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

Praise for Karen Tei Yamashita:

"It's a stylistically wild ride, but it's smart, funny and entrancing." —NPR

"Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." —New York Times Book Review

With delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an adventurous, experimental high point." —Kirkus

"Magnificent. . . . Intriguing." —Library Journal

"This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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 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.