The Loom (short story)

Short story by R. A. Sasaki that portrays the life of a Nisei woman looking both backwards and forwards after the death of one of her daughters. Born and raised in San Francisco where her family ran a boarding house, the unnamed woman graduated from the University of California before being incarcerated with her family in Tanforan and Topaz during World War II. Returning to San Francisco after the war having married a Kibei man she had known from before the war, she has four daughters while her husband works in the flower industry. Devoted to her daughters, she is at a loss as they leave the house to pursue their own lives and after one dies in a mountain climbing accident. Her daughters' efforts to bring her out of her torpor are largely unsuccessful until one gives her a loom, through which she is able to express the feelings she cannot verbalize.

Sasaki, a Sansei , was also born and raised in San Francisco and began the story while a student in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University in 1978, completing the story in the winter of 1982–83 while in Japan teaching English at the Language Institute of Japan. ^[1] In 1983, the completed story won the first prize American Japanese Literary (James Clavell) Award and was published in several Japanese American newspapers. In 1991, it appeared in Sasaki's first collection of short stories, The Loom and Other Stories .

Might also like " Rosebud " by Wakako Yamauchi; " Starting from Loomis " by Hiroshi Kashiwagi; " Kubota " by Garrett Hongo