“American Fish” was initially written as a scene in a play. I was taking a playwriting class from Ed Bullins, African-American playwright, and we were assigned to write one scene per week. I wrote it in 1985, so I honestly can’t say that I remember what inspired the scene. I thought it would be very funny to show the contrast between what the women were saying and what they were thinking. Japanese are so polite, and so indirect. I had this vision of a terribly polite Japanese-American woman getting herself into an embarrassing predicament because she is unable to ask a direct question.
Then, of course, the whole routine that people go through when they’re trying to remember where they know someone from seemed like a wonderful mechanism for revealing the outlines of the two characters’ past lives. I wanted that central irony of the two women being so different, yet having so much in common simply because they’re both Japanese-American.
When I took a fiction workshop with Molly Giles in 1986, I realized that I wasn’t going to finish a story I was working on in time to meet a deadline, so I turned “American Fish” into a story. At first, I had a huge didactic bog in the middle, where I got into relating background information about the loyalty questionnaire in the internment camps. I realized that it was all wrong, so I cut it. I had to work all the historical implications into the undertones in the dialogue.
The characters themselves, Mrs. Nakamura and Mrs. Hayashi, are completely fictional. Yet I know many Nisei ladies like them. And the experiences of the two women during the war were experiences that most Nisei can identify with.
After writing the story, I was in Japantown with my mom and aunt when they ran into an acquaintance in the Japanese grocery store. As I observed the carefully choreographed exchange, it began to feel very familiar to me, as if I had scripted it myself. I think one reason people have liked the story so much is that it is funny, and humor can be very liberating.
Originally published in Italian in Omero, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1995).
“My place”: © R. A. Sasaki
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