Born in Oakland, California, in 1910, the young Toshio Mori dreamed of being an artist, a Buddhist missionary, and a baseball player. Instead, he grew flowers in the family nursery business, and—influenced by contemporaries such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway—produced a body of extraordinary fiction. His well-crafted, humorous, wise tales celebrate the Japanese American community he knew so well, and reach beyond it to describe the essential human condition.

Unfinished Message includes fifteen stories, a novella, letters, and an interview with Toshio Mori.

Reviews

"Mori's voice is reminiscent of other first-generation Californian's with immigrant parents, such as William Saroyan and John Fante....That's the beauty of Mori's prose: to highlight human resilience while struggling with anger and doubts, to invest his characters and his locales with tenderness and love."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Toshio Mori's work speaks to the mixture of the two cultures at its core: the stories are fresh and Zen-like, catching the surprise and soft quirkiness of the California moment, and they also reach back to the Japanese shibai tradition of mingling folk drama and goofy skits. Mori's work remains a highlight, not only of early modern California fiction, but also of an Asian American literature that has reshaped the national literary terrain."—Al Young, co-editor of The Literature of California