Many critics and readers consider Hisaye Yamamoto, an essayist, poet, and short story writer, one of the most gifted of the post-World War II female Nisei writers. (The term Nisei refers to the generation of Japanese born in the United States to parents who emigrated from Japan.) Yamamoto was born to immigrant Japanese farmers in Redondo Beach, California, in 1921. She began writing at the age of fourteen and was a voracious reader in both Anglo-American and Japanese subjects. She published her first literary piece at the age of twenty-seven.

After the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto, along with more than one hundred thousand other Japanese Americans, was interned to an inland camp. The federal government considered the Japanese-American population, as well as a smaller number of German Americans and Italian Americans, a security threat during World War II. Yamamoto spent the years between 1942 and 1945 in a...