Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Mitsuye May Yamada - Joe Yasutake - Tosh Yasutake Interview
Narrators: Mitsuye May Yamada, Joe Yasutake, Tosh Yasutake
Interviewers: Alice Ito (primary), Jeni Yamada (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: October 8 & 9, 2002
Densho ID: denshovh-ymitsuye_g-01-0039

<Begin Segment 39>

AI: Did it seem unusual to you that you had a father who wrote poetry? In any community, there are only so many people who are writers or artists, and so forth. Did it ever strike you as strange that your father was so devoted to poetry?

MY: No, it just --

TY: Not really. Maybe we thought it was natural. I don't know whether, just took for granted, I guess.

MY: It's part of... yeah, I think my dad, being interested in literature, I mean, it just seemed -- so, and my brothers are always saying, "How come" -- because I had a lot of discussions with him about -- because we had something in common which the boys didn't have.

TY: Well, we had, in the library we had in our house down in Beacon Hill, yeah, Beacon Hill house we had a nice, a big library downstairs. A collection of books, National Geographics, and upstairs we had Harvard Classic books that Dad had bought for us.

MY: He, he gave it to me 'cause he said --

TY: He gave it to you? Yeah.

JY: She's the only one that read 'em. [Laughs]

TY: Yeah, she's the only one that read 'em. [Laughs] Only time we read was Book of Knowledge, 'cause we had, I used to look through that, but I never looked through the Harvard Classics. [Laughs]

MY: They were all novels. Henry Fielding, and Hawthorne.

TY: You still have that set?

MY: I didn't save the whole set.

TY: You didn't?

MY: No. Well, you know I moved about umpteen times.

TY: Oh. I thought you still had the whole thing.

MY: I did for a long, long time. But it's like twenty-some, twenty-four volumes.

TY: Oh you just, you just saved selected ones, then.

MY: If any -- yeah, I think I have a few.

TY: Is that right? Oh.

MY: Dickens, Charles Dickens and all that. But he was very well-read, actually. Dad was. He actually read them. You know, did a lot reading, Dad did.

TY: I think I looked, paged through them a few times.

MY: And --

JY: I'm not saying anything.

TY: [Laughs]

MY: So, and I'm really, he used to, he gave me my first book of poems when I was about twelve, I think.

TY: I wonder if, let's see. She thinks probably, thought it was a girl thing. I wonder --

MY: I did, too.

TY: -- if I got interested in poetry, whether he would have bought me a poetry book. [Laughs]

MY: Well I had, yeah, that was before the war, because it was, I treasured it. 'Cause it was, was leather-bound, and it had gilt, pages were gilt around the edges. And it was the collected poems by Christina Rossetti, and it started with "The Goblin" [Ed. note: Narrator is referring to "Goblin Market"] in the beginning. And --

TY: When did he give you that?

MY: I think when I was about twelve.

TY: Is that right?

MY: And then I, and then during the evacuation, it just got lost with a lot of other stuff. But, so for a long time after that, I looked at a lot of second-hand bookstores, to see if I could find something that was similar to, to this leather-bound book that I remembered, with the gilt letters, and to see if I could find it at a second-hand -- there's a second-hand bookstore in Long Beach. And I went there several times and I have a small, I think one of my kids gave me a small, small book, 'cause I used to talk about losing it. But, it's an old book but it's still not the same thing. But that was, remember, you know, you remember your first something. That was my first book of poetry. And then when I was going to do my graduate work at University of Chicago -- and I memorized some of the poems in it. And I was taking a course in critical interpretation or, oh, literary criticism. And you know, we were supposed to identify good poetry and bad poetry? And Christina Rossetti's poem was one of the, supposedly the bad ones?

TY: It was one of the bad ones? [Laughs]

MY: Yeah, it was suppose-, they had a poem by -- and they didn't identify it, but I knew it was by her 'cause I had recognized it. And then they had a poem by Robert Frost, which I recognized, "The Road Not Taken" or something like that, which was a very famous poem. And they put it alongside each other, and you were supposed to write a composition on which was the better poem. [Laughs] And I was going, "Gosh," this Christina Rossetti, "When I Am Dead, My Dearest," or whatever that poem was, I just loved it. I'd memorize them, but of course I had to do the -- I had to pass, so I wrote that the Robert -- and then you had to say which was the better poem and why. And I thought, "That's the University of Chicago. They don't know anything." [Laughs]

<End Segment 39> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.