Yamamoto’s is a story of a Japanese-American woman who, after returning to California from a concentration camp in Arkansas (sometime earlier), rides a bus along fast, wide Wilshire Boulevard to a hospital at soldiers’ home to see her husband, Buro (usually, twice a week). They were married less than a year when a three-month convalescence became necessary, due to a back injury he suffered in the war.

During this ride, the handsome, red-faced man (“a somatotonic,” [1438] as Esther refers to him) appears to Esther as having been drinking. She first listens with interest to the man’s diatribe, but then feels the tenseness in an elderly Chinese woman’s body, seated next to her, as the man shoots toward her defensive, oppressive statements about Chinese people. Esther

turns away, gazes out the window and feels detached (wondering if, since she is Japanese, she will be excluded from his cruelty). But, soon she realizes she is “gloating over the fact the drunken man had specified the Chinese as the unwanted” (1439). She is shocked by her feelings and remembers once (in great detail) seeing an elderly Korean man wearing a button proclaiming his Korean heritage. “Heat suddenly rising to her throat, she had felt angry, then desolate and betrayed.” “Wryly, she wished for an I AM JAPANESE button, just to be able to call the man’s attention to it, ‘Look at me’” (1440)?

Then, while she was walking towards Buro’s hospital very quickly, there arose in her mind some words she once read and let stick in her craw: People say, do not regard what he says, now he is in liquor. Perhaps it is the only time he ought to be regarded. These words repeated themselves until her saving detachment was gone every bit and she was filled once again in her life with the infuriatingly helpless, insidiously sickening sensation of there being in the world nothing solid she could put her finger on, nothing solid she could come to grips with, nothing solid she could sink her teeth into, nothing solid. (1440)

This paralyzing fear later causes her to sob uncontrollably and present a false front to her husband.

It is fear that drives Esther Kuroiwa to the point of committing, as Yamamoto calls it, a “grave sin of omission” (1438). She distances herself from the hostility she is forced to endure, only to fi

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