Description
ISBN: 9781597146968
Format: Trade paperback (US)
Year: 2026
Publisher: HeyDay Books
Description:
Now in paperback: A compelling and prismatic love story of one family's defiance in the face of injustice-and how their story echoes across generations.
"Beautifully woven together by Satsuki Ina's mother's diary and her father's haiku-through which they are both still speaking-[this] is memoir as healing, as self- and soul-determination, and as vigilance, the keeping vigil over past lives that are still becoming." -Brandon Shimoda, author of The Afterlife Is Letting Go
"The Poet and the Silk Girl is an incredible book. I cannot recommend it highly enough." -Rachel Maddow, host of The Rachel Maddow Show and Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order
In 1942 newlyweds Itaru and Shizuko Ina were settling into married life when the United States government upended their world. They were forcibly removed from their home and incarcerated in wartime American concentration camps solely on account of their Japanese ancestry. When the Inas, under duress, renounced their American citizenship, the War Department branded them enemy aliens and scattered their family across the U.S. interior. Born to Itaru and Shizuko during their imprisonment, psychotherapist and activist Satsuki Ina weaves their story together in this moving mosaic. Through diary entries, photographs, clandestine letters, and heart-wrenching haiku, she reveals how this intrepid young couple navigated life, love, loss, and loyalty tests in the welter of World War II-era hysteria.
The Poet and the Silk Girl illustrates through one family's saga the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who resisted racis