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The Grave on the Wall
A memoir and book of mourning, a grandson's attempt to reconcile his own uncontested citizenship with his grandfather's lifelong struggle.
Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life--child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen--mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the twentieth century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather, and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting.
Praise for The Grave on the Wall
"Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. ... It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle ... In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb."--Booklist, starred review
"In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making."--Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory
"Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo's Pedro P�ramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate."--Myriam Gurba, author of Mean
"Within this haunted sepulcher built out of silence, loss, and grief--its walls shadowed by the traumas of racial oppression and violence--a green river lined with peach trees flows beneath a bridge that leads back to the grandson."--Jeffrey Yang, author of Hey, Marfa: Poems
"It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces--through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, Where are you from? I would answer, From The Grave on the Wall."--Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War
"Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. This mystery is part of each of us. Shimoda outlines that mystery in silence and silhouette, in objects left behind at site-specific travels to Japan and in the disparate facts of his grandpa's FBI file. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge."--Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future
"Shimoda is a mystic writer ... He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. ... he has written a book that touches the bottom of my own soul."--Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue
Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life--child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen--mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the twentieth century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather, and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting.
Praise for The Grave on the Wall
"Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. ... It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle ... In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb."--Booklist, starred review
"In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making."--Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory
"Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo's Pedro P�ramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate."--Myriam Gurba, author of Mean
"Within this haunted sepulcher built out of silence, loss, and grief--its walls shadowed by the traumas of racial oppression and violence--a green river lined with peach trees flows beneath a bridge that leads back to the grandson."--Jeffrey Yang, author of Hey, Marfa: Poems
"It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces--through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, Where are you from? I would answer, From The Grave on the Wall."--Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War
"Shimoda intercedes into the absences, gaps and interstices of the present and delves the presence of mystery. This mystery is part of each of us. Shimoda outlines that mystery in silence and silhouette, in objects left behind at site-specific travels to Japan and in the disparate facts of his grandpa's FBI file. Gratitude to Brandon Shimoda for taking on the mystery which only literature accepts as the basic challenge."--Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future
"Shimoda is a mystic writer ... He puts what breaches itself (always) onto the page, so that the act of writing becomes akin to paper-making: an attention to fibers, coagulation, texture and the water-fire mixtures that signal irreversible alteration or change. ... he has written a book that touches the bottom of my own soul."--Bhanu Kapil, author of Ban en Banlieue
222 pages, Paperback
First published July 23, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
October 13, 2020
In this moving, intelligent work, Brandon Shimoda attempts to trace the life of his grandfather Midori, who died in America far from his birthplace near Hiroshima. Shimoda’s exploration's rapidly intertwined with a wider history of twentieth-century, Japanese-Americans. His great-grandmother’s experiences expose the trauma of the ‘picture brides’ exported to segregated California in the early 1900s,
“given pamphlets by immigration training societies on how to dress and bathe and walk like a Western Woman, how to sit on a toilet, how to cook food that would not offend their white American neighbors. They were not, due to legislation…, permitted to become American, but they were expected to behave American…both exemplary and invisible.”
FBI files lead to the WW2 camps for Japanese-Americans, where Midori was interned. The chance discovery of a series of photographs by Midori in an archive conjures up recollections of Ansel Adams’s famous photographs of Japanese-American internees, Adams instructed them to smile,
”to assuage White anxiety, by affirming a kind of loyalty in which white Americans could believe.”
Later journeys, first by Midori then Brandon take them to deserted villages and isolated family graves, and expose the ambiguity of ties to their ancestors’ vanished Japan; Shimoda’s visit to Hiroshima and its Hibakusha community, sets off reflections on his unexpected reactions to the city’s statues and museums, its many sites of memory,
“that outline the lives of war, ogle the effects of war by displaying…objects that exhibit the power of each war’s weapon. To look at a glass bottle twisted and shrunken and to see in it the neck and upper torso of a dead animal is not to consider…where it was the moment before it was blasted, on which table or shelf it sat, or who held it…but to look at the weapon that twisted and shrank it and marvel over that weapon’s power, that made an animal from an inanimate object.”
Brandon Shimoda’s foremost a poet. Highlighted here by his persuasive use of imagery, lyrical prose and his unorthodox mingling of fact, memory, Japanese myth and folklore with more personal portraits of grief – suggesting the complexities of trying to forge a sense of self from fragments of a far-distant past. The Grave on the Wall has a collage-like quality, so some passages only come into focus viewed in the context of the whole. This impression’s intensified by the way Shimoda's text's interwoven with paintings, photographs and extracts from other writers ranging from Roland Barthes, Julie Otsuka, James Baldwin, to Kurosawa ─ Shimoda’s explicit intertextuality seems to situate Midori and his family within a broader, ongoing narrative springing from questions of culture, identity and recovered immigrant histories. I thought Shimoda’s style, and the structuring of his material, was incredibly evocative and impressive – although there are passages where I found the lyricism a little too marked – everything finally combining to produce a strikingly original, memorable piece.
“given pamphlets by immigration training societies on how to dress and bathe and walk like a Western Woman, how to sit on a toilet, how to cook food that would not offend their white American neighbors. They were not, due to legislation…, permitted to become American, but they were expected to behave American…both exemplary and invisible.”
FBI files lead to the WW2 camps for Japanese-Americans, where Midori was interned. The chance discovery of a series of photographs by Midori in an archive conjures up recollections of Ansel Adams’s famous photographs of Japanese-American internees, Adams instructed them to smile,
”to assuage White anxiety, by affirming a kind of loyalty in which white Americans could believe.”
Later journeys, first by Midori then Brandon take them to deserted villages and isolated family graves, and expose the ambiguity of ties to their ancestors’ vanished Japan; Shimoda’s visit to Hiroshima and its Hibakusha community, sets off reflections on his unexpected reactions to the city’s statues and museums, its many sites of memory,
“that outline the lives of war, ogle the effects of war by displaying…objects that exhibit the power of each war’s weapon. To look at a glass bottle twisted and shrunken and to see in it the neck and upper torso of a dead animal is not to consider…where it was the moment before it was blasted, on which table or shelf it sat, or who held it…but to look at the weapon that twisted and shrank it and marvel over that weapon’s power, that made an animal from an inanimate object.”
Brandon Shimoda’s foremost a poet. Highlighted here by his persuasive use of imagery, lyrical prose and his unorthodox mingling of fact, memory, Japanese myth and folklore with more personal portraits of grief – suggesting the complexities of trying to forge a sense of self from fragments of a far-distant past. The Grave on the Wall has a collage-like quality, so some passages only come into focus viewed in the context of the whole. This impression’s intensified by the way Shimoda's text's interwoven with paintings, photographs and extracts from other writers ranging from Roland Barthes, Julie Otsuka, James Baldwin, to Kurosawa ─ Shimoda’s explicit intertextuality seems to situate Midori and his family within a broader, ongoing narrative springing from questions of culture, identity and recovered immigrant histories. I thought Shimoda’s style, and the structuring of his material, was incredibly evocative and impressive – although there are passages where I found the lyricism a little too marked – everything finally combining to produce a strikingly original, memorable piece.
March 30, 2021
Midway through Shimoda writes, “We are much safer at the threshold of memory, just outside of it, where all of our feelings are correct, with no particular object to clarify, to be made specific, to be made genuine, real.”
This memoir, written in prose-poetry, is about crossing that threshold, about stepping into memory. Shimoda investigates memories and second-hand experiences that, with time, become like graves. He excavates the memories and experiences of his deceased grandfather, the Japanese people who suffered violence and injustice at the hands of America, the language of dead relatives. The reader is invited, in turn, to haunt Shimoda’s memories and experiences, as well as those of the people and places he reflects on.
What emerges is a profound, mystical meditation on how absence, identity, and silence shape consciousness. It is a sublime work that I cannot recommend enough.
This memoir, written in prose-poetry, is about crossing that threshold, about stepping into memory. Shimoda investigates memories and second-hand experiences that, with time, become like graves. He excavates the memories and experiences of his deceased grandfather, the Japanese people who suffered violence and injustice at the hands of America, the language of dead relatives. The reader is invited, in turn, to haunt Shimoda’s memories and experiences, as well as those of the people and places he reflects on.
What emerges is a profound, mystical meditation on how absence, identity, and silence shape consciousness. It is a sublime work that I cannot recommend enough.
September 16, 2019
This is a curious memoir of a Japanese grandfather the author (Brandon Shimoda) barely remembers. Grandfather Shimoda is lost in a fog of Alzheimer's by the time Brandon wants to hear his story. So Brandon Shimoda, as a poet, must piece together bits and pieces of carefully collected information to create a portrait of not only one man but of himself and the entire Japanese American community. A community which underwent a unique Americanization requiring a virtual suicide of its cultural identity. This silence about the past forced the younger generations, like Shimoda, to create their own version of their parents' and grandparents' stories. His Japanese past and his grandfather's ghost haunt Shimoda and he gracefully translates these murmurs into a thirty-two beautiful essays about a troubled man (and a community). I for one, am grateful that voices, like that of Brandon Shimoda, are beginning to fill the void in the hearts of many Japanese Americans.
November 14, 2019
4.5 stars. I've never seen nonfiction written this way before: kind of stream-of-consciousness and paced like a song or poem. There were moments where I was wondering if I'd actually picked up a nonfiction book or not, 'cause Shimoda randomly starts talking about seeing ghosts around him. Though, come to think of it, I can't remember if it was Shimoda himself "seeing" the ghosts, or if he was talking about someone else from some other book or story having seen the ghost-- he weaves many quotes and references to other stories/poems/books/legends/myths/etc. into Grave on the Wall. I liked the bits and pieces he included, but there were times it got a tad bit confusing to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. Perhaps it is my lack of inner poet and/or inner artist that's giving me difficulty. Regardless, I appreciated getting to tag along with Shimoda on his extensive journey to learn about his grandfather, Midori.
October 9, 2019
Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall brings his grandfather's life into focus. It is a story of immigration and its requisite losses, and also of history, which includes Japanese internment camps where his grandfather was detained. Shimoda shows the reader his process of piecing together his grandfather's story through documents, emails, a page from a phone book, interviews, and of course, his grandfather's photographs. The author's investigation of grief also includes references to texts, including poems and films, because they are touchstones in his journey and help illuminate it for us. Reading, I was struck by what remembering means and what forgetting leaves behind, and how a poet makes sense of the fog.
November 30, 2019
Brandon Shimoda, a poet writes about his grandfather, a photographer. He investigates his life by traveling to places he had lived, obtaining FBI and legal records and trying to reconnect with people who had known him. He explores the effects of prejudice on his grandfather and the horrific treatment of the Japanese during WWII. His writing is elegant and describes the trauma of looking like the enemy.
February 8, 2020
Exceptional memoir. Shimoda's poetic skills elevate the prose and examine the calculus of trying to put value on the figures of one's family and past.
September 20, 2024
I had never seen my grandfather without teeth. A simple thing, but it felt, in that moment, like a violation. Not that he was violating us, but we were violating him. With our naiveté, fear. We were in his house, on his floor, catching him in a private moment, before the bath, in which he was taking himself apart. I was struck with the thought that my grandfather was dead. That he had already died, and had been replaced by a toothless apparition, who was as frightened-of us, of the world that produced children, vaguely familiar permutations of himself as it was frightening. The old man standing above us was not real. That following the removal of his teeth, every part of him could be taken off or out—his limbs, his nose, his eyes, his heart—leaving behind not a man, not my grandfather, but a shelf, more specifically an altar. An altar from which all the relics and offerings had been removed, an altar waiting to be populated, fulfilled. My grandmother was calling him, Midori-san, Midori-san, but she never appeared. She never caught up. The hallway was as long as a lifetime.
- The grave on the wall by Brandon Shimoda
.
The writing is unconventional, but not in a negative sense—rather, it's intriguing. I expected a straightforward memoir about the author's grandfather, Midori, who passed away in America far from his birthplace near Hiroshima. Instead, the book presented me with fragments of his life: you can see many attachments belonged to him or about him inserted between pages such as documents, emails, a page from a phone book, interviews, and photographs. It took some time to adjust to its almost poetic style, unexpected for non-fiction at least to me. The book felt intently not to have a structure, hence why it blended myth, history, family lore, and research which ultimately connected to Brandon Shimoda's family history. The author delves into his grandfather's generation and his experiences as a Japanese immigrant, from his obscure life as a photographer with peculiar artistic works to his internment during World War II and his eventual struggle with dementia. Undeniably, shimoda managed to contextualise his family within broader historical events, particularly highlighting Hiroshima's significance and its impact on Midori's life. While beautifully written, what resonated most with me were the stories of OKIKU, SADAKO, and ASANO—all women—whose tales of trauma and tragedy left a lasting impression. Overall, this book proved challenging yet rewarding, addressing themes of Japanese Americanness, diaspora, imperialism, aging, ancestors, family narratives, death, and legacy.
- The grave on the wall by Brandon Shimoda
.
The writing is unconventional, but not in a negative sense—rather, it's intriguing. I expected a straightforward memoir about the author's grandfather, Midori, who passed away in America far from his birthplace near Hiroshima. Instead, the book presented me with fragments of his life: you can see many attachments belonged to him or about him inserted between pages such as documents, emails, a page from a phone book, interviews, and photographs. It took some time to adjust to its almost poetic style, unexpected for non-fiction at least to me. The book felt intently not to have a structure, hence why it blended myth, history, family lore, and research which ultimately connected to Brandon Shimoda's family history. The author delves into his grandfather's generation and his experiences as a Japanese immigrant, from his obscure life as a photographer with peculiar artistic works to his internment during World War II and his eventual struggle with dementia. Undeniably, shimoda managed to contextualise his family within broader historical events, particularly highlighting Hiroshima's significance and its impact on Midori's life. While beautifully written, what resonated most with me were the stories of OKIKU, SADAKO, and ASANO—all women—whose tales of trauma and tragedy left a lasting impression. Overall, this book proved challenging yet rewarding, addressing themes of Japanese Americanness, diaspora, imperialism, aging, ancestors, family narratives, death, and legacy.
May 20, 2020
Most of the coverage surrounding this book paints it as being Brandon Shimoda's rendering of his grandfather's life, but I don't think that's accurate. His grandfather, Midori, is often at the center of his questions and he does journey to places looking for answers, but there are pieces that are much broader than the scope of one man's life.
Shimoda includes Japanese myths/stories (the ghostly telling of Okiku, for example), references to other people (the first Japanese to be photographed in the U.S.), mentions of other texts.
Zooming out, Shimoda places his family in context to other events. His grandfather grew up in Hiroshima. The atomic bombs are featured, circling around Midori's life. There are gruesome details, narratives like Sadako and the thousand cranes and other childhood remembrances of the horrific bombing, and the irony that someone Midori knew was flying in the sky as part of the U.S. Army, watching as the Enola Gay dropped the bomb.
Shimoda's family history is entwined with tragedy. Armed with little information but Midori's FBI file, he tracks down his grandfather's photographs and takes a trip to the place where he was incarcerated during WWII.
Yes, this book is a portrait of Brandon Shimoda's grandfather, but it's also an unflinching portrayal of the resilience of his family as well as a glimpse into the Japanese American experience and trauma faced in the 20th century that causes residual pain.
Shimoda includes Japanese myths/stories (the ghostly telling of Okiku, for example), references to other people (the first Japanese to be photographed in the U.S.), mentions of other texts.
Zooming out, Shimoda places his family in context to other events. His grandfather grew up in Hiroshima. The atomic bombs are featured, circling around Midori's life. There are gruesome details, narratives like Sadako and the thousand cranes and other childhood remembrances of the horrific bombing, and the irony that someone Midori knew was flying in the sky as part of the U.S. Army, watching as the Enola Gay dropped the bomb.
Shimoda's family history is entwined with tragedy. Armed with little information but Midori's FBI file, he tracks down his grandfather's photographs and takes a trip to the place where he was incarcerated during WWII.
Yes, this book is a portrait of Brandon Shimoda's grandfather, but it's also an unflinching portrayal of the resilience of his family as well as a glimpse into the Japanese American experience and trauma faced in the 20th century that causes residual pain.
December 24, 2020
The author traces his grandfather's life from his immigration, internment, the postwar years. This is also the meditation on the dead who live in the forms of memories, stories, and rituals. "The more the living speak and breathe, I thought, the more light and heat are given to the dead. All but wandering ghosts want to be dead, to formulate within the consciousness of their death the continuation of life. But that is life in death, not life. Light and heat are recourses we insist upon to keep life afloat, but that is memory where there is no life. We cannot stop speaking about the dead, breathing up and down their bodies, with which we stock our silences, while fantasizing the contours of the dead as they once were in life, or might have been, but do we ever actually think of the dead as dead?"
November 7, 2024
as good a day as any to consider the fact we live on land maintained & defined by an endlessly proliferating thicket of curses... everything i'm thinking & have thought about as a yonsei thoughtcabineting my grandparents & the quote unquote chimera of american grief&violence, brandon shimoda already had mystic visions about in like 2015. one might think fully comprehending these topics would burn the (mine and his) eyes out raiders of the lost ark style but actually the content of the book is... like an angel caught, at least partially, inside a vessel that my highly affected & having a deeply personal stake involving an infinite familial wound in it mind can stand... very very good, thankful to have read it
February 24, 2023
"The ancestors are always arranging, the hands reaching from all generations to locate me in a body that is also theirs."
It seems rare to encounter another human being whose idiosyncratic obsessions line up exactly with your own. Perhaps being yonsei narrows this possibility quite a bit because to be obsessed with ancestors (both remembered and forgotten) seems integral to how we make sense of the histories inscribed in our bodies. All of this is to say, this book was an answer to the question: do I really exist? In the reflection of his writing, I came to know myself.
I am still trying to understand the fullness of the history he offers, suffused with dreamscapes and detailed descriptions of encountered art. I would call this book perfect. It presents questions and answers, the answers not necessarily related to the questions but when taken together a glassy picture forms of how we may know each other and know ourselves. My people my people. A refrain of Fatimah Asghar that comes to mind when I reflect on Brandon's work.
The boy who calls out to the spirits, "I can buy peaches in the store! But where can I buy a whole orchard in bloom?" This book was an orchard in bloom.
[edit] Brandon Shimoda is a leo.
It seems rare to encounter another human being whose idiosyncratic obsessions line up exactly with your own. Perhaps being yonsei narrows this possibility quite a bit because to be obsessed with ancestors (both remembered and forgotten) seems integral to how we make sense of the histories inscribed in our bodies. All of this is to say, this book was an answer to the question: do I really exist? In the reflection of his writing, I came to know myself.
I am still trying to understand the fullness of the history he offers, suffused with dreamscapes and detailed descriptions of encountered art. I would call this book perfect. It presents questions and answers, the answers not necessarily related to the questions but when taken together a glassy picture forms of how we may know each other and know ourselves. My people my people. A refrain of Fatimah Asghar that comes to mind when I reflect on Brandon's work.
The boy who calls out to the spirits, "I can buy peaches in the store! But where can I buy a whole orchard in bloom?" This book was an orchard in bloom.
[edit] Brandon Shimoda is a leo.
August 22, 2020
"Are ghosts anomalous to the rule of life? They remind us that life is a compositional process, with seams and fissures between moments [that] allow for ghosts to emerge--through the rage, regret, foreclosure, the infinite spoils of the soul of the living. If death is the rule, ghosts become the living. Do the living then become the anomaly?" - The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda, pp. 113-114.
A calming, haunted story of pilgrimage, discovery, and reconnection with lost family history. The author pieces together his grandfather's life from interviews, historical sources, journeys to ancestral places, and his own patchwork memories and knowledge about his grandfather. This book resonated with me SO MUCH because of the loss of my Nisei grandmother, who experienced dementia similarly to Shimoda's grandfather's Alzheimer's, and for all of the unsaid and unknown histories within Japanese American families. Without her, I had to re-ground myself in the collective JA experience and that was hard. So: when the book cover review says, "If someone asked me, where are you from? I would answer, from the Grave on the Wall" - Same. Same.
(Some technical issues in my opinion, but a proseful, artful representation of Japanese American experience.)
A calming, haunted story of pilgrimage, discovery, and reconnection with lost family history. The author pieces together his grandfather's life from interviews, historical sources, journeys to ancestral places, and his own patchwork memories and knowledge about his grandfather. This book resonated with me SO MUCH because of the loss of my Nisei grandmother, who experienced dementia similarly to Shimoda's grandfather's Alzheimer's, and for all of the unsaid and unknown histories within Japanese American families. Without her, I had to re-ground myself in the collective JA experience and that was hard. So: when the book cover review says, "If someone asked me, where are you from? I would answer, from the Grave on the Wall" - Same. Same.
(Some technical issues in my opinion, but a proseful, artful representation of Japanese American experience.)
February 10, 2020
An impressive, elegiac hybrid of family history, poetry, and dreams, Shimoda's book is an impressionistic quest for a sense of belonging. Things emerge from fog, atmosphere, photographs. It takes a while to find footing, until you realize that the foundations always shift. Nothing is fixed when it comes to Shimoda's grandfather, Midori. His life follows the narrative of people of his generation, an immigrant from Japan, a photographer, a prisoner of an interment camp, and grandfather with dementia--itself a disease of dreams and fractured memory. The book zooms in and out, addressing intimate family memories and mass graves (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the World Trade Center) and the impotence of memorials. More and more is revealed if you allow yourself to go with the particular, poetic pace, where pictures are confused with the real, and the kind of road trip we all imagine taking to find the truth of our pasts.
November 29, 2021
Still a near-perfect work of creative nonfiction that I continue to use in my Intermediate Creative Nonfiction course for undergraduates in university. We focus on the use of research as a driving factor in developing and complicating the narrative, as an influence on creative choices in form and style, as a model for generative writing exercises. We also discuss the influence of poetry on the writer’s voice (as he is a poet), and consider what poetic devices might be useful for the student writer who is not highly practiced in poetry.
The students are often disturbed by their lack of education around American internment camps and racist treatment of Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese decent.
Upon each new read, I fall in love with another aspect of this work. In fact, I keep choosing to use it as a course text so I have an excuse to read it over and over again.
The students are often disturbed by their lack of education around American internment camps and racist treatment of Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese decent.
Upon each new read, I fall in love with another aspect of this work. In fact, I keep choosing to use it as a course text so I have an excuse to read it over and over again.
October 29, 2019
3 3/4 stars
March 14, 2025
6 ‘The obscurity of the past resided in not understanding.’
25 ‘concentration camps in remote valleys, high deserts, and swamps [...] Detention center, concentration camp: basic units of space the United States has devised for the populations it has written into its self-image as refractory, unassimilable, alien.’
31 ‘What looked familiar, to our desert-less eyes, was repetition [...] We were being enfolded, were already part of it.’
31 ‘A memorial exists in the present, must exist and be attended to and maintained in the present, therefore must constantly be renewed. In the intervening years, the hill moved.’
34 ‘What of the affection that is formed by being drawn into relation with a person or a place, a landscape, that remains wholly unfamiliar?’
43 ‘We were sailing off the map, the map dissolving in our wake.’
54 ‘How often is it asked, for example, if a ghost believes in the living?’
89 ‘That is a form of suffering the memorial enacts: it will not let Mrs. Yamashita die. In aiming to rescue Mrs. Yamashita from the ashes of Nagasaki, the museum has made her permanent. But she has been divided. Dead outside the museum, alive inside, she has become two people, each separated from the other.’
98 ‘People are not often characterized as ruins, even as their disintegration and enshrinement [...] to try to make sense not only of what the ruin is articulating—now, in the present—but what they are, by being there.’
101 ‘What is not the mound? What is not on the dark side of the door? A mound, surrounded by land, dreams of becoming an island, surrounded by water.’
113 ‘Are ghosts anomalous to the rule of life? They remind us that life is a compositional process, with seams and fissures between moments.’
168 ‘The secret life of memorials is not as much a secret as a subtext: that the memorial will not only outlast the people who might remember, who might have experienced, what is being memorialized, but people in general: human beings, entirely. That is what I see when I see seven mounds or twin holes in the ground (or, for that matter, memorial statues, plaques, signposts, inscriptions, etc.): a future in which only memorials remain. Then the future will be the memorial. To all that came before. The mounds and the holes will endure as enigmatic earthworks, expressing, exerting their language, their code, for no audience, but for the people-less earth.’
25 ‘concentration camps in remote valleys, high deserts, and swamps [...] Detention center, concentration camp: basic units of space the United States has devised for the populations it has written into its self-image as refractory, unassimilable, alien.’
31 ‘What looked familiar, to our desert-less eyes, was repetition [...] We were being enfolded, were already part of it.’
31 ‘A memorial exists in the present, must exist and be attended to and maintained in the present, therefore must constantly be renewed. In the intervening years, the hill moved.’
34 ‘What of the affection that is formed by being drawn into relation with a person or a place, a landscape, that remains wholly unfamiliar?’
43 ‘We were sailing off the map, the map dissolving in our wake.’
54 ‘How often is it asked, for example, if a ghost believes in the living?’
89 ‘That is a form of suffering the memorial enacts: it will not let Mrs. Yamashita die. In aiming to rescue Mrs. Yamashita from the ashes of Nagasaki, the museum has made her permanent. But she has been divided. Dead outside the museum, alive inside, she has become two people, each separated from the other.’
98 ‘People are not often characterized as ruins, even as their disintegration and enshrinement [...] to try to make sense not only of what the ruin is articulating—now, in the present—but what they are, by being there.’
101 ‘What is not the mound? What is not on the dark side of the door? A mound, surrounded by land, dreams of becoming an island, surrounded by water.’
113 ‘Are ghosts anomalous to the rule of life? They remind us that life is a compositional process, with seams and fissures between moments.’
168 ‘The secret life of memorials is not as much a secret as a subtext: that the memorial will not only outlast the people who might remember, who might have experienced, what is being memorialized, but people in general: human beings, entirely. That is what I see when I see seven mounds or twin holes in the ground (or, for that matter, memorial statues, plaques, signposts, inscriptions, etc.): a future in which only memorials remain. Then the future will be the memorial. To all that came before. The mounds and the holes will endure as enigmatic earthworks, expressing, exerting their language, their code, for no audience, but for the people-less earth.’
March 19, 2023
I felt like this book was sliding away from me as I read it. It has a dreamlike quality that puts you in Shimoda’s head more than any memoir or nonfiction book I’ve read. This same quality is what also makes it a more challenging read; it’s not a book you can skim, but it’s worth paying attention to the recurring motifs throughout. It’s constructed more like a collage than one story, and it’s a refreshing addition to the Japanese American canon in how it explores and reckons with the inherently interwoven nature of our histories in a realistic, fragmented, inconclusive way. It does so in a way that can only be achieved by someone who has been immediately and emotionally impacted by the history; it has none of the remove or head-tilted analysis that even the best-written white American histories do.
I imagine it was a massive undertaking to write this book, because it articulates all of the types of nebulous, heavy thoughts and ideas (not to mention dreams) that exist on the fringes of family history and trauma. Very interesting read that gives a lot of insight into Brandon Shimoda as well as his grandfather Midori.
I imagine it was a massive undertaking to write this book, because it articulates all of the types of nebulous, heavy thoughts and ideas (not to mention dreams) that exist on the fringes of family history and trauma. Very interesting read that gives a lot of insight into Brandon Shimoda as well as his grandfather Midori.
March 5, 2020
It turns out I was finishing this book just as it was winning the PEN Open Book Award! It was well deserved.
It took me a long time to get through this slim book because it was beautifully written, and there was a lot to process every few pages. Brandon Shimoda combines myth, history, family lore, and research to create a book about his family. For those who have asked family members about the vague stories that are told around family dinners, this book reflects the shadowy edges at which we exist with our family history. How every day we are alive our collective memory gets a little blurrier, and yet how the lives of those that came before us make us who we are in the present.
I recommend this to Elizabeth Warren instead of a DNA test (which the Brandon Shimoda does not once mention in this book).
It took me a long time to get through this slim book because it was beautifully written, and there was a lot to process every few pages. Brandon Shimoda combines myth, history, family lore, and research to create a book about his family. For those who have asked family members about the vague stories that are told around family dinners, this book reflects the shadowy edges at which we exist with our family history. How every day we are alive our collective memory gets a little blurrier, and yet how the lives of those that came before us make us who we are in the present.
I recommend this to Elizabeth Warren instead of a DNA test (which the Brandon Shimoda does not once mention in this book).
April 16, 2020
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. The author searches for his family's past, and therefore for parts of himself, making numerous pilgrimages to grave sites - both physical and metaphorical - along his journey. Only a poet could have created what he has - a book that feels like a living, breathing artifact, where the words on the page are never captive, but always invoke movement. Shimoda has woven together many potentially disparate elements together into an immersive whole that is at once history, dream, philosophy, politics, journal, and poem. It did what the best books do: challenged my ideas about "rules" of writing and inspired me to look at myself and the world in new ways. I loved it!
June 16, 2024
I’ve been meaning to read this for years now, and I’m glad I finally did. It’s hard for me to separate myself from it and talk about it in a way that isn’t ultimately about me, I think, because the topics of Japanese Americanness and diaspora and imperialism and aging and ancestors and family stories and death and legacy, these are all very close to me and my own experience of life. They are perhaps the central questions of my own life. It was meaningful to me to see someone else grapple with these same questions, even if perhaps the way he engages with them is somewhat different from how I do. Or perhaps it was meaningful because of that difference. I don’t know. But it was interesting, to say the least.
October 26, 2022
The Grave on the Wall is a beautifully written history of a grandfather and the people, events, and emotions floating at the periphery. It prompts interesting thinking about haunting and memorializing, and has vividly stuck with me in the month since I finished it. I read this work for a class and got the chance to speak with the author, Brandon Shimoda, who is both brilliant and super chill. The abstraction and non-linear temporality in his writing doesn’t come across forced, as it does in some works I’ve read, and this sense of authenticity increased my enjoyment of The Grave on the Wall.
December 29, 2024
The book was compelling. What I found the most enlightening was how Brandon Shimoda highlighted the struggles of not only women in his grandfather's time on this earth, but the struggles that Japanese woman faced when they came to America as picture brides. I felt that throughout the book he made a point to add the details on these woman whether they were able to be named, or not. I felt their presence. Poetic in nature, I felt his emotional journey as he sought information on the grandfather he knew, and the grandfather he did not.
January 27, 2020
Such a poetic and stunning memoir about Shimoda's search to find out more about his grandfather who lived through Japanese internment in the United States. The prose is so exquisite, I found myself pausing over and over again to just read the beauty of them. Shimoda does a great job of parsing out a familial history of migration, U.S. state violence, and how it impacts his everyday life. Highly recommend.
March 6, 2025
Very delicate, well-articulated story of Brandon Shimoda's grandfather, Midori Shimoda. It has a bit of everything—legends, stories, real stories, dreams, photographs, artwork. I read it for a class on archival work, in our unite on the Japanese internment camps during WWII. Not only did this text educate me on the topic, it provided great inspiration for my own archival projects in the future.
November 22, 2019
I would like to give this book a 3.5. The writing is compelling and evocative. However, I’m not really sure what to take from it. Even Shimoda’s overall searching contained a degree of apathy that made it hard to find a stake.
December 25, 2021
Shimoda’s style is lyrical and atmospheric, but also a bit illusive. There were moments when I felt I was struggling to grasp what he was saying or that I was stumbling after his meaning. I did find this to be a beautiful amalgamation of a memoir, biography, novel, and poetry.
April 8, 2022
So it's a ”memoir” about a world that has ended before the author was born. Reminds me of people writing about their past lives. Only in that case the people are talking about themselves, so at least they are more honest.
June 14, 2023
The Grave on the Wall was dense, lyrical, tender, and foundational to my own poetry, research, and identity. It's a great exploration of family research and what it means to exist alongside one's family past.
December 20, 2019
A very good recollection of a Japanese grandfather in America and the travails of his family.
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