The Afterlife is Letting Go

by Brandon Shimoda

“The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award-winning The Grave on the Wall.“–Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly’s “Big Indie Books of Fall 2024”

“Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how ‘exclusion zones’ proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work.”–Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.

Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

Genres: History, Essays, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 2024

Reviews

[lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

cried antiseptic tears each time i picked up the afterlife is letting go. when i was on the final pages my partner made me toasted mochi with shoyu and sugar as a snack. a surprise and a coincidence: my grandma used to make the same thing for me. she used the microwave to warm up the shoyu enough to dissolve the sugar, and to superheat the mochi, which in the microwave becomes puffy and burning hot, and sticky. i remember watching the mochi rotate and expand in the yellow light. it was mochi we made as an extended family, every january, on the farm my issei great-grandparents returned to after incarceration. we would freeze enough to last the whole year. my mom wanted my grandma to put less sugar in the shoyu, but she never listened. she always gave me anything i wanted. i only learned her japanese name last year. yuriko. and the ratio is important. you need a lot of sugar, too much, to balance the intensity of the soy sauce. it's the best snack in the world. i burnt my mouth on it every time. i bit down on the food roy cooked me and burst into tears. i miss my grandma and grandpa every day. transmutational book!! thank you brandon shimoda.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful book in the way it conveys a people’s trauma over multiple generations. It shows the impact on the children and grandchildren of the survivors of the military concentration camps during World War II. This was the result of executive order 9066 allowing the government to round up Japanese Americans, many of them American citizens and incarcerating without any due process, forcing them to lose belongings, houses and businesses.

One of the many powerful section is listing not the just the camps but the detention centers from all parts of the country that corralled innocent people into years of incarceration including place such as New Jersey, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Another thing the books does is suggest that the reparations paid out to Japanese Americans was a way for America to ‘move on’ from the history and to downplay and expunge the record of how the USA mistreated its own citizens and residents. Japanese American children report on the ignorance and minimizing that history teachers deployed when confronted by Japanese American students about what happened. Sometimes they would put the burden of teaching this history on to the offspring of those incarcerated, making them the ones to explain to their fellow students what they ‘claimed’ happened to their families.

In this era of flagrant unconstitutional executive orders we are advised to remember executive order 9066. We live in a county where the President has extraordinary powers that aren’t easily questioned or reversed.

[Ava · Rating 4 out of 5]

2025 is the year of ava reading essay collections for sure.
this collection was such a crazy mix of emotionality and personal experience and brutal, incredibly well researched, fact. the prologue is, to me, one of the most memorable pieces in this collection, and i will be thinking about the topaz rock and james wakasa for the rest of my life. i loved how the stories of different generations were woven together, reinforcing how the impact of this mass incarceration is still felt today.
the personal, such as reading to his daughter, was balanced well with facts and proven history (no matter how much we try to hide it) and the reverberations across communities. there are many different ways to respond to generational and individual trauma and racism and wakasa shows so many different sides.
some of the “choral” chapters were a bit long for me, but i nevertheless appreciate how he took the time to display so many unique responses to a question that we want to think has a single answer.

[yuni · Rating 5 out of 5]

holds two centers for survivors and their descendants, two centers that dance, merge and part, lay together, walk together, flickering in place, dashing with the hot wind

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

What happens in the aftermath of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988? Are Japanese Americans ever “beyond that,” with “that” referring to the injustices, memories and memorialization of their or their family’s incarceration at concentration camps and the destruction of Japanese American communities? In his essay collection, The Afterlife is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda traverses the difficult terrain in the dialectic of “innocence” versus “guilt,” “citizen” versus “alien,” “Japanese” versus “American,” to look at how certain types of memorialization are in fact desecration, and reparations an act of erasure, while giving way to a multiplicity of voices through the collection’s choral chapters. I was very moved by the depth of Shimoda’s reckoning with a history, like the stone commemorating the murder of James Hatsuki Wakasa, which cannot simply be dug up to be “protected.” Time itself becomes the material by which grief and resilience of generations of Japanese Americans are wrought in a nuanced undertaking that is at once scholarly and lyrical.
This is an introduction to an interview that first appeared in Tupelo Quarterly.

[Diana Arterian · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I wrote at LitHub:

As with Brandon Shimoda’s remarkable The Grave on the Wall, his new book The Afterlife Is Letting Go circles around monuments, memorialization, community trauma, incarceration, the innumerable violent expressions of power—and just as innumerable shapes of resistance. While Grave on the Wall predominantly focused on Shimoda’s grandfather, his new work is more expansive.

When describing the murder of James Hatsuaki Wakasa in 1943 at the Topaz concentration camp, Shimoda describes the moments before Wakasa’s death. He writes, “[Wakasa] had dinner with a friend in the mess hall that night—the stoves, dark brown with rust, are still there—then went for a walk along the southwestern edge of camp.”

This early quotation is the first of many gestures illustrative of Shimoda’s deep interest in collapsing time. The objects—in this case, the stoves—still remain from a time when a man was murdered with impunity while held in a concentration camp in a nation that considers itself one of the “free leaders of the world.” If the stoves are still here, what else endures? What else has survived but perhaps leaves no obvious physical trace?

Shimoda quotes many in The Afterlife If Letting Go, but aptly gives primacy to many Japanese and Japanese American witnesses, writers, thinkers, theorists, filmmakers, and artists. Within these pages are the historical plazas, plaques, museums, actions that attempt to honor, circumscribe, or wave away the pains and horrors exacted on Japanese people and Japanese Americans in the U.S.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing realities was for the children born in concentration camps and thus “into the impossible sta­tus of being simultaneously a citizen and an enemy of the United States.” Shimoda utilizes different forms to attend to all of this—some portions are almost entirely quotation, others are Shimoda’s descriptions of a museum or memorial or site as he moves through it.

The Afterlife Is Letting Go has the quality of quiet but intense scrutiny, like turning an object over and over to see how else it might catch the light. Such thoughtful rigor defines Shimoda’s work.

[Jim KABLE · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concentrating on the Camp - Making Sense with Heart

I’ve known about this seemingly unimaginable ugliness in US history going back more than four decades but in more detail from the time in the latter 1980s when I began studies in Japanese language and spent many years in Japan. I met people in Japan who had immediate family put into US concentration camps - kinfolk - who were part of the Occupation Forces in immediate post-war Japan who met families reunited - from both sides - separated by the declaration of war. I visited or was driven past places in south-east Arizona or in south-west Alberta in Canada where the same injustices occurred and also in Australia on a far tinier scale where similar internment camp incarceration took place. Brandon Shimoda’s tribute to his own family and to the hundreds of others who took part in answering his questions have validated and made real all the gamut of terrors and dehumanisation which was not only the fate of those taken from their homes and businesses and put into camps carved out of First Peoples’ lands - more injustice heaped upon injustice - but when the nightmare was over - the deformed manner in which the trauma was visited upon their children and grand-children. I highly, highly recommend this book and admit to tears as I read this book.

[chi · Rating 5 out of 5]

precise, cutting, expansive, and poetic. the afterlife is letting go is both a rigorously researched academic endeavor as well as a deeply personal excavation of the emotional realities of survivorship and inherited traumas. brandon shimoda weaves together a constellation of personal experiences without it feeling like he's splicing words to fit his own narrative. i appreciate the space made for contradictory experiences of trauma without the negation of any of those truths. if anything, the way he presents such contradictions makes the case for past/present/future healing.

i am most moved by shimoda's meticulous citation practice. citation is love! the entire work's demand for survivors to be in control of their stories is made clear in this rigorous crediting and citation. full names, cited over and over in multiple chapters, and references made to many books, talks, articles, interviews, and conversations are a demonstration of how much he really cares about the embodiment and empowerment of JA survivors and descendants of incarceration.

i really loved it.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fellow monument heads, take note. The idea that incarceration cannot really "end" as long as the generational trauma remains, combined with the fact that the US is currently persecuting immigrants for political reasons AGAIN, makes this book extremely powerful. Shimoda is not just an extensive researcher, but a poet, and that definitely shows in the language, which is at times very beautiful. Essential reading for this moment and beyond.

[Brian Rosser · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poetic thoughts and stories about the horrifix forced relocation of Japanese-Americans into American concentration camps during WWII and lasting effects on the living, their relatives and the collective psyche of being a Japanese-American in current society. Well researched and worth reading.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lyrical reflection on the afterlives of wartime incarceration.

[Pamela Okano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written book of essays about the Japanese American incarceration during WWII.

[Angry.Sad.Motivated · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary.

[stevie · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredibly transportive, transdimensional, transtemporal, transgenerational, deep, deeply harrowing, deeply seeking book. hard to read, hard to put down, consistently shocking in its beauty and provocation.