Book Review

As the U.S. government actively rounds up and incarcerates immigrants and children of immigrants in euphemistically-named “detention centers” in remote regions of the country, Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Questions 27 & 28 could not feel more timely. The title refers to two particularly divisive and consequential questions on a loyalty questionnaire distributed to Americans of Japanese ancestry roughly a year after Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order 9066 forcibly removed them from their homes on the West Coast and incarcerated them without due process in ten concentration camps scattered around the U.S.

Yamashita organizes this highly unconventional novel in three major sections, which the table of contents designates as “BOX 1: Salvage,” “BOX 2: Spoilage,” and “BOX 3: Residue.” Each “box” contains six to nine chapters or files, each of which is anchored in the life of a real historical person. Each chapter or “file” is tagged with this person’s name and key words, dates and associations. The cascading tab labels in the right gutter of each page further reinforce the visual impression that one is sifting through a physical archive.

Initially, this structure is fairly disorienting, as the early files don’t appear to have any narrative connections to each other. The first, in a rather bold and playful move characteristic of Yamashita’s overall approach, is narrated by the fictional protagonist of Yone Noguchi’s 1902 novel, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, and focuses on Yone’s early years in the U.S. She writes, “Oh, by the way, as it happens, every now and then, a character rises from the page and writes the life of her author. This is nothing new, and, to be clear, I am simply sharing my intentions. I am Asagao, Miss Morning Glory, and this is my story about the poet Yone.” Aside from a bibliography of sources, Yamashita resists supplying additional contextualization and relies on readers to engage with the contents of each file on its own terms.

Yamashita likewise does not explain the key divisions within the Japanese American community according to citizenship-status and birthplace and education—issei, nisei, kibei, and sansei—thereby centering an audience with prior understanding of these terms or a willingness to fill in their knowledge gaps through inference or research.

In effect, Yamashita gives readers the experience of participating in the novel’s construction of meaning as a kind of ghost archival researcher, stumbling through the contents of these files. Some incorporate actual archival materials, such as diary entries, while others are fictionalized. One early file, for example, includes a multi-decade epistolary correspondence wherein readers can infer the reasons for the sometimes decades’ long gaps between letters. Another interweaves the story of X (aka Richard Shigeaki Nishimoto) with images of the loyalty questionnaire, deconstructed question by question. This chapter also incorporates a rationale for the box labels that appears to contradict how the book actually uses them: “Spoilage was for those Japanese who renounced American citizenship; Salvage for those who were loyal; Residue for those who got left behind and couldn’t make up their minds.” Further complicating one’s reading is the realization that these first two titles refer to published sociological studies, the first of which Nishimoto co-authored. I read these double meanings in conversation with the many possible meanings of the seemingly simple “yes/no” answers demanded by the questionnaire.

As the book progresses, the impression that these files are random and do not intersect dissipates upon the beginning of BOX 2, as Yone Noguchi’s son, Isamu, turns out to be the subject of the first file. There’s also a narrative thread involving several characters of Japanese ancestry recruited for a plot to poison Pancho Villa, first introduced in BOX 1 and revisited in BOX 3. The deeper into the book one reads, the more Yamashita’s curation of these fictional files betrays her intention to account for a huge range of perspectives, forms, and experiences—albeit within the manageable confines of a 400-page novel, as opposed to the 355 boxes in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley that she indicates in the acknowledgments was an inspiration for the project. Gradually, it becomes clear that BOX 1 explores people’s lives prior to Executive Order 9066, BOX 2 chronicles the years of incarceration, and BOX 3 investigates the aftermath, including the process of seeking legal redress and constructing the archival record.

Like the character who folds a discarded stack of loyalty questionnaires into origami and plants them in odd places for others to discover at a camp that is closing, there is a delightful spirit of invention in Yamashita’s engagement with historical details and archival materials. Along with the Pancho Villa subplot, one of the most memorable examples is a file written in the slightly comic and fast-paced style of a James Bond movie. Yet another is written from the point of view of a man’s trumpet: “Even then, I was old and beat up, cheap acquisition from the San Francisco Japanese Boys Association Boy Scouts Bugle Corp, Troop 12, but I was precious. Understand?” For all of the book’s seriousness of subject matter, this persistent bent toward the whimsical is one of its most unexpected and refreshing qualities.

The sole instances where Yamashita’s formal experiments came across as somewhat forced are found in two chapters of theatrical dialogue, both of which are heavy on exposition and involve characters recounting historical events. These chapters are late in the book and are ironically the only places in the novel where Yamashita leans into providing the reader with detailed historical context; this belies the wisdom of her inclination to otherwise require readers to piece things together on their own.

Questions 27 & 28 is no pre-digested history lesson or guided tour in the guise of a novel. Instead, it’s an overwhelming yet exhilarating trip through the archival record, filled out by Yamashita’s imagination. With it come all the attendant gaps, puzzles, surprises, and contradictions befitting the diverse experiences of Americans of Japanese ancestry in relation to Executive Order 9066 and the loyalty questionnaire. The novel’s intensely polyvocal and hybrid structure also offers a compelling model for how the novel form might be adapted to portray a collective historical injustice at a human scale and without flattening its complexities.