Unfinished Message: Selected Works of Toshio Mori (California Legacy)

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 Heming-way —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. The promise of a writing career was tragically interrupted when the publication of his first collection of short stories, Yokohama, California, was cancelled after the United States entered World War II. Mori was soon on his way from Oakland to Topaz, Utah—one of 110,000 citizens of Japanese descent 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, photographs, and an interview with Toshio Mori. Some of this material has never before been published.