Letters to Memory

This dive into the Yamashita family archive and Japanese internment runs a documentary impulse through filters that shimmer with imagination.

Letters to Memory is an excursion through the Japanese internment using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as 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 to explore various aspects of the internment and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, orientalism, and community.

Publication date: September 5, 2017

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 200 pages

ISBN: 9781566894876

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Letters to Memory, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist & Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is currently Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“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."

—AAAS Outstanding Achievement in Creative Writing - Prose Award Committee

“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.” 

—The Boston Globe

“[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 Los Angeles Times

“A timely, thoughtful examination of an often unspoken period of American history.” 

—The Margins

“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.” 

—The Star Tribune

“Allusive, quirky, questioning.” 

—Christian Science Monitor

“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