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, Asian American

253 pages, Kindle Edition

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.

[Joanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

reflecting on exhibition, Shimoda is first in the Topaz Museum, where an arrangement of childrens’ shell art is displayed in the opening gallery. it is the same place containing the rock monument for James Hatsuaki Wakasa, extracted from his place of murder seventy-eight years later. “What would it have mattered,” Shimoda asks, “if the people behind barbed wire spent three years “huddling in their barracks, whining”? Is there a right way to be incarcerated?”

if not yet another incarceration, Wakasa could not avoid what was a profane act of un-liberation, not even posthumously. escapism through art for Japanese American children in the camps, art made for themselves, becomes art for who the museum director admits is a white audience. in the museum, the “curational impulse towards empathy” dredges only for the materially rousing. what is extracted is what is evocative, from the exterior. that archaeology is not deep enough, Shimoda shows me, in his own archaeology of Japanese America. the locating he does himself to fully recover and remember a diaspora of the oppressed, in addition to being geographical, takes place in the interior.

to think about (all of) what the nonfiction in these essays could be, i am thinking about the archetypes of a nonfiction that fails to represent what Shimoda wants to represent. when my school's SJP chapter was planning a vigil to memorialize the Palestinians killed in genocide, i remember how people also hoped and struggled to commemorate the living; there was an apprehension about sending messaging akin to saying that the only “good” Palestinian was a dead one. what more do the oppressed, “curated onto a wall in the unfathomable future”, owe us? a museum has a similar effect in the name of preservation, as if what it claims to memorialize is over, and as finite as a curation. it is an artifact of tragic pieces already put whole again, with nothing else to inquire, and without that inquiry, to forget.

how can a nonfiction become and be, while avoiding this? why does it takes a martyr for history to become and be history? i realize that i am not immune to veer into violence when i write either ... my last short story was about overdose, death, and near-death. my last poem involved a firearm. a creative writing guide i perused last semester instructed writers to disavow acts of interiority in favor of action on the exterior. meanwhile, as a reader, i (problematically) find myself looking, as i read, for some poetic reason to cry, whether funereal or lethal or tragic. but Shimoda’s (a poet) nonfiction, focused on contemplation and everyday life, focused on the living, and actively animating the dead through the living (none of these albeit celebratory), had me crying at random points, hard, and without expectation or anticipation.

it is an interior nonfiction that takes place mostly in remembering and it still achieved tragedy to me, i think, in rendering a truth that history is not only ongoing, but cyclical. in Shimoda’s own “museum of painful memory” (as he imagines as perhaps the only righteous portrayal of Japanese America), the emotions felt from things that happened in history are emotions that continue to be felt by all descendants of the incarcerated. on ancestors, Mia Ayumi Mahlotra says: “I live with their wounds, their shame, their proclivities”; “I wonder how much of my hurt and rage belong to them—to all of us,” Brynn Saito says; “I believe we’re feedback loops,” says Fred Sasaki. strikingly, Shimoda’s dialogue tag of choice here is “continued”, not necessarily contriving something like a common narrative, but instead finding something that can be enduring (intergenerationally, interpersonally, inter-narratively). and doesn't the feedback Sasaki imagines multiply, as endurance, naturally, endures? the american establishment today seeks so badly to invent new scapegoats, to break families apart and continue incarceration under changed names like ICE. no record of oppressions is static, and it could be any one of ours.

in any instance, writing like this is aversion towards a bigotry that is ultimately internecine. and writing, also, is “like an exorcism” of what haunts our internals in consequence.

but we, even as writers, do not possess an authoritative voice; our nonfiction of the world is nothing without asking, asking *others*, including answers. Shimoda disclaims in his anthropology of diaspora, “it is not until a fragment is found that it becomes, paradoxically, missing.” the fragment found first is often a fragment of our own, that triggers our writing itself. but the incoming fragments discovered through each of Shimoda’s empirical observations, different fragments shared by different people, somehow fit also among his and each others’, ultimately into this. almost interchangeably, the people of this book share all — memories, phenomena, poetry, feelings — that remains individually, discretely, intact.

the pressure that is oppression (and the containment that is incarceration) is a crystallizing force. i imagine that the retrieval of each fragment is another crystallizing force. and by being it, could it be reclamation?

referencing the correspondence of a separated Japanese American couple, Shimoda considers them “surrogates” who help him imagine his own grandfather, writing letters in incarceration. in the life we must give others in our writing, we transplant their memories to be everyone’s memories. even if not all of the fragments in any of our inquiries can be truly retrieved, even if the truth is that many of the “dead are deprived of a place in the lives—the days and nights, thoughts and feelings—of the living”, a truth still stands that they can can be remembered.

[Jimgosailing]

NYRB article “Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration” by Francisco Cantú (4/24/25):
“[Shimoda] uses the words, incarceration and concentration camp with researched intention ‘I do not remember when I first heard of internment, which was the only word that seemed to exist… it was not until years later that I learned that it was not an internment camp, but a concentration camp; that internment refers to the detention of non-citizens while incarceration refers to the detention of citizens; that 2/3 of the people who were incarcerated were citizens, and that the other third were not citizens because they were not eligible by law to become citizens.’”

It wasn’t until he read Joy Kowaga’s 1981 novel Obasan, a fictionalized version of her families incarceration in Canada that his awareness truly began. In his introduction to a recent collection of Kowaga’s poems, Shimoda writes:
‘It was her experience, and the lifelong reaching back to retrieve it from being, by force and forgetting, erased, that introduced me to incarceration, not the experiences of my own family member members… about which I mournfully yet mundane knew nothing.’

In her 2017 book City of Inmates the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández describes how the once relatively small US prison system began to expand to accommodate a rise in immigration convictions after the passage of the 1929 undesirable aliens act which transformed undocumented border crossings into a criminal rather than an administrative charge. ‘by the end of the 1930s… imprisonment for unlawful entry bulged the federal penal system, tipped its expansion towards the borderlands, and recast the meaning of immigrant detention into punishment for crime.’”

“ consider Fort Sill, which - before it was a site for Japanese American incarceration before it was used to detain migrant Children- was founded as a military outpost in America’s conquest of the frontier, a base from which war was waged against the Comanche, the Kiowa and the Cheyenne. later, it became a prison camp for Chiracahua Apache forcibly removed from the Southwest and, concurrently, an Indian boarding school, where generations of children were separated from their parents until its closure in 1980. Sometimes a place’s afterlife is barely an afterlife at all, but a grim continuation of the life it had before.

[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.

[DALYN MILLER · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Afterlife is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda is a deeply reflective and intellectually powerful collection of essays that explores the enduring impact of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Through a blend of personal narrative, historical inquiry, and poetic introspection, Shimoda crafts a work that is both expansive in scope and intimate in its emotional resonance.

What makes this book particularly compelling is its concept of the “afterlife” of historical trauma. Rather than focusing solely on past events, Shimoda examines how the consequences of forced removal and incarceration continue to reverberate across generations. This perspective transforms the work into a living dialogue between past and present, memory and reality.

The structure of the essays layered, multi voiced, and often meditative adds to the depth of the reading experience. Shimoda’s poetic background is evident in the precision and rhythm of his prose, allowing complex themes to unfold with clarity and emotional weight. His integration of personal and familial history alongside broader historical contexts creates a narrative that feels both grounded and expansive.

Another strength of the book lies in its exploration of connections. Shimoda draws parallels between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of systemic injustice, prompting readers to consider how patterns of exclusion, displacement, and state violence persist over time. This approach gives the work a contemporary relevance that extends beyond its historical focus.

As the essays progress, themes of memory, identity, and healing emerge with quiet intensity. The physical journeys to sites of incarceration and memorials are mirrored by a deeper, metaphysical search for understanding and reconciliation. This duality enriches the narrative, making it both thought-provoking and deeply moving.

Ultimately, The Afterlife is Letting Go is more than a historical reflection it is a profound meditation on trauma, remembrance, and the possibility of healing. It will resonate strongly with readers interested in history, social justice, and literary nonfiction that challenges and expands perspective.

[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.

[Graeme Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brandon Shimoda’s The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a masterful, deeply meditative collection of essays that navigates the enduring repercussions of Japanese American incarceration during WWII. Shimoda blends personal and familial reflection with historical investigation, taking readers on a journey through memory, trauma, and resilience. His writing is precise, lyrical, and intellectually rigorous, balancing intimate narrative with broad social critique. The collection is both heartbreaking and illuminating, demonstrating how historical injustices resonate across generations and communities. A profoundly necessary work, it challenges readers to reckon with the past while offering pathways to understanding and healing.

[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.

[Luc · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gorgeous, evocative, lyrical memoir-monograph on the afterlives of the incarceration camps Japanese American were forced into around WWII. Sometimes very academic, perhaps needlessly so with its high register, but the personal link between author and subject shines through - and the collaborative choral sections, centering the voices of survivors and descendants, are a highlight.

[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.