Issei, nisei, sansei for decades, the story of Japanese America has been told as if it were a straight line of numbered generations—first, second, and third. Issei Failures turns to those who fell out of line, a lost generation of "failures." These failures were men of Japanese descent who lived and wrote in the United States at the same time as the first generation of Japanese immigrants, but who, due to historical circumstance and individual orientation, failed to become the founding fathers of later generations of Japanese American literature.

  Through scalar readings that cross from large, world-historical shifts in Japanese and Anglo-American economic hegemony to the smallest forms of punctuation, Andrew Way Leong situates Issei failures within a transitional period between crises in global capitalism. By doing so, Leong re-orients us to a bilingual archive of uneven temporalities and unruly political orientations. From the prophetic pull of amity and commerce in the writings of Sadakichi Hartmann, to the unfinished laments of Shōson Nagahara, through the anarchist utopias of Takeo Arishima and the romantic ultranationalism of Yoné Noguchi, Issei Failures provides a map for reading texts lost between the boundaries that have separated studies of realist and modernist literatures of the North Atlantic from studies of Japanese American literature as an ethnic literature in the United States.