The Afterlife is Letting Go

(Paperback)

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A memoiristic travelogue that illuminates the enduring legacy of the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War II.

In a series of reflective, multi-layered, and sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the afterlife of the U.S. governments forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate todayin storytelling and silence, in literature and art, in legislation and protest. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.

This is a book about memory, how we remember and how we forget, and how remembering often takes the form of forgetting. Shimoda attempts to answer this pivotal question (posed by Christina Sharpe, in her influential work): How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing 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.

Held together throughout by excerpts from interviews, conversations, and correspondence with over 200 descendants of people who were incarcerated, this is also a book about community, as well as a tribute to it.

Reviews

Praise for The Grave on the Wall:

Winner of the 2020 PEN Open Book Award

"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

"The Grave on the Wall is a passage of aching nostalgia and relentless assembly out of which something more important than objective truth is conjureda ritual frisson, a veracity of spirit. I am grateful to have traveled along.Trisha Low, The Believer

"Intergenerational knowledge must be actively sought, researched and retrievedit's not a given. But while attentive to the work of remembering, Shimoda also writes through the slipperier terrain of experiencing ones ancestry in the present, never fully manifest but felt and lived."Frieze Magazine

"In this memoir, Shimoda . . . tells a universal story of the horrors of war both physical and emotional, and the tensions that linger among people long after the wars are over."Literary Hub

"Relying on his skills as a poet, Shimoda enhances the elusive details of [his grandfather's] life with his own journeys of discovery, creating an impressive prose debut. "Shelf Awareness, starred review

Brandon Shimodas The Grave on the Wall is a wondrous feat of memory work, reportage, and writing.Judges' Citation, PEN Open Book Award

"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 Rulfos Pedro Pramo, 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

Author Bio

Brandon Shimoda is a 2020 Whiting Fellow, and the author of several books of poetry and prose, including Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the co-editor of To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014) and an anthology of poetry on WWII Nikkei incarceration (forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2025). He currently lives in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College.