Karen Tei Yamashita ’73 publishes acclaimed novel with Graywolf Press
Yamashita studied English and had a special major at Carleton.
Karen Tei Yamashita ’73 published her first novel in 16 years, Questions 27 and 28, with Graywolf Press. It has been reviewed in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among other outlets.
The New York Times published a full review, “She Began with Japanese American History. Then She Made Things Up.” that covers how “in her sprawling new novel, Karen Tei Yamashita sprinkles fanciful details (a trombone narrator!) into the bracing story of World War II internment.”
On a recent morning, the novelist Karen Tei Yamashita was at home in this beachfront town, talking about the time she came upon a little-known — but enormous — archive of materials at the University of California at Berkeley.
There were 335 boxes containing records related to the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), a controversial research project conducted inside Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II.
The Berkeley sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas had enlisted young students, themselves prisoners inside the camps, to report on their fellow prisoners — and, in the end, on themselves. Among other things, the study sought to uncover what sorts of people were imprisoned, who was loyal, and who was not. The study was also, by several measures, grossly unethical.
“She had hired these people, who were basically kids, and they were doing this secretly, typing these things out and mailing them over to Berkeley out of the camps,” Yamashita said.
As she learned more about the project, Yamashita, whose own parents were incarcerated at the Topaz camp in Utah, had further questions about the experience. What does loyalty mean? How could you demonstrate loyalty to a nation that’s unjustly imprisoned you? Why would you even want to?
Those questions and others led Yamashita to write “Questions 27 & 28,” her first novel in 16 years, which Graywolf Press published in late April. A 450-page chronicle of the Japanese American experience, the book leans on the actual stories of figures like Yone Noguchi, the first Japanese-born writer to publish poetry in English, and Yuri Kochiyama, a civil rights activist and friend of Malcolm X.
But despite its historical trappings, Yamashita insists the book is a novel.
That’s because Yamashita, a storyteller of the first order, is having a bit of fun, often a lot of fun, with her subjects. In one chapter, she imagines two heroes of the Japanese American reparations movement discussing historic civil rights cases in the afterlife; in another, we hear the story of Harry Kitano, a pioneering social scientist and U.C.L.A. professor, narrated by his trombone.
“I guess it’s a roman à clef in that respect,” Yamashita, 75, admitted over cups of Earl Grey at her home on the campus of U.C. Santa Cruz, where she is a professor emerita. “I don’t know. After I had studied all of this, it just sort of came out of me.”
The New York Times also included Question 27 and 28 in “Luminous New Historical Fiction,” a columnist’s list of the best books of the month.
QUESTIONS 27 & 28 (Graywolf, 450 pp., $30) takes its title from two crucial items in the loyalty questionnaire Japanese American internees were asked to answer during World War II — whether they would serve in the U.S. military and whether they would renounce any allegiance to the emperor. The sheer hypocrisy of making such demands of people (many of them native-born citizens) whose fundamental rights had already been ignored is just one of the messages of this ambitious, wide-ranging pastiche of fiction and documentation, a hybrid novel that also serves as an idiosyncratic history of the Japanese experience in America before, during and after the war.
Yamashita includes well-known figures — Isamu Noguchi, Daniel K. Inouye, the Hiroshima maidens — as well as those whose stories are only preserved in archives, oral histories and legal briefs. The shape of the narrative changes along with its sources and inspirations, sometimes dense with alarming facts and at other times almost whimsical. Dedicated, as one character puts it, to the “little histories” that are overshadowed by “big history.”
The New Yorker published a full book review as well, titled, “The Novelist Reimagining the Japanese American Internment.”
In 1943, the United States government administered a questionnaire to people of Japanese descent who had been confined to wartime concentration camps in California, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Arkansas. The forced imprisonment of some hundred and twenty thousand residents, a majority of whom were U.S. citizens, rested on dubious evidence that they posed any meaningful threat to American safety. The removal orders seemed cruel and arbitrary, given that they applied only to people living on the West Coast. Still, the government sought to measure their loyalty. The title of Karen Tei Yamashita’s fifth novel, “Questions 27 & 28” (Graywolf), refers to the survey’s last two questions:
- Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?
- Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?