Brandon Shimoda’s The Afterlife Is Letting Go is best read slowly. Written as creative nonfiction, deeply researched and imaginatively composed, it offers multiple ways into understanding the experience of 120,000 Japanese Americans detained and imprisoned in camps by the US government during World War II. Shimoda calls his account of these American citizens and immigrants a book of reportage, based on many years of interviews and visits to sites linked to incarceration. But his reporting is firmly anchored in his own experience as the descendant of many family members detained and imprisoned. Reading slowly allows Shimoda’s innovative approach and the accounts of incarcerees and descendants to register fully.

Shimoda, author of several books of poetry and prose and a professor at The Colorado College, challenges the reader to recognize the enormity of the Japanese American incarceration experience in 23 short sections. He offers narrative, history, lyrical accounts, even inventories. Seven of the most moving sections are what he calls choral chapters, made up of responses to his questionnaire by survivors and descendants; their voices, at first solos, form a chorus that washes over the reader.

Shimoda starts with  the story of inmate James Wakasa, shot to death for picking a flower by reaching over the boundary fence at the Topaz Camp in Utah. The story is pivotal in camp memories although Wakasa’s intent is remembered differently by different witnesses. Some said it wasn’t a flower Wakasa bent to pick up; it was a rock. Others said he didn’t stay inside the fence; he climbed over it. Some said he was given a verbal warning by the guard who watched him from a tower, gun poised to enforce the camp’s boundaries. Others said no warning. Some said Wakasa was running away, but others said he had nowhere to run because Topaz was isolated with desert all around. He was old, some said. He was 60, perfectly cognizant, others said.

Shimoda offers the various narratives and then looks at attempts to memorialize Wakasa’s death and the decades-long struggle with how to do that. He’s deeply patient with examining how it is to remember events held in individual memories, often not told for decades or at all

A glance at the footnotes at the bottoms of these pages reveals sources as varied as courts martial testimony, academic publications, accounts by survivors, a 1943 publication by the War Relocation Authority, films, art exhibit documentation and, sometimes, interviews Shimoda conducted.

As Shimoda sets the tone and orients the book, he is uncovering the deeper story of incarceration, not just offering an outline of historical events but accessing the lived experience and its long-term impact on those affected. He demonstrates that it takes extensive research and persistence, along with great tenderness toward the people involved, to reach the deeper story of what happened in the camps. He offers the story of an 82-year-old woman who tells him what happened to her as a six-year-old child. She said it had taken her entire life to be able to tell her story.

He’s deeply patient with examining how it is to remember events held in individual memories, often not told for decades or at all.

Shimoda’s family experience with incarceration enhances his sensitivity and insights. He writes about his grandfather who was incarcerated at an internment camp at Fort Missoula, Montana, during the war, suspect simply because he was a photographer. Shimoda says, “He died just as I was becoming more aware of his life, and I missed him. Missing him led me to reading and writing about his life which led to reading and writing about Japanese American history which led to reading and writing about Japanese American incarceration. In other words, missing him led to this book.”

He returns to his family story throughout the book, the personal narrative a welcome part of the whole. Just a few months before Shimoda wrote the epilogue, he found 30 letters his grandfather wrote while imprisoned in camp 80 years earlier. The letters, addressed to Shimoda’s great aunt, allow him to see his grandfather’s handwriting and to see how he experienced life in the camp. Although the letters were censored and full of redactions, they convey the everyday: “meals, naps, baseball, tennis twice a day, movies on Tuesday, a class on bookkeeping, being in a play.” Stamped with “Detained Enemy Alien Mail Examined,” the letters remind Shimoda how precarious our access to history is.

He says, “We read the letters, aloud and to ourselves, excited and in silence. The presence of the past, the revelation of my grandfather’s hand moving across thin pieces of paper in the morning, afternoon, night, in a prison that no longer existed but that was, in our hearts and inheritance, everywhere, was too much and somehow not enough. “

The section “Best Wishes for the Future” centers on reparations, the $20,000 given to each of the surviving 82,219 Japanese Americans, from 1991 to 1993 by the Office of Redress created by the Civil Liberties Act signed by Ronald Reagan on August 10, 1988. The reparations followed Reagan’s apology letter acknowledging the wrong committed by incarceration.

Shimoda follows his family’s  story of receiving reparations checks with responses to his questionnaire by other families about what they did with the money. They answered:  “They bought a new roof. They built a front porch. They fixed the patio. Repaved the driveway. Installed a new drainage system. A trash compactor. Hardwood floors. Floor-length curtains. They bought folding screens. A leather recliner. A camera lens. Golf club membership. Fishing equipment. Farm equipment. Groceries. They paid bills. Ambulance bills. Car loans. Mortgages. College funds. Weddings. Long-term care insurance. Assisted living. They gave it to their children. They drank it away. Gambled it away. They went to Japan. To Hiroshima. To China. To Egypt. They started a teriyaki sauce business. A red truck. They donated it to the library for a collection of books about incarceration. The Red Cross. They did not want it. They never spent it. They gave it away.”

Choral chapters are some of the most impactful in the book. Shimoda says they were composed of responses to a questionnaire he shared with 250 descendants.  He says, “It consisted of ten questions, ranging from informational to speculative, on the experience of being a descendant.”

Often they start with a question from Shimoda’s questionnaire. “I See the Memory Outline” starts with the question, ”If you have not visited the site or sites where your family members were incarcerated, what do you imagine the site or sites (places, landscapes) look and feel like?” Brief answers follow without comment:

“Desolate,” said Mia Ayumi Malhortra.

“Empty , lonely, desolate,” said Brad Shirakawa.

“Sad, dry, desolate,” said Danielle Steckler.

“Barren, windswept, and desolate,” said Julie Yamamoto.

Not just an impressionistic, lyrical examination of the camps, Shimoda hits hard against the violence that racism sets in motion. He employs a quote from Chritina Sharpe to do some heavy lifting: “The machinery of whiteness deploys violence and constantly manufactures wonder, surprise, and innocence in relation to violence.” And throughout the book, he calls to account political and cultural forces that enabled incarceration.

In a chapter that opens with Shimoda’s visit to Portland’s Japanese American Historical Plaza, he first lists the ten concentration camps where Japanese Americans were held, following that with a list of 138 other facilities where Japanese Americans were detained and imprisoned, thus correcting the impression that the ten camps were the only significant places of detention.

Sunken rooms were caves the incarcerees burrowed beneath their barracks where they could find some relief from the blistering heat.

Throughout the book, Shimoda gives lie to the popular notion that because Japanese Americans were resilient and withstood incarceration with dignity, somehow the experience was not too harmful. Gaman is the term used to signify the resilience of Japanese and Japanese Americans. Accounts of experience in camps are made to seem tolerable with their references to crafts classes and Boy Scout troops, gardening and landscaping in desert locations, making the best of the surroundings.

Shimoda gives the reader a more accurate story. In “Sunken Rooms,” a choral section, the detainees reveal conditions in the camps built quickly in a few months following the attack at Pearl Harbor in desolate, windblown deserts. The quarters lacked insulation, heat and even finished walls. Sunken rooms were caves the incarcerees burrowed beneath their barracks where they could find some relief from the blistering heat.

Shimoda makes his way under and into the silences, giving the reader insights into actual experiences, ones too difficult to bring to language until recently, too threatening to reveal when the war ended and the Japanese Americans returned to their homes in California and Oregon and Washington, facing racism that created a prison as formidable as the camps.

Shimoda’s book is incremental in its impacts. It takes some time to make the shifts invited by the book: first to reckon with the devastation of racism and our government’s impunity in handling  those whom they consider threats. And to appreciate the Japanese Americans’ experience with the tenderness  and respect that Shimoda models for us in his book. I finish the book changed but aware that coming to see the deeper story of things is ongoing work.