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Ballad of Yachiyo.
A tender and tragic imagined account of the life of Gotanda's aunt.
72 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 2, 2023
This play is inspired by a story of Gotanda's aunt, who was sent to live with some family friends in order to learn the traditional Japanese tea ceremony and pottery making, but when she fell pregnant with the husband's baby she was disgraced and basically disowned by the family before killing herself. As Gotanda says in the intro, this play is not an exact portrayal of her story, but he was trying to capture the feeling Yachiyo's story evoked in him. Some of the recurring themes in this play suggest this search for a way to express what's going on, a search that mirrors the long time Gotanda spent tinkering with versions of this story before finally coming to this one.
Yachiyo is trying to figure out who she is, which is partially a normal part of being a teenager, but she is also pulled between different cultures and traditions: conservative Japanese tradition, the working class immigrant culture of the Hawaiian sugar cane fields, and her desire for the fancy Americanized life reflected in the Montgomery Ward catalogue. Hers is a process of self-creation.
The Takamuras--the couple Yachiyo is sent to stay with--each have their own creative journeys. Hiro, the husband, is trying desperately to make artistic pottery. His father was a famous artist in Japan, but when Hiro ran into trouble with alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes, his father disowned him. So Hiro moved to Hawaii and is trying to find himself by making pottery and overcoming the challenges of a different type of clay, no master kiln builder, etc. Okusan, the wife, is a master of the tea ceremony, which is an art in itself, but she also uses puppetry to tell stories, including the story of the love affair she suspects is going on between Hiro and Yachiyo.
The other major artist is Yachiyo's Papa, who had been a poet but had burned all his poems because his wife thought they were useless in their new life in Hawaii. He had also tried to import silk worms to make silk--another traditional Japanese art form. Though the silk venture failed, he does eventually return to writing poetry, which gets him a decent job writing love letters on behalf of sugar cane workers and then doing the correspondence for a local shop to which the family had been indebted.
https://youtu.be/tkCHmA56SAY
Yachiyo is trying to figure out who she is, which is partially a normal part of being a teenager, but she is also pulled between different cultures and traditions: conservative Japanese tradition, the working class immigrant culture of the Hawaiian sugar cane fields, and her desire for the fancy Americanized life reflected in the Montgomery Ward catalogue. Hers is a process of self-creation.
The Takamuras--the couple Yachiyo is sent to stay with--each have their own creative journeys. Hiro, the husband, is trying desperately to make artistic pottery. His father was a famous artist in Japan, but when Hiro ran into trouble with alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes, his father disowned him. So Hiro moved to Hawaii and is trying to find himself by making pottery and overcoming the challenges of a different type of clay, no master kiln builder, etc. Okusan, the wife, is a master of the tea ceremony, which is an art in itself, but she also uses puppetry to tell stories, including the story of the love affair she suspects is going on between Hiro and Yachiyo.
The other major artist is Yachiyo's Papa, who had been a poet but had burned all his poems because his wife thought they were useless in their new life in Hawaii. He had also tried to import silk worms to make silk--another traditional Japanese art form. Though the silk venture failed, he does eventually return to writing poetry, which gets him a decent job writing love letters on behalf of sugar cane workers and then doing the correspondence for a local shop to which the family had been indebted.
https://youtu.be/tkCHmA56SAY
May 28, 2023
Ballad of Yachiyo is a bit of a mixed bag for me. I listened to the audio performance from LA Theatre Works, and while I enjoyed the performances, I did find that sometimes it was hard to follow along with what was happening without visual cues. The story was a really interesting piece of history, and while Yachiyo's story is a bit much on the tragedy for my tastes, I thought the setting of Hawaiian plantations during strikes for the workers' rights was really interesting. Overall, it isn't a bad play, and I think I'd probably enjoy seeing it performed more.
August 1, 2011
1996 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Drama (tie)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews