The Afterlife Is Letting Go

Poet Shimoda (Hydra Medusa) examines in these penetrating essays the ongoing fallout from the U.S. government’s mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. Drawing from his travels, research, and family history—Shimoda’s grandfather was among the incarcerated—the author posits that psychic damage from the period remains critically underexamined by survivors, their descendants, and the culture at large: “What does it mean for people to survive trauma, and how can anyone be sure that they have survived, rather than, more simply, not died?” Several essays turn outward for answers. “Stars Above the Ruins” weaves quotes from people who lived in the internment camps with those who’ve visited the sites more recently; “I See the Memory Outline” strings together hypothetical musings from Shimoda’s friends and relatives who’ve never been to the incarceration sites (“I imagine feeling haunted and suffocated”). Other essays—including the elegiac “Peace Plaza,” in which Shimoda visits San Francisco’s Japantown—skew inward, critically examining poems and films by Japanese Americans to help the author map the impact of the internment. With a steady hand and a poet’s knack for concision (“Japanese American Historical Plaza” simply lists every internment site and its location), Shimoda constructs an anguished archive of intergenerational pain.