Carroll has a bachelor of arts degree in English from Oakland University. In this essay, Carroll explores the ways in which Yamamoto uses subtlety in her story to give power to repressed individuals.

Sometimes, the words an author leaves unsaid are as important to the story as the written words on the page. In "The Eskimo Connection," Hisaye Yamamoto builds a story from broken glimpses into the lives of the two main characters, Emiko Toyama and Alden Ryan Walunga. The written correspondence that they share with each other is not constant, and what they write is not always definite or necessarily reliable. Yamamoto provides the reader with clues to the dialogue between the two but rarely uses the original text from the letters Emiko and Alden write. By giving fragments of a story, she emphasizes to the reader what may not be obvious about the characters to...