Author: Toshio Mori

Publisher: Modern Times Publishing

Published: 2022-05-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781632923578

The Chauvinist and Other Stories features twenty-two stories of Japanese-American life, ranging in settings from pre-WWII era California, to wartime internment camps, to the postwar Nisei experience. As an Asian Times reviewer notes when The Chauvinist first appeared, Mori "cannot fail to reach [his readers] because he is an honest man, speaking from his own experience, his own suffering and happiness, his own real and human life." The writer Hisaye Yamamoto, in the original introduction to this collection, declared Mori "indisputably the pioneer of Japanese American literature." The collection's republication in this volume marks the first time these stories are widely available in over forty years. About the author: Toshio Mori (1910 - 1980) was born in Oakland and spent most of his life in San Leandro, California, where his family owned a nursery. He began writing in 1932, working at night after a day in the nursery, and was encouraged by William Saroyan, who became a lifelong friend. Mori's first book, Yokohama, California, was scheduled to appear in 1941, but the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the ensuing anti-Japanese racism, put the book's publication on hold. Like most Japanese-Americans, Mori's family was forcefully relocated to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah, where worked as the camp historian. At the end of World War II, Mori returned to run his family nursery. His book, released in 1949, made him the first published Japanese-American author of literary fiction. Despite critical acclaim, Mori fell into relative obscurity until the early 1970's, when a new generation of Sansei-third generation Japanese-American students-discovered his writing, leading to the publication of two new books, Woman from Hiroshima and The Chauvinist and Other Stories. His third collection, Unfinished Message, was published posthumously in 2000.