Wakako Yamauchi, whose plays exploring the Japanese-American experience drew on her own life of relocation, rootlessness, assimilation and internment during World War II, died on Aug. 16 at her home in Gardena, Calif. She was 93.

The death was confirmed by her granddaughter, Alyctra Matsushita.

Ms. Yamauchi’s plays were produced frequently, especially by the Asian-American troupe East West Players in Los Angeles. She was best known for “And the Soul Shall Dance,” a work she adapted from her own short story. East West Players staged it in 1977, a time when Asian-American voices, especially female ones, were rarely heard in the theater. The next year a film version was made for PBS.

The play tells the story of two Japanese immigrant families in California working as itinerant farmers during the Depression, one still rooted in the old culture, one trying to assimilate. Ms. Yamauchi herself was nisei — a first-generation child of Japanese immigrants — and grew up in a farming family. Her experiences, and the ones she would have later, are the subtle heart of the work.

The play’s strength is that Ms. Yamauchi “writes from neither self‐pity nor ideology,” John Corry wrote in reviewing the New York premiere by the Pan Asian Repertory Theater for The New York Times in 1979. “The internment of 1942 awaits her characters, but that tragedy exists in our minds, and not in anything said on stage. This deepens our feelings, without ever romanticizing them.”