Place for What We Lose: A Daughter's Return to Tule Lake
Place for What We Lose: A Daughter's Return to Tule Lake
Place for What We Lose: A Daughter's Return to Tule Lake
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Description
Description
A deeply affecting memoir of reckoning with a father's death and the Japanese American incarceration
In a moving conversation with the past, Tamiko Nimura explores her late father's life and her family's wartime history at Tule Lake. The typewritten pages of her father's unpublished memoir--written decades earlier about his childhood behind barbed wire--spark a reckoning with the long shadow of parental loss and the unresolved legacy of incarceration.
Following an innovative structure, Nimura interlaces her father's vivid recollections with her own: scenes of camp life, family separation, and resistance alongside her present-day journey as a mother, writer, and descendant. Joining a community pilgrimage to Tule Lake transforms inherited pain into collective remembrance.
With honesty and lyrical precision, Nimura shows how intergenerational trauma and silence are transmitted, and how confronting them can foster healing. Part memoir, part dialogue with the past, A Place for What We Lose illuminates the enduring costs of incarceration while honoring the persistence of family, memory, and story. It is a profoundly moving exploration of grief, history, and the fragile but necessary work of resilience.
About the Author
About the Author
Tamiko Nimura is a creative nonfiction writer, VONA fellow, and public speaker. She is coauthor of We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration, which was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award in 2022.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"[A] masterful weaving together of two voices . . . There's such a gentle, touching sensitivity to [Nimura's] writing, while her ruminations are powerful and insightful, with no small amount of piercing self-reflection."
-- "Discover Nikkei""In this gut-wrenching work of intergenerational dialogue, Nimura braids passages from her late father's unpublished memoir of growing up in California's Tule Lake Japanese-American concentration camp during WWII with her own reflections on the text. . . . [A] memorable duet."
-- "Publishers Weekly, starred review""Nimura creates a vivid, thoughtful work that explores intergenerational trauma, parental loss, and how these histories continue to shape identity and relationships across generations."
-- "Alta Journal""Gorgeously written and profoundly moving, [Nimura's] memoir navigates the intersections of adult crises and the deeper losses of childhood, in her father's story and her own. Along the way, she is guided by a community of survivors and descendants that materializes most vividly in the organized pilgrimages to Tule Lake."
-- "International Examiner"
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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