Keynote
A masterful polyvocal history of Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II
Book Title
Questions 27 & 28
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
“Most of us understand that history is often just the victor’s account of how things happened. But the novel’s achievement is that we are forced to experience this insight almost bodily. We feel the weight of the past, all these accumulated voices and perspectives, within and between Yamashita’s novels, as well as the process through which disparate stories, anecdotes, or experiences might coalesce as history.”—Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
Body
In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates—who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military—whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them—many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan—to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar.
Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.
Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.
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About the Author
Credit: Chris Hardy
Upcoming Events
Karen Tei Yamashita reading and in conversation with Naomi Hirahara about QUESTIONS 27 & 28 at J-Sei
Date:
Location:
J-Sei in Emeryville, CAview map
Free and open to the public. Click here for details and to RSVP.
Praise
“[An] ambitious, wide-ranging pastiche of fiction and documentation, a hybrid novel that also serves as an idiosyncratic history of the Japanese experience in America before, during and after the war.”—Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review
“Karen Tei Yamashita deserves to be a literary household name.”—Adam Morgan, Esquire’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2026”
“A provocative symphony.”—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
“With Questions 27 & 28, Yamashita is not just seeking to interpret the loyalty debate, and perhaps the experience of internment, by writing fiction about it. She is also challenging her readers to do the interpreting themselves—to join her in deciphering history. . . . In order to read Questions 27 & 28, you have to commit, if only for the length of the novel, to the messy project of American history.”—Lily Meyer, The Atlantic
