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Unfinished Message: Selected Works of Toshio Mori

Introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada

256 pages (6 x 9)
Trade paper, ISBN: 1-890771-35-X, $15.95

A California Legacy book

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. As William Saroyan, who championed his work, once wrote: "[Toshio Mori] can see through the material image to the real thing; through a human being to the strange, comical, melancholy truth that changes a fool to a great solemn hero. With the Eye he has also the Heart. The fine heart of a true writer."

The promise of a writing career was tragically interrupted when the publication of his first collection of short stories Yokohama, California was cancelled at the entry of the United States into World War II. Mori was soon on his way from Oakland to Topaz, Utah—one of 110,000 citizens of Japanese decent held in internment camps between 1941 and 1944. When Yokohama, California was finally published in 1949, Toshio Mori was, at last, able to claim his place as "one of the most important new writers in the country" (William Saroyan).

Unfinished Message includes fifteen stories, a novella, letters, and an interview with Toshio Mori. Some of this material has never been published.

Unfinished Message is a publication of the California Legacy project, a collaboration between Santa Clara University and Heyday Books, dedicated to the rich and diverse cultural and literary heritage of California.

Reviews:

"Mori's voice is reminiscent of other first-generation Californias 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."—The 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

"[Mori's] well crafted and humorous tales celebrate the Japanese American community he knew so well and reach beyond it to describe the essential human condition"—Palo Alto Daily News

Table of Contents

Through Anger and Love
1936
Lil' Yokohama
The Distant Call of the Deer
The Seventh Street Philosopher
The Woman Who Makes Swell Doughnuts
Toshio Mori
The Chauvinist
The Trees
The Chessmen
The Sweet Potato
The Garden
Slant-Eyed America ns
The Travelers
Letters from Toshio Mori to William Saroyan
The Brothers Murata
Unfinished Message
An Interview with Toshio Mori
Toshio Mori-A Brief Biography

Author Biography:

Toshio Mori (1910-1980) was born in Oakland and grew up in San Leandro. During World War II, he and his family were interned at Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, where Mori edited the journal Trek for a year. After the war, Mori returned to the Bay Area where he continued to write. He is the author of Yokohama, California (1949), The Chauvinist and Other Stories (1979), and The Woman from Hiroshima (1980).