The Afterlife is Letting Go

"In a wrenching exercise to understand history and his own biracial ancestry, Shimoda visits the ruins of incarceration sites and connects with many descendants of the Japanese Americans whose lives were upended during WWII. Mere statistics are never enough to drive home the severity of a wound, especially one that impugns the moral fabric of a country that is supposedly a beacon for human rights. It's sobering that many of those Shimoda interviewed speak up at another time in which immigrants are painted anew as the terrifying 'other.' Tragic and illuminating." —Poornima Apte, Booklist Magazine, Starred Review

"With a steady hand and a poet's knack for concision, Shimoda constructs an anguished archive of intergenerational pain."—Publishers Weekly

"Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the 'afterlife' of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S."—The Millions' "Great Fall 2024 Book Preview"

"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."—Tiffany Troy, The Tupelo Quarterly

"Brandon Shimoda is investigating ghosts of our ancestors' pasts, for the same reason that I do: to tell their truths, to preserve history on their terms, to put the reader in both his and their shoes. It's done through a poetic, human lens that centers us in a real and honest way, rather than centering how the white gaze might seek to slant the perspective of what happened to us, or worse, to erase the memory of it."—Elizabeth Ito, creator of City of Ghosts

"Shimoda prises open the language of erasure, and in forensic detail traces the disturbing compulsion to deny and suppress. . . . He connects the use of Executive Order 9066 in the 1940s to today's carceral structures of racial segregation . . . [and] brings together the work of other Japanese American artists, writers and activists to create a potent archive for those seeking strategies, resources and the courage for the journey into what Shimoda reveals as the afterlife where both the past and future are intrinsically intertwined."—Kirsten Emiko McAllister, author of Terrain of Memory: A Japanese Canadian Memorial Project

"Poet and essayist Brandon Shimoda reconstructs an ever-shifting narration, an unforgettable constellation of voices of the Japanese American incarceration survivors and their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, including his own. Like the 'hinotama: balls of light' witnessed by the incarcerated The Afterlife is Letting Go also sparks of grief—it's a mourning star, orbiting our collective consciousness of night."—Don Mee Choi, author of Mirror Nation

Praise for The Grave on the Wall:

Winner of the 2020 PEN Open Book Award

"Shimoda brings his poetic lyricism to this moving and elegant memoir, the structure of which reflects the fragmentation of memories. … It is at once wistful and devastating to see Midori's life come full circle … In between is a life with tragedy, love, and the horrors unleashed by the atomic bomb."—Booklist, starred review

"The Grave on the Wall is a passage of aching nostalgia and relentless assembly out of which something more important than objective truth is conjured—a ritual frisson, a veracity of spirit. I am grateful to have traveled along.”—Trisha Low, The Believer

"Intergenerational knowledge must be actively sought, researched and retrieved––it's not a given. But while attentive to the work of remembering, Shimoda also writes through the slipperier terrain of experiencing one’s ancestry in the present, never fully manifest but felt and lived."—Frieze Magazine

"In this memoir, Shimoda . . . tells a universal story of the horrors of war both physical and emotional, and the tensions that linger among people long after the wars are over."—Literary Hub

"Relying on his skills as a poet, Shimoda enhances the elusive details of [his grandfather's] life with his own journeys of discovery, creating an impressive prose debut. "—Shelf Awareness, starred review

“Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall is a wondrous feat of memory work, reportage, and writing.”—Judges' Citation, PEN Open Book Award

"In a weaving meditation, Brandon Shimoda pens an elegant eulogy for his grandfather Midori, yet also for the living, we who survive on the margins of graveyards and rituals of our own making."—Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Letters to Memory

"Sometimes a work of art functions as a dream. At other times, a work of art functions as a conscience. In the tradition of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Brandon Shimoda's The Grave on the Wall is both. It is also the type of fragmented reckoning only America could instigate."—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean