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The Afterlife is Letting Go
�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.
“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.
- GenresHistoryEssaysNonfiction
272 pages, Paperback
First published December 10, 2024
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307 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 12, 2025
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.
March 24, 2025
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
December 2, 2024
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.
This is an introduction to an interview that first appeared in Tupelo Quarterly.
January 11, 2025
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.
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.
April 17, 2025
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.
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.
January 28, 2025
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.
December 21, 2024
A lyrical reflection on the afterlives of wartime incarceration.
January 2, 2025
Beautifully written book of essays about the Japanese American incarceration during WWII.
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