Stealing Home consists of Sharon Hashimoto’s best short stories written over a forty-year period. Her language is so precise, so distilled, so beautiful, it reads like poetry. This debut short story collection explores the intergenerational trauma of Japanese American incarceration through the distances between family members.
While many will recognize Hashimoto’s work from her award winning books of poetry, The Crane Wife and More American, Hashimoto’s first love was writing fiction. In the 1970s, Hashimoto’s breakthrough success was a short story published in a magazine called, Echoes from Gold Mountain.
The following interview is from recent email exchanges where Hashimoto writes from her home in Tukwila where she resides with her husband, poet Michael Spence, and two cats.
International Examiner: You grew up in Seattle’s Japanese American community as a Sansei in the 60s. Stealing Home is grounded in a nostalgia for the Pacific Northwest that many of our Nisei knew well. How did that shape the world of your characters?
Sharon Hashimoto: There’s the old adage: write what you know. I’m 70 years old now. First memories and emotions are often the strongest. I believe that I was fortunate to get to know my maternal grandparents who we visited often near Collins Park and the Wonder Bread outlet. My father was devoted to family activities like mushroom hunting, clam digging, and fishing. His family was from Hawai’i, so there were many different stories. I grew up in south Seattle, so driving along Lake Washington Boulevard, shopping at the original Uwajimaya and Mutual Fish, as well as going to the bazaar at Nisei Vets for makizushi, are details that can be found in my stories.
IE: Can you talk about the intention of placing your Japanese American characters who experienced war, family separation, and incarceration inside more intimate moments of home?
SH: It took me a while to even put a name to the dissonance I felt when an elder spoke. There is so much meaning in so few words. My focus is on the small, hurtful, and often poetic moments.
The title story, “Stealing Home,” is about anger—something I am surely capable of but struggle with expressing. I was thinking about betrayals and small slights that we deal with on a daily basis within a fictional family. These are often things I’m sure the perpetrator isn’t even aware of. For me, the book title Stealing Home alludes to the evacuation and incarceration because under such circumstances, there was nothing to support what home meant.
IE: In one of your short stories, “Into Eclipse,” the college-aged character, Ryoko, leaves her family at the Heart Mountain Concentration camp to go to university where she decides to change her name to Christine. I heard parts of this story are based on your mother’s experience?
SH: “Into Eclipse” is based on the research I found about my mother’s two years at Simpson College. I’d heard bits—but didn’t know enough to ask questions. The character of Ryoko isn’t my mother, but someone I imagined to “fill in the gaps of history.”
After my grandparents and parents passed, I “inherited” the physical photo albums, my mother’s college yearbook, and my grandmother’s haiku she had printed from her senryu group. As life went on, I attended a Minidoka pilgrimage, and a student associated with the group did a quick translation of the haiku my grandmother had written.
IE: You write with a particularly striking and singular voice in Stealing Home of the Issei. What was the process of developing these characters?
SH: I have memories that aren’t precise—they have more of a kind of dream quality. And memories, of course, are selective. And there’s what I’ve been told, or heard about, or where I intuit a detail that may not be correct.
For my stories with Issei characters, I do a fair amount of research tracking some of this down. Interestingly enough, I find myself reading a lot of dissertations. I use Densho and Densho’s encyclopedia to find sources and to double-check my facts. The oral histories, photographs, and newspaper stories also give me a “feel” for that world.
IE: Fiction can fill in the gaps of history especially to make the lives of people who were invisible visible. What do you hope your poetry and fiction create for the future?
SH: Poetry and fiction, for me, have always been intertwined. I love the written word, and poetry offered me more tools to tell a story—figurative language, symbols, alliteration, assonance.
But where poetry is condensed, fiction allows me to expand on characters and conflict. Sometimes there’s an idea that begins as a poem—an insight, an honesty. I’ll realize that there’s much more to it.
Distance makes it easier to write; you have to make choices—what to tell and what not to tell. I want to write stories that I don’t think have been addressed in Japanese American literature. I want to write them for future generations.
Sharon Hashimoto will read excerpts from her new collection of short stories, Stealing Home, Saturday, September 28th, 2:00pm at the Tukwila Library.
