Reviews

Letters to Memory by Karen Tei Yamashita

chiyeungreads's review against another edition

emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad

4.5

tiffanywang29's review against another edition

5.0

Exhilarating. What a beautiful exploration into family, memory, remembering, retelling, forgiving, all the things. What do you do with all the things that are left behind? What is your responsibility to tell them? How should one tell them?

Also I can't stop thinking about this: "It's hard to theorize my birth, especially since I rather enjoy being here."

callieswag17's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

3.5

readingrinbow's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

daniellew03cd3's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective

andf's review

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

3.5

wcsheffer's review

4.0

Karen Tei Yamashita's epistolary memoir is detailed, intellectual, and haunting. Letters to Memory tells the story of Yamashita's family through their letters, journals, and personal documents as well as Yamashita's letters to famous poets. In these letters Yamashita engages with them on their own work, describing Homer's Iliad to Homer as sometimes boring or the asking Vyasa about the violence in the Mahabharata. The root of this book is the experience of Japanese internment during WWII and it is undeniably honest in its exploration of that history. The book sometimes feels disjointed but in a way that encouraged me to dig deeper into the work. It is unlike anything I have read before.