Letters to Memory

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 fa