First published 2026
The loyalty questionnaire arrives at the internment camp in 1942, carrying two questions that will split families down the middle. Question 27 asks imprisoned Japanese Americans if they will fight for the country that locked them up. Question 28 demands they renounce loyalty to Japan, even though most have never set foot there. The Issei who crossed the Pacific decades earlier watch their American-born children wrestle with impossible choices. Some answer yes to prove their patriotism. Others refuse on principle. Brothers turn against brothers. Parents disown children. The questions create wounds that bleed across generations. Yamashita weaves together the voices of laborers and artists, informants and activists, following three generations as they build and rebuild their community. She mixes genres like a DJ spinning records, jumping from spy thriller scenes to delicate haiku to raw oral testimony. The result captures both the bureaucratic cruelty of wartime policy and the human cost of forced loyalty.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, world-war-ii, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-secrets, generational-conflict
Setting: Japan, United States
Period: 1942
464 pages · Hardcover · Graywolf Press
Content warnings: racism