A review by wcsheffer
Letters to Memory by Karen Tei Yamashita

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.