Between their iconic black-and-white-and-orange covers, the Penguin Classics line offers canonical texts by internationally recognized masters of literature like Pablo Neruda, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Shirley Jackson. The Classics line has democratized quality literature for over 75 years, putting affordable paperback editions of the most important stories in human history in the hands of millions of readers.
In addition to celebrating the best writers in history, Penguin Classics also publishes anthologies contextualizing important historical periods for a modern audience through titles like “The Portable Nineteenth-Century African-American Women Writers” and “The Women‘s Suffrage Movement.” A new Penguin Classics release, “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration,” will undoubtedly serve as a seminal text for generations of students learning about the United States government’s incarceration of 125,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
Smith College’s Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, Floyd Cheung, who coedited the volume, admits “that responsibility makes me a little nervous.” Cheung first pitched the anthology as a distillation of a class surveying the literature of Japanese American incarceration he taught as an English and American Studies professor at Smith. But he soon realized he needed a partner, so he asked Seattle writer and historian Frank Abe to join him on the project.
Abe has devoted more than four decades to collecting and sharing stories from the incarceration. He’s directed documentaries, written graphic novels and championed literature documenting the experience of Japanese American citizens who were incarcerated during the war.
Over the course of seven years, the two men worked on the book that would become “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration.” “Working with Frank turned the project into something much grander, and I think more significant,” Cheung says.
Over the last few decades, thanks in part to Abe’s efforts, books like “Farewell to Manzanar” by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Cynthia Kadohata’s “Weedflower” and John Okada’s “No-No Boy” have told the story of incarceration to younger generations. With that large and growing body of work available to them, “the temptation when we started out was to do a greatest-hits version of camp literature,” Abe says.
“But what I thought was needed were pieces that were more unseen,” he says. “And over the last 45 years, I’ve been collecting a lot of bits and pieces of writing” by people whose lives were directly affected by the forced incarceration “that have always, for one reason or another, stuck with me.”
The 68 selections in the finished book, written by 65 authors (including 14 from Seattle, Abe notes) range from poetry to newspaper columns to official government paperwork. Also included is a personal cry for help written by a housewife to Eleanor Roosevelt begging for the release of her husband, a Seattle shoe store owner: “I appeal to you to send back the father of these American citizens and my honest husband as soon as possible. If you do this, I shall not trouble you again,” she writes.
The chorus of voices blend into a narrative. The selections are arranged in rough chronological order, beginning before the incarceration. “We wanted a section set before camp to give people a sense of what Japanese American community and life was like before,” Cheung says. Those pieces, an account by Toshio Mori of a joyous summer baseball game between the Alameda Taiiku and the San Jose Asahi, and a newspaper column by Ayako Ishigaki explaining the fear of immigrant parents that their children “cannot understand the Japanese customs which their parents cherish,” could be the story of any immigrant family struggling to adjust to life in America.
That universal American experience makes the forced incarceration that follows even more horrifying. “Here’s the truth: I am now called a non-alien, stripped of my constitutional rights,” writes Kiyo Sato. “I am a prisoner in a concentration camp in my own country. I sleep on a canvas cot under which is a suitcase with my life’s belongings: a change of clothes, underwear, a notebook, and pencil.”
While some of the pieces in the book are sad and resigned, others are angry and defiant. Abe highlights poetry by Joseph Kurihara that laments two young men who were killed in an uprising at Camp Manzanar — a revolt that many historians believe Kurihara helped incite: “However bleak and forlorn be their resting place/The glorious sun forever shines on their graves,” Kurihara wrote. Those poems, Abe explains, “are not polished, but they’re raw and they’re true to as an expression of the anger that many people had felt at the time.”
Much of the anthology is seeing the light of day for the first time, and deeper meanings of the works are still being uncovered today. Some of the texts were only recently translated from the original Japanese. And during the course of assembling the book, Abe says that an expert realized a poem in the anthology, “Song of Cheyenne” by Eddie Yanagisako and Kenroku Sumida, was actually a specific kind of folk song called a “holehole bushi,” which was sung by Japanese immigrants who worked on Hawaiian sugar plantations. Abe explains that what he originally thought was a written scrap of verse turned out to be the lyrics of “a jailhouse song written to confound their guards, who didn’t understand what they were singing, and to keep their morale high.” Using that traditional melody, “Song of Cheyenne” is performed as a song on the audiobook edition of the anthology.
Cheung believes the book will “add way more nuance to the way I teach. And I think my students will have a much more solid understanding of the diversity of viewpoints that Japanese Americans had” during and after the incarceration. He hopes the book’s inclusion in the Penguin Classics line will highlight the book’s importance as “an entry point” into the wider canon of incarceration literature.
And for Abe, the book represents a new sort of freedom. “I have hauled boxes of these files and these books from house to house in Seattle for the last 45 years, over the objections of my spouse, who says I’m hoarding this stuff,” he laughs. “But I can finally let go of it now, because they’ve found their place in this anthology.”
