I have been trying to figure out how to talk about this book, because I think it’s an incredible, deeply important novel, and I fear that its difficulty will prevent it from getting the attention it deserves. Among the group I was reading it with, we joked that it was an amazing novel that we probably wouldn’t recommend to anyone. This sounds like my students at the end of our Ulysses seminar, and I think the resemblance is apt: it’s similarly daunting, but also, I think (I might need to read it 8 more times to be sure, ha ha) similarly rewarding. Yamashita’s note in the acknowledgments about how future readers may “reveal clearer epiphanies” seems like a winking acknowledgment to Joyce, and I couldn’t help, too, thinking of that famous quote attributed to him, the “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant” — there are plenty of those here as well. A book to launch 1,000 dissertations (if higher education doesn’t collapse entirely).
The novel takes its title from the questionnaire given to imprisoned Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and were intended to measure their loyalty to the United States: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States, and will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and forswear any allegiance to the Japanese Emperor? The answers were perceived as a meaningful way to separate people into different groups: the “no-nos” were perceived as disloyal and sent to a “segregation camp” at Tule Lake. It is important to understand — I knew nothing about this when I started reading the novel — that these categories were also salient, and tremendously divisive, within the Japanese American community. You can learn more about that from Densho, an amazing resource.
I think perhaps the best way to summarize Questions 27 & 28 is to say that it gives the lie to the notion that the answers to these two questions have a straightforward meaning, both then and now. More broadly, I could say that it’s a novel about the camps, or the experience of wartime incarceration, but that doesn’t seem right, really, or at least, it’s not about that in the way you might expect. For one thing, the first part, Salvage, is mostly stories from the early 20th century, many about immigrating to the US, and only obliquely mentioning the coming war. Each of the novel’s three parts — Salvage, Spoilage, Residue, terms that come from the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), a project that perceived this process of mass incarceration as a great research opportunity — is made up of chapters that tell their own smaller stories, some clearly interlinked with others, some not. Some of them center around specific individuals, others feature a broader cast. Each is a different form, or style: interwoven fragments of narrative; a first-person monologue; a dramatic dialogue; interview fragments; diary entries. It’s dizzying — marvelous, but also disorienting. Sometimes I felt like I was so mesmerized by the formal intricacies that I missed the forest for the trees — I would get so swept up in a section that I’d forget about the rest of the book. So this is part of the difficulty: it’s stunningly intricate and complex. It’s difficult, and demanding, in a way that I love and admire, but that many people will find overwhelming.
The other part of the difficulty is that it’s densely referential and doesn’t hold the reader’s hand and walk them through the basics of the history. Prior to reading this novel, most of my knowledge about the Japanese American wartime experience came from reading a graphic novel called We Hereby Refuse, and if you are similarly ignorant, you may want to read that one first (it’s short), just to get a little more of an idea. Densho also has some reading suggestions that you might consider. It’s not that you can’t read the novel if you don’t know more, but you’ll get so much more out of it if you do. I was supremely grateful to the people I read it with, who did metaphorically hold my hand and explain things to me. Then as I kept reading, I started stopping more to look things up — and every time it blew my mind. Like, there’s a chapter where a young woman remembers an event where she was the translator — I won’t tell you what the event was (even though the section card at the beginning of Part III hints at it), because the gradual unfolding of information is astonishing. So many layers of history overlapping, and the subtlety with which its presented has a brilliantly estranging effect — the unexpected perspective raises new, different questions, making you see the story in a fresh way.
And then, if you really want to step into the multiverse — some of these characters also appear in Yamashita’s earlier novel, I Hotel. I joked in June that this was my Karen Tei Yamashita summer, because I had been meaning to read I Hotel for a few years and decided to finally do it, then learned that Questions 27 & 28 was coming out and decided to do that too. I actually don’t recommend reading them side by side, as I did — it gets too confusing. I think it would have been better to have finished it before starting the newer novel, but if you’re only willing to commit to one 500ish-page novel, I think I’d say Questions 27 & 28, though I Hotel is more approachable (though I haven’t quite finished it). But there’s also Letters to Memory, a kind of memoir-essay about the camps and going through her family’s archives. I started reading it literally the day after I finished Questions 27 & 28. I guess it’s becoming an obsession. I’m not mad about it.
Kasia Reads 