Technically dexterous, intellectually stimulating, and simply stunning, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory is a master class on how to write nonfiction that straddles the personal and the political. Yamashita seamlessly fuses historical and family documents, pictures, letters, philosophy, and personal memory to tell a story of Japanese American internment and its effects on her family. However, Yamashita’s ultimate accomplishment is not only to archive but to interrogate life’s largest questions: What is love? What is resistance? How do we create our moral codes? And how do we find faith, hope and laughter in this human life?” —AAAS Outstanding Achievement in Creative Writing - Prose Award Committee
“Shaped and voiced with literary flair, this is clearly a book Yamashita felt compelled to write, and her sense of purpose makes this historical excavation feel deeply personal.” —Kirkus
“While this account may provide context for some of the themes found in Yamashita’s fiction, the author’s personal reflections on a dark period of American history will resonate with a larger audience concerned with how some U.S. organizations have targeted specific communities.” —Library Journal, *starred review*
“[Letters to Memory] is a challenging, varied work, in moments deeply personal and impressionistic and in moments pulling back into a voice of epic omniscience.” —Boston Globe
"Yamashita goes beyond her family’s story as internees to unpack what that experience became as they dealt with the ordeal of building new identities and re-establishing their communities in the face of great loss and ongoing racism. It also very personally deals with the author’s emotions regarding this legacy. This is the work of establishing these deeds as an ongoing, living part of America’s being." —Literary Hub
“More than just a memoir, this book teaches by example a new kind of relationship you can have with your familial, national, and cultural story. This is an important book.” —Porter Square Books
“A timely, thoughtful examination of an often unspoken period of American history…” —The Margins
“... Letters to Memory is a work of genius... a groundbreaking exploration and example of how we can build a sense of self through interaction with our pasts…” —The Order of Importance
“Epistolary, but in a form of its own, this book preserves the collective memory of the Yamashita family: removed from Oakland, first to a racetrack, then to a concentration camp. Yamashita evokes the time of displacement, the dust, Christian charity and Christian racism, the problematics of documenting struggle, and the importance of art, laughter and waffles.” —The Rumpus
“A unique take on Japanese American history.” —International Examiner
“This is one of those books that’s so damn good, and also incredibly essential right now…” —Conversational Reading
“[Yamashita] 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
“Always in the foreground is the meta nature of Yamashita’s enterprise; we are not to experience a story but are prodded to pay attention to the ways of approaching, circling it. . . . An intriguing experiment in memoir.” —Star Tribune
“. . . [A] template for fathoming still more imponderable and overarching matters such as the lessons and limits of history, the character of charity, the challenge of forgiveness, the trauma of war, the quality of love, the power of death, the pain of poverty, the poignancy of memory, and the problem of evil.” —Nichi Bei
“Letters to Memory is not only for history buffs searching out new perspectives, but for anyone wanting to better understand humanity.” —New Pages
“Karen Tei Yamashita has written a chilling account, powerful in its presentation not only of the internment camps but of life that followed. Letters to Memory is a book that is a must read for those who have an interest in history but also for those who value civil rights and how quickly those rights can dissolve in the chaos of war.” —North of Oxford
“An absolutely effulgent journey into the always contested past of the (extended) family.” —Asian American Literature Fans
“As she presents material from the family's history, including excerpted correspondence from Tanforan and later Topaz in the Utah desert, Yamashita gravitates toward lacunae in the documentary record, using the unknown— and unknowable— to fuel her philosophical queries.” —Kyodo News
“Allusive, quirky, questioning, ‘Letters’ is a challenging text; for all its brevity, the less-than-200 pages are dense with assumptions of cultural literacy, community insight, historical background. And yes, don’t be deterred: for ‘gentle, critical, or however’ readers ready for intellectual stimulation, ‘Letters’ awaits your inquisitive participation and rewarding collaboration.” —The Christian Science Monitor
★ 07/01/2017
When the United States imprisoned Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II, the circumstances changed the lives of more than 100,000 U.S. citizens, profoundly impacting future generations. In her first work of nonfiction, novelist Yamashita (literature, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz; I Hotel) uses her family's letters, sermons, and photographs to come to terms with this period's impact on both her family and American society as a whole. Told in a series of letters from Yamashita to fictionalized academics, the book muses on the value of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, and love to a family after the trust between country and citizen has been broken. Instead of dwelling on the injustice that befell her parents' community, Yamashita focuses on her father's rebuilding of his parish and her community finding a way forward through tragedy. VERDICT While this account may provide context for some of the themes found in Yamashita's fiction, the author's personal reflections on a dark period of American history will resonate with a larger audience concerned with how some U.S. organizations have targeted specific communities.—John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
2017-06-27
A multilayered evocation of Japanese internment camps as experienced by the author's extended family.The thematic ambition of this project transcends category. It isn't quite memoir or even the memory of stories told by earlier generations. Title aside, it isn't a collection of letters, though such an archive spurred Yamashita (I Hotel, 2010, etc.) to feel she could become "a useful repository of the past." She quotes the letters sparingly, and most of the longer letters are hers to readers or her editor. It isn't quite a scrapbook, though there are plenty of family photos, renditions of artwork, and shards of manuscripts. The narrative is part research, part history, part literary criticism, part spiritual meditation, and part open wound. "Stories blossom, as a kaleidoscope, a space where events aggregate in infinite designs," writes Yamashita, who has toyed with form in her much-lauded fiction. Most of these stories are ones she has read in the letters or maybe heard from her parents (her father was a pastor), but they become very much her stories in the telling. "For you, the problem is to separate the fiction from the fact of living," she writes, addressing "Homer," though perhaps writing to the reader or herself, "to excavate the origins of our attachments to meaning, the material forensics of human systems, the fork in the road where we could have taken another path. This is the work of history." This is certainly interpretive history that illuminates the tensions within the Japanese community in America over the war with Japan and the ironies of a country outraged by German concentration camps subjecting the Japanese in America to similar treatment. Shaped and voiced with literary flair, this is clearly a book Yamashita felt compelled to write, and her sense of purpose makes this historical excavation feel deeply personal.
