Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Eskimo Connection” is told through the eyes of Emiko Toyama, a poet who self-deprecatingly refers to herself simply as “an aging Nisei widow” with very little to offer a young prison pen pal. She never directly calls herself a poet in the story, although art and writing have certainly played an important…
Tag: The Eskimo Connection
The Eskimo Connection – Setting
Japanese Internment Camps During World War II After the Japanese attack on American ships at Pearl Harbor in 1941, sentiment grew in support of relocating all Japanese Americans living along the West Coast to the interior of the country. Many in the western states, as well as those holding high positions in the United States…
The Eskimo Connection – Literary Devices
Narrative Form Given that the bulk of Yamamoto’s story is about the letters written between Alden and Emiko, “The Eskimo Connection” is written almost as an epistle—a writing form that presents letters written to someone or written between two or more people. (According to one of the letters, Alden has paraphrased the biblical epistles of…
The Eskimo Connection – Themes
Loneliness In “The Eskimo Connection” both Alden and Emiko are victims of loneliness, although in different ways. Emiko’s husband is dead, and she describes herself in terms of what she has lost: her husband and her poetry. As “an aging Nisei widow in Los Angeles with several children, three still at home, whose main avocation…
The Eskimo Connection – Characters
Emiko Toyama In the story “The Eskimo Connection,” Emiko is a Nisei poet and a widow living in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Emiko remembers living in one of the internment/relocation camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. Emiko receives a letter from a young Eskimo prisoner, Alden, asking her to critique his essay….
The Eskimo Connection – Summary
1975 “The Eskimo Connection” begins in the late winter of 1975, when Emiko Toyama, a Nisei poet and widow living in Los Angeles, receives a letter from a young Eskimo prisoner-patient at a federal penitentiary in the Midwest. Alden Ryan Walunga has read one of Emiko’s poems in an old AsianAmerican magazine and wants her…