A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter's Return to Tule Lake

by Tamiko Nimura

A deeply affecting memoir of reckoning with a father’s death and the Japanese American incarceration

In a moving conversation with the past, Tamiko Nimura explores her late father’s life and her family’s wartime history at Tule Lake. The typewritten pages of her father’s unpublished memoir―written decades earlier about his childhood behind barbed wire―spark a reckoning with the long shadow of parental loss and the unresolved legacy of incarceration.

Following an innovative structure, Nimura interlaces her father’s vivid recollections with her own: scenes of camp life, family separation, and resistance alongside her present-day journey as a mother, writer, and descendant. Joining a community pilgrimage to Tule Lake transforms inherited pain into collective remembrance.

With honesty and lyrical precision, Nimura shows how intergenerational trauma and silence are transmitted, and how confronting them can foster healing. Part memoir, part dialogue with the past, A Place for What We Lose illuminates the enduring costs of incarceration while honoring the persistence of family, memory, and story. It is a profoundly moving exploration of grief, history, and the fragile but necessary work of resilience.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Race, Aapi, Asian Literature

296 pages, Hardcover

Published April 28, 2026

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tamiko Nimura's father, siblings and parents were incarcerated at Tule Lake concentration camp during World War II. Two decades later, her father wrote a memoir—never published—about his experiences during those years. He died in 1984, when Tamiko was 10 years old.

The above paragraph lists the factual basis for Tamiko Nimura's book, but does not reveal the generational trauma that Nimura explores with great emotional depth and sensitivity. She interweaves excerpts of her father's memoir with her own thoughts on the impact of the Japanese incarceration on herself, her family and the larger Japanese community. This was a heartrending and honest book and, as she writes, a lesson for our time, as well:

"...I want people to know about camp, to know my dad's story, which is part of my community story, which is part of American history. I want people to have questions.
Will you remember it now?
Why are we doing it again?"

[Kendra Schroeder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir was extremely touching. I found it couldn't put it down! Living in southern Oregon, I have always been intrigued by the WWII incarceration that happened so close to me. This was a piece of history never taught growing up, and that is a shame. I enjoyed how the timelines wound together as the story unfolded. As someone who has also lost a parent at a fairly young age, I loved how the author explored grief and loss. Thank you for putting such a powerful book out in the world and sharing your family history.

[Megumi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply touching book which is as much an intimate dealing with grief and family memory as it is a close examination of Japanese American incarceration and its infrequently discussed emotional effects/after-effects. Nimura makes this history very personal, bringing ancestral, inter generational, “historical” trauma into the present—which is exactly how trauma operates, temporally and physically borderless.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that needed to be written, for the author's peace of mind and to inform readers about the Japanese-American incarceration during World War II. At the age of ten my family moved to the Klamath Indian Reservation (shortly before the U.S. government saw fit to terminate the tribe and sell off the land--another story of injustice), and I discovered the books of Yoshiko Uchida. She too had been sent to an internment camp with her family, as had a family friend we got to know, and their stories opened my eyes to racism and the denial of freedom to a group of people for no logical reason.

Here, Tamiko Nimura has uncovered the story of her father's family, interned at Tule Lake when he was a child. It's a journey back in time as well as a pilgrimage to the site, where she looks for signs of her father, who died when she was young. This is a story of the generations that were affected by their ancestors' experiences, and how they continue to try to come to terms with how a government can so easily break its promises.

It is not lost on the author or the reader that this is happening again 80 years later to another group of Americans. I ask myself once again, why must history repeat itself instead of standing as an example of what not to do?

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm fascinated by intergenerational trauma narratives, and this is a good and timely addition to the genre. Nimura intersperses her father's unpublished memoir (written in the late 1960s) of growing up in the Tule Lake concentration camp during WWII with her own account of the pain, silence, bitterness, and strength handed down from her Nisei relatives. An academic and historian by training, she makes a case for this braided narrative as unique from other camp literature. It is an-all-too relevant story of a country caving to its worst inclinations, a reflection on the power of and need for storytelling, and a moving love letter to a father. I cried when, near the end of the book, she tells a photo of her 11-year-old father, "You will get out. I'm coming for you."

[Evelyn Frankforter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a cool book. It is fascinating that you dont only get excerpts about life in the camps, but also how those experiences have left impressions on the next generation as well. I loved the chapters where Nimura challenged her father's manuscript and asked questions that felt unanswered or not entirely honest. Absolutely have to recommend this one. I consider myself someone who is more aware of camps than the average person, but there was still a lot to learn from this book. I feel that it really enriched and deepened my understanding of camp history.

[Marleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tamiko Nimura has written a very personal book which combines her father’s story of his childhood in a Japanese American Concentration Camp during WWII and her own reflections about how she learned this history. Nimura had this opportunity because of a crisis in her own life where she was denied tenure at a university that she was worked at for a number of years. Now she was no longer a professor what was she?Crisis leads to opportunity and this gave her time to fully explore her grief and anger at her father’s untimely passing.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautiful, layered memoir breathes into the deep space of loss and trauma with so much love and care. Reading this book was painful, beautiful, and revelatory. What a powerful act to bring her father’s Tule Lake memoir to print within her own narrative of loss of her father and an academic career. This book is generous, honest, and profoundly moving.

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving tribute to her father, accepting and understanding the power of the past and her family.....seeing, hearing, feeling her father's words, an unpublished manuscript of his memories as a young boy sent to Tule Lake and her exploration and findings in researching the past.

[Leslie Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subject of this book is compelling but I found the writing to lack something. It feels like the author works hard to make a full book from her young memory of her father and his 'book' written following internment.

[Tbfrank · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Place for What We Lose is a multifaceted gift to every reader: a breathtakingly poignant memoir; a personal expression of love given and received; a testament to the strength of family across generations and the power of a resilient community; a reminder the evil that stems from fear and hatred is not dormant but resurgent; and lastly, an invitation to remember the people, places, and events that have been forgotten, ignored, and erased to salve a tender conscience.