Letters to Memory
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
An excursion through the Japanese-American internment using archival materials from the author’s own family. In this unique memoir, Karen Tei Yamashita draws on her family’s history and creates a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classicists—their disciplines, and Yamashita’s engagement with them, are a way for her explore various aspects of the internment and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, and community. From a National Book Award finalist, Letters to Memory is “in moments deeply personal and impressionistic and in moments pulling back into a voice of epic omniscience” (The Boston Globe). “Interrogates the cruelty of internment and the random nature of immigration, war, birth and death and disease through her own probing, lively correspondence . . . The irony and dark humor of Yamashita’s interrogations, of her nimble prose and sentences, illuminate the tragedies.” —Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Yamashita (I Hotel) explores her family's experience in a Japanese-American internment camp during WWII using stories, letters, photos, artwork, and other records from her family archive. In five thematically linked sections on poverty, modernity, love, death, and laughter, Yamashita sketches the humiliation, absurdity, and cruelty collectively suffered by her extended family, with special focus on her grandmother Tomi; mother, Asako; and father, John. In one particularly haunting scene she imagines what it was like for her family to frantically pack their house in one day before leaving for the relocation camp. Yamashita positions these stories within larger questions what is the meaning of evil, justice, war, and forgiveness? and considers the answers suggested in classics including the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the jataka tales, and King Lear. The immediacy and poignancy of the struggles of Yamashita's family members are deflated by interposed epistolary conversations with five mythic authors and pseudonymous scholars, who never take shape with the richness, complexity, urgency, or character of Yamashita's family and friends. Yamashita's hopscotch approach makes the deeper claim that there is no explanation and no possible reparation for events like slavery, internment, or the bombing of Hiroshima only the disorienting reality they produce and the legacy of pain, distrust, and shame they leave behind.