’s short story cycle, Yokohama, California, was to be published in 1942, but the war intervened. When it finally came out in 1949, postwar America was less welcoming of work by Japanese Americans. By comparing the original version of Yokohama, California, the final version published in 1949 that contained two additional stories about the war, and the fiction Mori produced in camp and published in TREK, the chapter traces the progress and setbacks of Mori’s literary career. It also considers why and how Mori’s literary reputation was revived in the context of the movement toward redress and reparation in the 1970s.