The grave on the wall

The concept of family is a fractured one for poet Shimoda. His relationship with his father is not spoken of, but he does feel a special closeness to his grandfather, Midori Shimoda. Despite that bond, only broken composites make up the larger picture: Midori as immigrant, professional photographer, struggling husband, a resident of the Japanese internment camps in Montana, and finally, as a victim of Alzheimer's, torn from his mind as he dies in a home far away from home. Shimoda (Desert, 2018) brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. The grandson looks for his grandfather's origin story in Nakanose, a town near Hiroshima that may no longer be whole; pieces together the ugly history of the U.S. internment camps, and wrestles with the remove at which he views his grandfather toward the sunset of his life. It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle; born on the shores of Japan's Inland Sea, he dies near its namesake, a lake in North Carolina. In between is a life marked with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb.--Poornima Apte Copyright 2010 Booklist

An American poet of Japanese descent illuminates the tensions that exploded with World War II and the aftershocks within his family.By the time Shimoda (The Desert, 2018, etc.) came to know his grandfather, the latter was suffering from Alzheimer's, and thus it was only after his death that the author began to untangle the narrative of his life as a citizen of one country living in another. The resonance of the story that he pieces together, through pilgrimages back to Japan and across the United States, extends well beyond a single family or ethnicity to the soul of his own native country, where "white settlers were the original aliens. They sought to diffuse their alienation, by claiming the land and controlling the movement and rights of the people for whom the land was not alien, but ancestral." Shimoda's grandfather was conceived in Honolulu and born in Japan, and he crossed the ocean to Seattle as a 9-year-old boy, without the rest of his family. World War II turned him into an "enemy alien," though, as the author writes, "he was not born an enemy alien. He was made into an enemy alien. The first (alien) phase was immigration. The third (enemy) phase was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second phase was the transition. Which was, for a Japanese man, ineligible for citizenship, compulsory." He was a trained photographer, and by all evidence, a very good and sensitive one, but the main offense on which he was initially incarcerated was possessing a camera. Shimoda wades through memories and dreams; lives and graves that have no names documented; unspeakable horrors committed by the country where his grandfather lived on the people of his native country; and the attempts to memorialize what is too graphically terrible to remember. By the end, writes the author, "I was just learning how to see."A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.