On The Music Lessons by Wakako Yamauchi

Essay by Michi Barall

I was first introduced to Wakako Yamauchi’s work as an undergraduate, in a course bearing the 1990s-era title, “Ethnic Drama.” I remember my surprise: a Japanese American female playwright! Her vivid, poignant plays spoke directly to me as a nisei (second generation Japanese) woman, and drew me closer to the tumult and promise of Japanese American history and identity.

Yamauchi’s short stories and plays chronicle the lives of the first wave of issei (first generation) immigrants who arrived in California in the early 1900s as migrant laborers, wresting fertile soil from marginal, rocky land, patiently tending intensive crops like melons and tomatoes. Together with their “picture brides”—women who set sail based on no more than a photograph of their future husbands—these early pioneers reclaimed the desert, building farms against impossible odds: unrelenting weather conditions, legal restrictions against land owning, the Great Depression. 

Yamauchi’s short story In Heaven and Earth (on which the play The Music Lessons is based) features a mysterious stranger who arrives at one such farm in the Imperial Valley in 1935. The farm is run by an issei widow with three teenage children, two older boys and a daughter, Akiko, who is in the early throes of adolescence. The mysterious stranger, Kaoru, arrives looking for work, but he’s unconvincing as a prospective farmhand. Tall and handsome, he has delicate, city hands, carrying with him a violin and a checkered past. The widow grudgingly takes him in on deferred pay: she needs the help and they are both, after all, strangers from an increasingly distant shore. Kaoru charms the kids, helps with math homework, brings home small but prized gifts, tentatively fills in for their absent father. Late one night, he plays his violin and the sound unspools a restless desire in Akiko. She sits outside his door, in defiance of the cold, listening to him play. He eventually offers her music lessons, and she makes screechy, half-hearted progress. Her eye is on Kaoru: she imagines he is everything she wants: culture, communion, and most of all, change.

During a lesson, she takes a risk, makes a move, and he, shabby, half-drunk and abject, responds. The widow quickly deciphers the meaning of the too-extended silence during the lesson, and (spoiler!) exposes the pair before anything too untoward can happen. But the incident throws mother and daughter into open conflict, laying bare their unfulfilled expectations and resentments.

Although the story is told in a rising pitch that culminates in near-melodrama, the language is itself understated, pristine without being fussy. Yamauchi is a master of the short form—subtle shifts from third person to first person unearth multiple perspectives and emotional registers. The story as a whole is underwritten by a kind of indeterminacy of time, place and character. “There’s more to life than you can possibly imagine, Akiko,” Kaoru says. He completes the reference to Hamlet’s line to Horatio in his head, “in heaven and earth.” It’s useful to remember Shakespeare’s lead-in to this line, “and therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” We must, Yamauchi affirms, make space for what’s unknown, for uncertainty, for all the ways in which life exceeds our understanding.

Yamauchi smoothly transfers this quality of indeterminacy—as well as the bleak loneliness (and loveliness) of her characters—to her stage adaptation. Her instinct for playwrighting is both sensitive and sharp. Although the narrative arc remains roughly the same, in The Music Lessons, Yamauchi sharpens the characters’ contexts and contours, setting them on a swift, inexorable dramatic clock. In the play, Kaoru is more of a cad—we understand from the outset that he is unworthy of the family’s trust, let alone Aki’s romantic desire. There’s a tonal (and theatrical) shift in the play as well, in favor of greater humor and irony. Yamauchi also adds more social and overtly political commentary. Through the mostly benign presence of a white teenage neighbor, Billy – a friend of the kids—she also underscores what the Sakatas lack: financial and social currency, a true sense of belonging. Significantly, Yamauchi brings the character of the widow out of the wings and onto center stage. Chizuko is only 38, but looks and feels much older. Dressed in the clothes of her dead husband, she seems, at least at the top of the play, to have accepted her role as the family’s provider. But Yamauchi dramatizes the depths of her unease, the ways in which she contests the terms of her erasure as a woman. When Aki accuses her of not loving her husband, Chizuko reminds her of what it meant to be a picture bride: “How could I love him,” she protests, “I didn’t know him.” And yet, throughout the play, she emerges as a voice of passion: protective, defiant, haunted, resilient, flawed but loving. Believe me when I say that we rarely accord middle-aged Asian American women this kind of representation onstage (although perhaps Michelle Yeoh is about to introduce us to yet more multiverses in which middle aged Asian American women play starring roles!).

On the surface, the play feels somewhat Chekhovian (in the manner of his short plays), but the form is innovative, its structure closer to the jo ha kyu (beginning, break, rapid rush to the end) of the Noh theatre. The play ends with a kind of uneasy sense of closure—each character is part of an ecology of restlessness. Things are better this way, Chizuko effectively tells Aki, after Kaoru is paid out and moves on, but of course, as readers/spectators, we know what’s coming for them for all of them. The second war will soon be on the horizon. Whatever stability they have earned will be upended when Japan goes to war against the US and all Japanese Americans are deemed, in effect, enemy combatants and sent to internment camps. The issei will lose their farms – even the ones bought in the names of citizen children.

Yamauchi and her family were, in fact, rounded up and interned in the Poston Relocation Centre in Arizona, the largest of the ten internment camps, built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation (despite the objections of the Tribal Council), when she was a teenager. Then, as now, our political status as “provisional” Americans was shaped by US foreign relations. Then, as now, Japanese Americans were seen as part of “a race so different,” they were assumed incapable of assimilation or allegiance.

Much is made of the fatalism of Japanese Americans in the face of internment, of the principle of shikata ga nai: there is nothing to be done. When the war ended, Japanese Americans were lauded for their willingness to cooperate, their forbearance. This story elides the suffering of the issei in particular, their profound confusion and grief: all their sacrifices for naught. This story also tries to tone down the rightful anger and activism that led in part to the inception of “Asian America.” Asian America is a political term that emerged in the 70s, one forged in the crucible of 20^th century US immigration and foreign policy. Early Asian American artists and activists wrote our histories so that we would no longer be strangers to ourselves.

Yamauchi and the other Asian American writers/dramatists in this series were among the most important pioneers of the Asian American movement. They gave us language so that we might speak. They worked collectively, editing together anthologies so that their stories could speak across and unite communities together. They staged sit ins and protests, making a full-throated case for Asian American studies, so that by the time I was sitting in class in the early 90s, they had made it possible for me to read Yamauchi’s play as part of my education – they made it possible for me to understand the sweep of my own history, and to imagine, even in spite of this history, a world in which I might be seen.  

We are separated by almost half a century, but in so many ways, Yamauchi and I are connected, to use the title of the anthology that first introduced me to her work, by an “Unbroken Thread”.  

Today, I write plays, and I teach Asian American theatre and performance. My Asian American students come to class, much as I did, with little sense of literary or political legacy. They know, for the most part, about the exclusion acts, the internment, the bans. Many of them know, first-hand, what it feels like to walk down the street in fear. They, too, need to know where they come from, to know they come from a line of storytellers who have shaped not only how we understand the past, but how we might imagine a different kind of future. Yamauchi’s work remains relevant today, not only because she was a pioneer, but because her work reminds us of the ways we can and must continue to write ourselves into community, into being.

Set in California’s Imperial Valley in the year 1935, The Music Lessons encounters Chizuko Sakata, a widowed mother of three, struggling to raise her children and make ends meet. When Chizuko hires Kaoru Kawaguchi, a young itinerant worker, to help her on the farm, his presence disrupts the family’s stasis and sparks Chizuko’s and her daughter Aki’s dreams of a better life. Wakako Yamauchi’s play transforms the people and places from her own childhood into a compelling family drama following first generation Japanese immigrants in California.

The Music Lessons was originally written as a short story entitled “In Heaven and Earth,” and was adapted into a play in 1977. It premiered at The Public Theatre in 1980 and was subsequently produced by East West Players in 1985.

To read the play: Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women edited by Roberta Uno