The Poet and the Silk Girl - by Satsuki Ina Hardcover

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A compelling and prismatic love story of one family's defiance in the face of injustice--and how their story echoes across generations.

"It is both overwhelming and affirming to imagine, in the midst of their darkest hours, and in the middle of a country and a war that willfully misperceived them as enemy aliens, that the future, for Itaru and Shizuko Ina, was not only possible, but would deliver redemption in the form of the intimate, inexhaustible attention of a daughter." --Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall

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 racist oppression, fought for the restoration of their rights, and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity. With psychological insight, Ina excavates the unmentionable, recovering a chronicle of resilience amidst one of the severest blows to American civil liberties. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family's ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Lyrical and gripping, this cautionary tale implores us to prevent the repetition of atrocity, pairing healing and protest with galvanizing power.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Poet and the Silk Girl:

"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

"Ina has made several documentaries and written widely on Japanese-American history and state violence, but goes somewhere new in The Poet and the Silk Girl, a memoir not only of Itaru and Shizuko, but of Satsuki herself. [...] As a writer, she expands the genre of memoir to include a constellation of interconnected 'subjects': Itaru, Shizuko, Kiyoshi, Satsuki, other people in the camps, as well as memory workers and incarcerated people today." --Full Stop

"One of the most compelling accounts of the forced removal, unjust incarceration, and family separation experienced by the Japanese American community during WWII." --Zócalo Public Square

"Ina stands alongside so many others [...] who have offered what we might call representational correctives of incarceration. [...] Ina's work, as important as it is archivally, is also crucial right now, in this moment of heightened political polarization, rising white supremacy, and increased scrutiny at the border." --AsianAm Lit Fans

"Ina's book and life work boundlessly grow the possibility that even now, we can become compassionate allies to the vulnerable and our own vulnerability and trauma, and together, create a 'we' that can heal, live, and even thrive. Diverse, and proud of our diversity, rather than in anguish because of it." --Ravi Chandra, Eastwind

"The internal landscape of injustice is made heartbreakingly visible in this exquisitely written and passionate memoir. It reminds us of what we might otherwise forget: that injustice is an intimately lived experience, endured day to day and hour to hour, and full of complexities roiling deep in the heart and mind." --David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars

"I could not put this book down; The Poet and the Silk Girl is storytelling as activism at its finest. Satsuki Ina counters the 'kaleidoscope of distorted stories' that is U.S. history and trauma-informed familial silences with vivid, complex testimonies about the discriminatory injustice of Japanese American internment camps. Tracing the lives of her newlywed U.S.-born Japanese American parents through no less than six different camps and the births of two children, and following the trail of her own intergenerational scars, Ina weaves archival and family ephemera together, heightened by her insights as a psychotherapist. Learning compassion and empathy for what her parents suffered, Ina reclaims anger, grief and action as appropriate responses to the manipulations and deceptions of government officials. With brilliant extrapolation, Ina cautions us against the national amnesia that allows all-too-similar events to repeat. Satsuki Ina's voice is a clarion reminder that the political is still personal, the personal still political, and we repeat these crimes at our own peril. Brava!" --Deborah Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

"A profound and moving testimony to intergenerational trauma and resistance." --Tony Platt, author of Beyond These Walls and The Scandal of Cal

"It is both overwhelming and affirming to imagine, in the midst of their darkest hours, and in the middle of a country and a war that willfully misperceived them as enemy aliens, that the future, for Itaru and Shizuko Ina, was not only possible, but would deliver redemption in the form of the intimate, inexhaustible attention of a daughter. Satsuki Ina's The Poet and the Silk Girl is this revelation. Beautifully woven together by her mother's diary and her father's haiku--through which they are both still speaking--it 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 Grave on the Wall

"Satsuki Ina's family-rooted memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl, is a genuinely classic work in Asian American Studies. In it, she draws upon her multiple talents as an accomplished university teacher, a published poet, a skilled psychotherapist, a seasoned documentary filmmaker, an author of novelistic prose studies, and an activist of social conscience to produce a richly documented and reasoned investigation of how the U.S. government's unjust World War II oppression of some 125,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry set in motion an intergenerational transmission of trauma that now urgently needs to be addressed and redressed." --Art Hansen, author of Barbed Voices and A Nikkei Harvest

"A tremendous, and tremendously moving, account of injustice, resistance, and resilience. The indignities endured by Satsuki Ina's parents were beyond healing, but in telling their story unflinchingly and drawing its lessons for our time, she herself reaches impressive closure." --Frederick Crews, author of Freud: The Making of an Illusion

"A must-read! This is a seminal, beautifully rendered intergenerational narrative of a courageous young couple who spoke truth to power and found themselves fighting deportation, that re-centers the Japanese American incarceration story as civil rights activism, past and present." --Barbara Takei, co-author of Tule Lake Revisited

"A powerful quilt work of memory, The Poet and the Silk Girl sutures the traumatic wounds of Japanese American incarceration with care for the past and struggle for the future." --Andrew Leong, author of Lament in the Night

"The Poet and the Silk Girl is a ground-breaking contribution to the literature on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Based on the personal correspondence, diary entries, and haiku written by author Satsuki Ina's parents, this book provides a rare and vivid glimpse into the complexities of the family's incarceration traumas and resilience. Adding to the richness, Ina includes her own perspectives as a psychotherapist, born during her parents' wartime imprisonment. This combination of first-hand accounts from the past with Ina's personal experiences and expertise brings incarceration history to life in unique, powerful, and insightful ways." --Donna Nagata, Professor of Psychology and author of Legacy of Injustice

"This incredibly poignant account reveals how a daughter uncovered why her parents went from buying war bonds and voting in every election to renouncing their citizenship during the World War II mass incarceration. As you view photographs and read her parents' letters, diary entries, and lyrical poetry, you can't help but feel their anxiety, fear, anger, and emotional turmoil as they lose faith in the U.S. and decide their future lay in Japan. In writing this family memoir, Satsuki Ina pays tribute to her parents' courageous protest and love of family while also showing how their suffering inspired her support of recent Central American migrants experiencing indefinite detention and family separation." --Alice Yang, Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories

"The Poet and the Silk Girl is one of the most compelling accounts of the forced removal, unjust incarceration, and family separation experienced by the Japanese American community during WWII. Born in an American concentration camp, Satsuki Ina weaves her own experiences into conversation with her parents' wartime letters and father's haiku poetry from behind barbed wire to show how family history is a part of the very fabric of the struggle to belong in America. A beautifully-crafted memoir and community history that brilliantly reveals how past, present, and future are interlinked." --Duncan Ryūken Williams, Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and author of The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan

About the Author

Satsuki Ina is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in community trauma. She helps victims of oppression to claim not only their voice but also their power to transform the systems that have oppressed them. Her activism has included cofounding Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. Ina has produced two documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy Now! and the documentary And Then They Came for Us. A professor emerita at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.