The Japanese Journal of American Sturdies, No. 11 (2000)(Self) Indulgent Listening: Reading Cultural
Difference in Yokohama, California
Gayle K. SATOI INTRODUCTION: REPOSITIONING THE READER
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which played aninﬂuential role in the development of American literary modernism, provided the model for Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California (1949), a shortstory cycle by a nisei who grew up in one of the many west coast JapaneseAmerican communities that were destroyed during World War II. Mori’s
work offers a unique, profound, and ultimately critical response toAnderson’s classic, but remains little known outside the ﬁeld of Asian
American studies. Like much “minority” writing, Yokohama, California
raises questions about the criteria governing circulation, analysis, andevaluation of literary works, but its critique is not obvious. Indeed, overt
narratological and thematic similarities between the two books, coupledwith Mori’s acknowledgment of Anderson’s inﬂuence during his formative period, support readings of Yokohama, California from within
the paradigms of self and community that inform Winesburg, Ohio.
However, Mori’s representation of community cannot be fully understood without moving outside the cultural frameworks in which
Winesburg, Ohio has been conceived and read. This relocation of critical perspective opens up an analysis of what “Yokohama” signiﬁes thatis not represented by “Winesburg.”1
Copyright © 2000 Gayle K. Sato. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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Both writers depict intersubjective relationships through episodes oflistening, but Anderson emphasizes alienation while Mori represents listening as a form of enabling dependency. I will argue that this contrast
reﬂects different cultural assumptions about the nature of self and others, differences that can be articulated by reading Mori’s narrative
through a Japanese social practice and discourse of dependency called
amae. Such a strategy enables a fuller analysis of Mori’s pioneering workand a different perspective on Winesburg, Ohio. A reading of both texts
as narratives of (self )indulgent listening repositions readers outside theframeworks in which Winesburg, Ohio as well as Yokohama California
have been commonly understood and evaluated.2
II

AMAE, “YOKOHAMA,” INDULGENT LISTENING: “THE WOMAN WHO
MAKES SWELL DOUGHNUTS”

My understanding of amae is based on Takeo Doi’s Amae no Kozo
(1971), translated into English by John Bester under the title The
Anatomy of Dependence (1973)3. Doi asserts that (self)indulgent dependency is a deﬁning feature of Japanese culture, and his discussion of thisconcept and social practice provides a way into a critical reading ofAnderson’s inﬂuence on Mori.
A person seeking amae wants to be passively loved in order to avoid
the necessity of negotiating for the satisfaction of desires, the prototypical case being a newborn infant who is normally indulged as a matterof course. Adult seekers of amae likewise want or expect those depended upon to understand and minister to their speciﬁc needs even in theabsence of explicit requests. Further, the seeking and providing of amae
is distinguished in the Japanese language by the intransitive and transitive verbs amaeru and amayakasu, respectively. For example, children
seeking reassurance or comfort amaeru towards others; caregivers
amayakasu when responding appropriately. In Mori’s ﬁctional world,
the practice of amaeru and amayakasu is as diverse and pervasive as it
is in the Japan described by Doi. Memorable examples of tolerant indulgence in Yokohama include the ﬂower shop owner who puts up with ayoung clerk’s idealism, the nurseryman who allows a little boy to waste
marketable ﬂowers in an educational experiment, and the attentive
patient in a dentist’s chair who gives new meaning to the phrase “captive audience.”
Doi’s interest in amae grew out of his experience of cultural disloca-

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tion in the United States, where he had gone to study psychiatry. Even
after accounting for culture shock, homesickness, and second-language
difﬁculties, he felt a persistent “awkwardness arising from the difference
between [his] ways of thinking and feeling and those of [his] hosts” (11).
Eventually Doi realized that whereas amae existed in Japan as an “everyday word for passive love” (21), it was not likewise named and therefore not accorded a similar status and function in American culture, andhe came to feel that Americans put too much value on self-reliance.
Recalling, for instance, his discomfort at being continuously required toassert and specify his preferences whenever he was invited to dinner at
an American’s home, Doi observed that a Japanese host frequently
assumes all responsibility for what, how, and when to serve a guest.
While acknowledging that placing responsibility on a guest could beunderstood as a form of American politeness, Doi nonetheless felt thatsuch “deference” was really a form of self-assertion: “What a lot of trivial choices they were obliging one to make . . . almost as though they
were doing it to reassure themselves of their own freedom” (12). Similarly, he observed that a host’s “please help yourself” serves notice that“nobody else will help you” (13), whereas a practice of taking all decisions out of the guest’s hands can be construed positively as showing“sensitivity in detecting what [is] required” (13). Doi also observed thatthe norm of self-reliance seemed to shape American psychoanalytic
practice, accounting for what he felt was the remarkable insensitivity ofAmerican doctors to “the feelings of helplessness of their patients” (21).
The American psychiatrists he observed appeared to be generally unaware of or perhaps intentionally ignoring a concealed need for amae“that lay in the deepest parts of the patient’s mind” (21). Thus, while
agreeing that therapy’s goal is to produce a functionally independent self,
Doi implied that reaching this desired end required detecting andindulging a patient’s inexpressible desire for attachment.
Amae facilitates an analysis of listener–speaker interactions from thepoint of view of comforting and being comforted. In Yokohama, California, the “therapeutic” function of amae relationships within normalsocial situations is fully deﬁned in a story called “The Woman Who
Makes Swell Doughnuts,” which provides a paradigm of “indulgent listening.”4The story describes the narrator’s typical visit to Mama’s house, where
host and guest make small talk about the weather and grandchildren or
just enjoy the silence and homemade doughnuts. The event being nar-

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rated is at once thoroughly unremarkable yet extraordinarily signiﬁcant.
The narrator experiences an almost mystical rejuvenation—
When I sit with her I do not need to ask deep questions, I do not need to know
Plato or The Sacred Books of the East or dancing. I do not need to be on
guard. But I am on guard and foot–loose because the room is alive—5

which is simultaneously demystiﬁed and embedded in material reality—[H]er little room, her little circle, is a depot, a pause for the weary traveler,but outside, outside of her little world there is dissonance, hugeness of another kind, and the travel to do. So she has her little house, she bakes the grandest doughnuts, and inside of her she houses a little depot. (25)The heart of this story is one particular woman’s attentive, enabling
receptivity to one particular guest. It is a kind of sustenance that usually takes totally unremarkable forms, but that is nonetheless supremely
important to our day-to-day well being. The providing, receiving, andsavoring of such sustenance are symbolically encapsulated in the doughnuts, while the narrator of this story, as I will argue later, circulates
throughout Yokohama providing the same kind of sustenance to others
through sympathetic listening.
If “Swell Doughnuts” can correctly be read as a paradigm of indulgent listening, what this paradigm emphasizes is the embodied, intersubjective relationship without which indulgent listening cannot exist:
Instead I take today to talk of her and her wonderful doughnuts when theearth is something to her, when the people from all parts of the earth may
drop in and taste the ﬂavor, her ﬂavor, which is everyone’s and all ﬂavor;
talk to her, sit with her, and also taste the silence of her room and the silence
that is herself; and ﬁnally go away to hope and keep alive what is alive in
her, on earth and in men, expressly myself. (25)

By asserting that Mama’s “ﬂavor” is “everyone’s and all ﬂavor,” Moriappears to celebrate the woman’s universality, but the semantic ﬂow of
this one–sentence conclusion to the story underscores a connection
between two particular individuals. Not only is “her” repeated ninetimes, but a repeated reference to the entire global population and theearth itself comes to rest in the one particular guest who is actually present. Further, readers familiar with Asian American history will havealready situated the story on Seventh Street in Oakland, California in theyears prior to World War II. Thus the real focus of the passage is an
exchange between two particular individuals who are speciﬁed and sit-

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uated on many levels: geographically, historically, racially, culturally,and by age and gender. The phrase “everyone’s and all ﬂavor” thus signiﬁes not “universality” but all of the embodied particularities of every
and any individual’s life. The passage implies that a person’s particular“ﬂavor,” or subjectivity, cannot be apprehended except through concrete
acts of embodied, intersubjective communication. There is no substitutefor face–to–face conversation.6
III YOKOHAMA: CIRCUIT OF COMMUNICATIONThe kind of close encounter that comprises the entire narrative of“Swell Doughnuts” recurs throughout Yokohama, California. Nearly
every story is, like “Swell Doughnuts,” a close–up of one particular indulgent relationship between two people, often the narrator and one of
his acquaintances. Technically, it is possible that each story is told by adifferent narrator, but because all of these possible narrators exist solely through function (witnesses to acts of indulgence who narrate theseacts for the reader) and are never named, described, or identiﬁed in otherways (such as changes in rhetorical style or voice), we can speak of asingle “typical” narrator without invalidating the all–important fact ofeach narrator’s embodied particularity. This “typical” narrator, whom I
call “Mori’s narrator,” embodies the creation and maintenance of a circuit of communication that simultaneously anchors individual characters to the community while creating for the reader a sense of Yokohama
as a communal entity. Mori’s narrator is both a character and the author’s
device; he interacts with characters while revealing, explaining, andjudging them for the reader.
Indulgence appears in every story in Yokohama, California, but is perfectly enacted only in the ﬁrst story, “Swell Doughnuts.”7 This is because
the recipient of indulgence in “Swell Doughnuts” is Mori’s narrator, whonormally plays the role of listener or dispenser of indulgence. This storyis the only instance where the reader of Yokohama, California hears an“expert’s” report on indulgent behavior while seeing it performed.
However, although the narrator’s perfect (self)indulgent relationshipwith Mama is only imperfectly replicated in other stories, these imperfect acts of (self)indulgence nonetheless comprise a therapeutic circuitof communication. When the narrator receives guests at his house or visits them at their homes, workplaces, or other settings, the circuit of communication he thus literally constructs is one that absorbs stress, pro-

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vides reassurance, and ministers in various other ways to the emotional
needs of Yokohama’s inhabitants. They, in turn, having been enabled toexpress their needs before a receptive audience, achieve some measureof the rejuvenation experienced by the narrator at Mama’s house. Thus,
the narrator’s strange “prediction” about Mama’s immortality makes
sense—“I think she will grow, and her hot doughnuts just out of the oilwill grow with softness and touch” (25)—since he is conﬁrming the valueof a social practice and its perpetuation through his own indulgent listening.
I turn now to “The Eggs of the World” to show how the paradigm ofindulgent listening is actually played out in the ﬁctional world of
Yokohama. The indulgence-seeker featured in this story is Sessue Matoi,
an unemployed alcoholic who believes he has broken the “shell” of social
conformity and is no longer trapped in life as a stagnating “egg.” He is
Mama’s antipode, portrayed as an uninvited guest rather than rooted in
his own dwelling. Matoi’s need for fellowship can somehow only be
expressed through provocation, and when his persistent talk about rotting eggs creates tension, Hasegawa, his host, tries to change the subject
by producing an especially ﬁne sake and asking for Matoi’s assessment.
But instead of the expected compliment, Matoi answers with a riddle:“All brands are the same to me, all ﬂavors match my ﬂavor. When I drink
I am drinking my ﬂavor” (118). Hasegawa presses Matoi again for an
opinion but the answer is the same: “When you wish to taste the ﬂavor
of sake which I drank then you must drink the ﬂavor which I have been
spouting all evening” (120). Once again, Hasegawa cannot respond as
Matoi desires. Since Hasegawa is preoccupied with being a proper hostand thus with his own expression of self, he is not attuned to Matoi’s
emotional needs or the loneliness that brought him to the house as an
uninvited guest.
When hints and riddles prove ineffective, Matoi ﬁnally pleads his casedirectly in a last ditch effort to win indulgence:“I cannot go a day without drinking because when I drink I am really goingoutward, not exactly drinking but expressing myself outwardly, talking verymuch and saying little, sadly and pathetically. . . . Think of me as the mess I
am. I am a mess. Then laugh very hard, keep laughing very hard. Say, ohwhat an egg he has opened up! Look at the shells, look at the drunk without
a bottle.” (119)Even after this outburst, however, Hasegawa cannot risk abandoning the

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safety of politeness. He therefore withholds what Matoi truly seeks: afﬁrmation and acceptance of his actual, messy existence.
Yet this is not a story of failed hospitality. Hasegawa keeps his uninvited guest supplied with liquor although it is common knowledge thathe “did not tolerate drinking bouts” (113). He absorbs Matoi’s provocation despite being unable to enjoy or explain it. Thus, however ﬂawed
Hasegawa’s listening is from Matoi’s point of view, it nonetheless enables Matoi to be part of a community he both repudiates and needs. Intelligent, humorous, and hungry for company, Matoi is at the same timeemotionally weak and alienated from people by his critical perceptionof their social posturing. Yet however repellent Matoi’s manner of socializing, at least one person in Yokohama indulges him.
IV WINESBURG: COMMUNICATION SHORT–CIRCUITED
Matoi’s counterparts in Winesburg cannot presume emotional dependence on others. Indulgent listening is unavailable to them. Anderson’s
unifying signiﬁcation of the self’s relationship to community is not a
woman who makes swell doughnuts but a “grotesque,” a condition of
psychological deformity that represents the wasting and distortion ofhuman lives through the obstruction of a need for emotional, spiritual,and creative expression. In Winesburg, deterioration into grotesquenessalways revolves around a failure to speak to and be heard by other people.
Criticism of Winesburg, Ohio offers various explanations for the transformation of normality into grotesqueness. Thomas Yingling, for example, situates the narrative in the rise of industrial capitalism and its concomitant destruction of “an oral culture of proximity” in pre-industrial
communities like Winesburg.8 Acute forms of loneliness and alienationin Winesburg therefore manifest the breaking down of a more intimatesocial order that existed before the rise of modern urban and suburban
landscapes, where isolation becomes a normal rather than “grotesque”
social condition. Feminist readings, like Sally Adair Rigsbee’s, interpret“grotesqueness” as a product of gendered social identities. Drawing upon
Jean Baker Miller’s Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976),
Rigsbee argues that Winesburg, Ohio endeavors to recuperate and valorize “qualities associated with the feminine—vulnerability, tenderness,and the need for intimacy.”9 Cultural explanations, like John Updike’s,view the sexual and psychological repression of Winesburg as a legacy

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of Protestant culture. Summarizing the grotesque as a “bundle of stalled
impulses and frozen grievances,” Updike situates Winesburg among the“Protestant villages of America,” where “[t]here is something perilous
and maddening in the accommodations such communities extend tohuman aspiration and appetite.”10 Each of these explanations is indispensable to a full understanding of Winesburg, Ohio, but all of them arelimited by the cultural boundaries of the text. Whether it is capitalism,
gender, or culture that the critic uses to interpret Winesburg, Ohio, whitemainstream culture remains the assumed framework within which explanations are sought. Re-reading Winesburg, Ohio through Yokohama,
California involves a relocation of critical perspective to a point outsideof white hegemonic frameworks. Thus, rather than explaining “grotesqueness” within western paradigms, I use the practice and theory ofJapanese amae to link what is depicted in “Yokohama” to what is unrepresented in “Winesburg.”
The absence of indulgent listening in Winesburg is marked by the presence of grotesque speaking. Wing Biddlebaum, Wash Williams, Enoch
Robinson, and Joe Welling either erupt into terriﬁed, terrifying speech
only once or are taken for crazy babblers. Those who talk for a living—
Kate Swift the teacher and the Reverend Curtis Hartman—ﬁnd that theirvery vocations entrap them in a sense of alienation. The sole case oflistening that seems to promise therapeutic results—when Elizabeth
Willard reveals her anguish to Doctor Reefy—ends prematurely out of
the couple’s mutual terror of being overheard and exposed as lovers.
The relationship between the presence or absence of indulgent listening, and whether speaking becomes therapeutic or dysfunctional, becomes clear when certain pairs of stories are cross–examined. Let me
begin with Mori’s “The Seventh Street Philosopher” and Anderson’s“The Philosopher.”
Anderson’s story concerns the shabby Doctor Parcival who is obsessed with talking to George Willard about his past. He tries to createa personal history to replace the disappointing life he actually lives, but
his fragmented stories contain nothing remarkable and in fact only serve
to reveal the poverty of a childhood that continues to limit his imagination of a better life. George feels hounded by the needy Doctor, whose
exaggerated sense of victimization leads him to compare his life to
Christ’s cruciﬁxion. The story ends with Doctor Parcival still in pursuitof a listener, but neither George nor the narrator responds to his ﬁnal
plea—“You must pay attention to me.”11 By terminating abruptly with

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these words, the story suggests that Doctor Parcival’s desire for indulgent listening will not, cannot, or should not be satisﬁed.
Yokohama’s “philosopher” is a bachelor launderer who lives on thefringes of town, venturing in whenever the urge to speak his mind takes
hold. Lacking Matoi’s sharp tongue, Tsunoda is easily ignored and ridiculed by most people, but he is often accommodated at the narrator’shome until the wee hours of the morning. In the most dramatic performance of his life, Tsunoda lectures to an audience of nine adults and twobabies in nothing less than the town hall. Tsunoda’s passionate and utterly incoherent speech is understood by the narrator as a form of “broadcasting to the world in general the apology of being alive” (28), which
in fact is what every grotesque in Winesburg aspires and fails to do
because receptive listeners in the ﬂesh are hard to ﬁnd. Winesburg’s
grotesques are fully heard and understood only by the omniscient narrator, but in Yokohama the one who fully perceives someone’s plight isalso the one who receives his or her story in person.
Anderson’s “Loneliness” and Mori’s “Akira Yano” comprise another pair of stories centered on the absence or presence of indulgent listening. Anderson’s story concerns a failed artist, Enoch Robinson, who
is moved for the ﬁrst and only time in his life to try to explain the events
that led to his self–destruction as a painter. When Enoch is overcome byanguish midway and seems unable to continue telling the story, Georgechanges from a self–effacing, gentle listener to an aggressive, demanding information–seeker, pushing the agonized man to continue and leaving abruptly without a word of comfort or parting as soon as the story
ends.
In Mori’s “Akira Yano,” the narrator initiates a relationship with Akira
Yano when he notices the latter reading a copy of Winesburg, Ohio. This
allusion creates a link between Mori’s narrator and Mori himself, andthe resulting suggestion that the narrator is a writer or understands theambitions of a writer underscores the importance of his conscious decision to play the role of reader and listener only to another aspiring artist:“Each time we met it was the same. He would talk about prose. And I
would sit and listen to everything he said and knew about prose” (66).
The narrator is a committed listener even though he knows Yano’s writing is awful, and in contrast to George’s abandonment of Enoch, remains
indulgent even beyond the conclusion of both the relationship and thestory: “Perhaps I will hear from him again real soon. I don’t know.
Anyway, it is several years since he wrote to me about having signed up

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with a major book publishing company in New York” (70). Akira Yano
may eventually have suffered the same degree of isolation as Enoch
Robinson, but if so it happens beyond the borders of his hometown andoutside the framework of available indulgent listening. The narrator’s
ﬁnal gesture—wondering whether he will hear again from Yano, andthus keeping the lines of communication open—embodies the antithesisof the “short circuit” in Winesburg.
V“TOSHIO MORI” AND “LIL’ YOKOHAMA”: SELF, COMMUNITY, AND
THE ART OF INDULGENCE

George Willard and Mori’s narrator are the primary listeners in
Winesburg and Yokohama, respectively, and in both cases their listening behaviors are connected to artistic ambition. In this ﬁnal section, I
examine the implications of indulgent listening for the practice of art andthe relationship between artist and community.
Theoretically, George’s episodes of listening may be understood as anapprenticeship in amayakasu, a learning how to indulge another’s speaking and through such accommodation developing the sensibilities thatwill ground artistic production. But at the same time, George’s very
desire to be a writer, or a speaker himself, interferes with his ability touse episodes of listening for the cultivation of indulgence. As illustrated by his interactions with Doctor Parcival and Enoch Robinson,
George’s interest in people as future subjects of his writing seems to prevent him from being able to focus on their present existence as needy
speakers. This aspect of George’s behavior is more pronounced in thebook’s concluding stories, which afﬁrm his ambition to become a writerand the necessity of separating from others to make that ambition a reality.
In the last two stories, George ﬁnally reaches an understanding with
Helen, the banker’s daughter, whose acceptance of George as her sweetheart serves to bless his departure from Winesburg. In addition, shortly
before George’s climactic meeting with Helen, his only enduring tie toWinesburg is broken by the death of his mother. The last image in thebook is of George in the train, remembering to glance out the window
only after Winesburg is no longer visible. In other words, the afﬁrmation of George’s artistic ambitions through a representation of connectedness to the two most important individuals in his life at the same timerequires George to disconnect himself not only from them but his entire

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community. The association of separation with artistic endeavor characterizes George and Helen’s rendezvous, the climactic moment ofWinesburg, Ohio:
The presence of Helen renewed and refreshed him. It was as though her
woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of themachinery of his life. He began to think of the people in the town where hehad always lived with something like reverence. He had reverence for Helen.
He wanted to love and be loved by her, but he did not want at that moment
to be confused by her womanhood. . . . With all his strength he tried to holdand to understand the mood that had come upon him. In that high place inthe darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly andwaited. In the mind of each was the same thought. “I have come to this lonely place and here is this other,” was the substance of the thing felt. (135)The moment of intense communion ostensibly being narrated here isundercut by a sense of disjunction in the ﬁgure of “two atoms” embracing. More tellingly, George resists becoming involved with Helen’s“womanhood,” backing off from the commitments that an actual relationship with a particular woman would entail. George’s resistance isinconsistent with the fact that his changed view of Winesburg has comeabout precisely through Helen’s receptivity, yet it is not inconsistent withhis self–indulgent listening.
Similarly, George’s newly acquired “reverence” for Winesburg’s
inhabitants emerges at precisely that moment when he is as far awayfrom them as possible without actually leaving town. This physical distance is carefully detailed in the description of the deserted place Georgeand Helen have chosen for their moment of communion: a “decayed”
grand-stand at the far edge of the fair ground, itself located on top of the“hill rising out of the valley of Wine Creek” that commands a panoramic view of the town (134). Thus, although George is explicitly presented as the one character able to penetrate the social isolation ofWinesburg’s grotesques and form meaningful, intimate relationships
with others, he can be read as another embodiment of social isolation
wherein his departure represents rather than releases him from the condition of alienation deﬁning Winesburg.
This critical perspective on George’s listening behaviors and development as an artist can also be arrived at via the concept of “embodied”
knowing through which some feminist philosophers critique the foundational concept of “self ” in traditional western philosophy. Virginia

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Held, for instance, summarizes the difference between a traditional“self” and a feminist reformulation of “self ” thus:
The region of “particular others” is a distinct domain, where what can be seen
to be artiﬁcial and problematic are the very egoistic “self ” and the universal“all others” of standard moral theory. In the domain of particular others, theself is already constituted to an important degree by relations with others,
and these relations may be much more salient and signiﬁcant than the interests of any individual self in isolation. The “others” in the picture, however,are not the “all others,” or “everyone,” of traditional moral theory; they are
not what a universal point of view or a view from nowhere could provide.
They are, characteristically, actual ﬂesh-and-blood other human beings forwhom we have actual feelings and with whom we have real ties.12

George’s separation from home and hometown, which concludes
Winesburg, Ohio, follows the traditional paradigm of self-development
described by Held:The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams.
. . . With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed hiseyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time andwhen he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the townof Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a backgroundon which to paint the dreams of his manhood. (247)

As noted earlier, Thomas Yingling reads Winesburg, Ohio as a reﬂection of the social costs of industrial capitalism. In Yingling’s analysis,
the book’s concluding passage pronounces the loss of George’s capacity to mediate between the inhabitants of Winesburg, contrary to theportrait of George that has been developed all along. By implication,
George’s departure from Winesburg also means the demise of pre-industrial communities like Winesburg, where face-to-face interaction provided the structural foundation of communal identity (125).
Mori seems to have consciously rejected the route taken by George
because the writer-narrator in Yokohama, California is rooted in a community and his writing and listening skills are realized only within andthrough a domain of particular others. Mori’s views on the relationshipbetween self and others, including the self as artist, are revealed through“Toshio Mori” and “Lil’ Yokohama,” stories whose titles invite comparison by hinting at some kind of relationship between the individualand community.
By naming the main character of “Toshio Mori” Teruo, Mori simul-

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taneously reveals and masks his position as a writer. Teruo is the only
amae seeker without a listener in Yokohama, California, and throughhim Mori offers a veiled yet candid look at his own artistic achievement.
The story narrates an acute bout of loneliness which propels Teruo
toward the home of a particular female friend whom he believes is the
only one capable of understanding his mood. (The situation is similar to
George Willard seeking Helen’s company in “Sophistication.”) But
Teruo’s friend is already hosting two other male guests, and thus begins
a fruitless search for an alternative listener. Although Teruo’s occupation is not identiﬁed, the description of his living arrangements together with biographical information about Mori support a reading of Teruo
as the author’s self-representation. However, the title alone is enough tosuggest that Teruo’s restless evening wandering the streets of Oaklandstems from a lapse of faith in his chosen path as a writer and an attempt
to ﬁnd a sympathetic listener to alleviate the anxiety. As “Toshio Mori,”
Teruo knows the pain of being unable to make the leap from desire toachievement.13 On this night, all he seeks is someone like the narratorsof “Akira Yano” or “The Seventh Street Philosopher” who will acknowledge his need to speak and his existence as a writer. But after several
failed attempts to ﬁnd sympathy, Teruo/Toshio must return home andminister to himself. All he can do is wait for anxiety to subside, knowing that it will not disappear so easily: “He was aware that the night wasalmost over, that tonight was almost through with him. But he knew he
was not through with the state of his feeling” (44–45).
The story itself, however—“Toshio Mori”—can be read as an antidote
to the frustrated search for indulgence being narrated. On one level, it isToshio Mori’s confession and complaint, an unabashed writer’s act ofself–indulgence to sustain himself in the same way other characters in
Yokohama, California are sustained by acts of indulgence. In this sense,“Toshio Mori” actually narrates a failure in Yokohama’s circuit of communication, but a failure that only underscores the value of indulgent listening. On another level, however, this “failure” transfers a plot andethics of listening from within the narrative proper to the world inhabited by the reader. Through a self–representation called “Toshio Mori,”
the author explicitly seeks the reader’s indulgence; the story is a request
to hear him out and afﬁrm his existence. If the reader understands thatthe point of the story is to bear witness to Teruo/Toshio’s pain and accept
him as he is, then a key to understanding the whole of Yokohama,
California materializes. For the reader’s indulgent listening is the same

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kind of thing that transpires in other stories between characters or
between narrators and characters. The reader’s indulgent listening in“Toshio Mori” is thus equivalent to hearing what the book says about
the construction of community in places like “Yokohama.”“Lil’ Yokohama” can be understood as “Toshio Mori”’s dramatic andrhetorical complement, a “daylight” afﬁrmation of the collective existence of Yokohama as a domain of particular others who are boundtogether by relationships of accommodation.14 The narrator of “Lil’
Yokohama” speaks with an implied omniscient perspective but clearlyplaces himself in the opening sentence among the “characters” he identiﬁes. His narrative task, which is compared to that of a teacher callingroll, is to assert that a town peopled mostly by residents bearing names
like Mori, Matoi, and Tsunoda is as “natural” a part of the American
scene as the weather. As the opening passage declares, “In Lil’
Yokohama, as the youngsters call our community, we have twenty-fourhours every day . . . and morning, noon, and night roll on regularly justas in Boston, Cincinnati, Birmingham, Kansas City, Minneapolis, andEmeryville. . . . And when the people are sometimes missing from Lil’
Yokohama’s roll, perhaps forever, it is another matter; but the news
belongs here just as does the weather” (71).
Further, Yokohama’s aliveness is asserted not only through anassumption of its identity as a “normal” American place, but through anassertion of its health as a community where various kinds of embodied
difference are accommodated. The concluding passage alludes to thesame generation gap that informs Anderson’s narrative of Winesburg as
one main cause of social estrangement, but here age differences support
a description of social interconnectedness:
And today which is every day the sun is out again. The housewives sit on theporch and the old men sit in the shade and read the papers. Across the yard
a radio goes full blast with Benny Goodman’s band. The children come backfrom Lincoln Grammar School. In a little while the older ones will be returning from Tech High and McClymonds High. Young boys and young girls
will go down the street together. The old folks from the porches and the windows will watch them go by and shake their heads and smile.
The day is here and is Lil’ Yokohama’s day. (76)Highly rhetorical titles like “Toshio Mori” and “Lil’ Yokohama” suggest
what is in fact borne out by the narrative strategies and contents of these
two stories—that together, they enunciate and foreground a vision of

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143

community operating throughout the text. This vision of community,
which encompasses the artist’s own social relationships as well as theact of creating art, questions hegemonic cultural assumptions about thedevelopment of “self ” that ground the narrative of Winesburg, Ohio,
especially the notion that maturity and creativity require detachmentfrom the speciﬁc, often messy needs of family, kin, neighbors, acquaintances, and other individual members of one’s larger community.
VI CONCLUSION: HER FLAVOR, EVERYONE’S AND ALL FLAVOR—DOUGHNUTS AND SUKIYAKI
The ﬁnal scene of Yokohama, California is marked by the distinctive“ﬂavor” of life in a prewar Japanese American community. Like Mama’s
doughnuts, Hatsuye’s sukiyaki dinner represents both producer andproduct of Yokohama’s ethic of indulgence:
Hatsuye is back in the kitchen watching over a steaming pan of rice, cutting
sukiyaki meat for a sukiyaki, and washing the leek and cutting them in small
pieces. This sort of stuff is going on every minute, every hour, every day inthe house and Hatsuye is still going strong. While she is moving about day
in and day out it is not whether she is brave and courageous or tragic andpathetic that is important about her life, but it is her day that is present andthe day that is tomorrow which is her day and which will not be. (166)

Hatsuye, as the narrator puts it bluntly, is “ugly, the ugliest young girl
you ever saw” (162). Hatsuye will probably remain in Yokohama as asingle woman keeping house for her parents, but far from facing a lifeof diminishment like the lonely unmarried women of Winesburg,
Hatsuye is thoroughly alive. Indulging neither in self pity nor self delusion, she is sustained by a sense of membership in the community: “Sheknows she is no beauty but she is hopeful that she is not all ugliness toothers” (165). She performs unvarying domestic labor with cheerfulcompetence, a stance that is open to criticism but that also invests suchnecessary work with the value and respect it is seldom accorded. The
narrator sums up his regard for Hatsuye by calling her a “swell homemaker,” thereby connecting her to the book’s other dedicated and “alive”(165) homemaker whose material and emotional sustenance introduces
the reader to Yokohama.
A fuller analysis of the gendered indulgence embodied by housework,
as well as a contextualization of housework within the portrayal of occu-

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pations and working central to both Winesburg, Ohio and Yokohama,
California, unfortunately lie outside the focus of this paper, but I dwell
on Hatsuye because she indicates Mori’s consciousness of the differences between “Yokohama” and “Winesburg.” Through the passage
quoted earlier, we take leave of Yokohama from the kitchen where
Hatsuye presides, energetic and committed, producing and asserting her
existence through yet another speciﬁc, routine chore that is somehow“alive and enormous” (165). Hatsuye’s various labors remind us that listening is only one of many speciﬁc kinds of indulgent work, all of which
are necessary to feed or sustain each individual in a community andtherefore the life of the community itself.
Whereas in Winesburg only George (and through him Helen) has afuture and all others are trapped in the past, the deliberately inverted titleof Hatsuye’s story—“Tomorrow and Today”—implies connectedness
and equivalence between the future and the present. A combined “tomorrow and today” ﬁlls the empty space between George’s unrealized future
and the grotesques’ hopeless present, for it is not a disembodied or generalized conception of potential but “future” pluralized and realized continuously in the present through embodied social relationships and rootedness within a particular community. And by ending with a candid
appraisal of Hatsuye’s limitations—her tomorrow “which will not be”—
the narrator underscores the social necessity of indulgence that has been
exempliﬁed by his own listening practice.

NOTES
1
For their indulgent reading of earlier versions of this paper, I thank Candace
Fujikane, Mark Heberle, David Mayer, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, George Uba, Sauling Wong, and Amy Ling (in memoriam). For help with interpreting the discourse andpractice of amae in present–day Japan, I am grateful to Hideo Masuda and Takao Sato.
2
Peter Horikoshi, “Interview with Toshio Mori,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on
Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, UCLA,
1976), 472–79; Lawson Fusao Inada, “Standing on Seventh Street,” in Toshio Mori,
Yokohama, California (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), v–xxvii; Elaine
H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social
Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); David R. Mayer, “Toshio Moriand Loneliness,” Nanzan Review of American Studies 15 (1993): 20–32; David R.
Mayer, “Toshio Mori: Chronicler of Japanese-American Oakland,” in Door Stoops andWindowsills: Perspectives on the American Neighborhood Novel (Nagoya: Nanzan
University, 1992), 55–77; David Palumbo–Liu, “Universalisms and Minority Culture,”READING CULTURAL DIFFERENCE IN YOKOHAMA, CALIFORNIA

145

Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7.1 (1995): 188–208; Sau-ling
Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Hisaye Yamamoto, “Introduction,”in Toshio Mori, The Chauvinist and Other Stories (Los Angeles: Asian American
Studies Center, UCLA, 1979), 1–14. Subsequent references to these works are cited in
the text. Except for Inada and Mayer (“Toshio Mori and Loneliness”), there is little discussion in Asian American literary criticism regarding Mori’s relationship to Andersonor the formal integrity of Yokohama, California as one narrative rather than a collectionof stories. I have thus far been unable to locate Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald’s unpublished essay, “Toshio Mori: Yokohama, California and Sherwood Anderson,” apparently written in 1976 and cited in Yamamoto (8).
3
Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence, trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha,1973). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text.
4
Dorinne K. Kondo, in Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity
in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1990), draws connections between
Doi’s analysis of amae and the uchi / soto, or “inside / outside” concept which also permeates Japanese social organization and paradigms of self. Amaeru and amayakasu represent indulgence within the most intimate “inner” circle of relationships (home, family), while another analogous pair of behaviors, tanomu (requesting) and enryo (holdingback), represent indulgence in the sphere of less intimate relationships made up of
coworkers, acquaintances, and people in the public realm whose services are desired.
Thus, Kondo situates amae within a larger framework she charts as follows (150):
Expression of Self
Withholding of self
Uchi
AmaeruAmayakasu
Soto
Tanomu
Enryo
Listening in Yokohama, California is an uchi relationship; “Yokohama” is a realm of
insiders who assume and presume upon their membership within the same group.
Whereas uchi / soto distinctions in Japanese society are not centered on one social axis,
such as class, race, or gender, the fact that Mori represents “Yokohama” as functionally “one” group reveals the centrality of race in the lives of Japanese Americans.
5
Toshio Mori, Yokohama, California, Introd. Lawson Fusao Inada (Caxton, Idaho:
Caxton Printers, 1949; repr. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1985), 24. Subsequent
references to this work are cited in the text.
6
Critics have placed special emphasis on “Swell Doughnuts.” Wong reads it as avision of “right eating,” the salient feature of the ideal nurturing community in Asian
American literature which is deﬁned against the far more numerous literary representations of eating associated with deprivation and suffering (Reading Asian American
Literature, 71, 74–75). For Inada, “Swell Doughnuts” encapsulates an extraordinary representation of healthy, integrated Japanese American subjectivity, something which heand other writers who grew up in the shadow of a repressed history of internment havestruggled to articulate and assert (“Standing on Seventh Street”).
7
According to Inada, “Swell Doughnuts” was the lead story in the manuscript accepted by Caxton in 1941 and slated for publication in 1942, but when Yokohama, California
ﬁnally appeared in 1949, two stories which Mori had written while interned at Topaz
Relocation Center had been added, one of which became the new lead. See “Standingon Seventh Street” for a fuller analysis of the publisher’s racially motivated changes.
8
Thomas Yingling, “Winesburg, Ohio and the End of Collective Experience,” in New
Essays on Winesburg, Ohio, ed. John W. Crowley (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 125. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text.
9
Sally Adair Rigsbee, “The Feminine in Winesburg, Ohio,” in Winesburg, Ohio: An

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Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, ed. Charles E. Modlin and Ray
Lewis White (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 188.
10
John Updike, “Twisted Apples,” in Winesburg, Ohio: An Authoritative Text,
Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, ed. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1996), 193.
11
. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio: Text and Criticism, ed. John H. Ferres(New York: Penguin, 1977), 56. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text.
12
Virginia Held, “Feminist Reconceptualizations in Ethics,” in Philosophy in a
Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 105.
13
According to Hisaye Yamamoto, Mori’s unpublished work includes several hundred short stories and ﬁve novels. He told her he had collected enough rejection slips to“paper a room” (“Introduction,” 4, 8).
14
Mayer also draws on psychology (mainly Erik Erikson) to explain the difference
between the relative failure of lonely characters in Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a
Lonely Hunter and Winesburg, Ohio compared to the considerable number of adjusted
or “accommodated” lonely people in Yokohama, California (“Toshio Mori andLoneliness,” 25). Although we reach the same conclusion about the existence of “accommodation” in Mori’s work, my discussion focuses on the “how” of accommodation andits critique of hegemonic psychological and philosophical paradigms of identity.