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In Isako Isako, Mia Ayumi Malhotra considers an array of topics from Japanese/Nikkei history, drawing on both major historical events and intimate family narratives.

What I liked:

• The narrative ambiguity in Malhotra’s poems, while startling at first, ultimately led me to reexamine my understandings of memoir and history. I have previously discussed the politics (and problems) inherent to scholarly writings on history, specifically the notion of primary versus secondary sources, and the power dynamics involved in translation and transcription. Malhotra’s poems, however, push the discussion on primary sources a step further by forcing the reader to consider the many ways primary sources can be created and preserved. Through her poems, Malhotra, who was not present for some of the events she discusses, is generating a secondary source by documenting information provided by family members who were eyewitnesses. At the same time, for any present or future scholar who is studying examples of nikkei writers documenting their family history, Malhotra’s poems would constitute a primary source.

What I learned:

• Does Malhotra know Mariko Nagai? Reading the poems about Isako’s illness, I constantly thought back to Nagai’s Histories of Bodies. There are stories of illness and loss in every family, but the similarities between Malhotra’s and Nagai’s works made me consider how loss operates specifically in Japanese/Nikkei history and literature. Many major historical events are also defining moments of loss for someone who experienced that event, and events such as Hiroshima and JA incarceration are no exception. I also think here of Akiko Hashimoto’s The Long Defeat and Karen Inouye’s The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration. Seeing the titles side by side, I wonder if “long” is really a euphemism for “ongoing” or “perpetual” or something more permanent. Is it simply human nature to cling to and memorialize loss? I have not read widely enough in the literatures of other cultures to make an accurate comparison, but I do remember seeing a Korean writer (possibly Emily Jungmin Yoon?) note how the concept of han goes hand-in-hand with being Korean. I do not think loss operates in Japanese/Nikkei culture in exactly the same way, but I wonder if any Japanese/Nikkei writer has studied this idea already, specifically by analyzing examples from Japanese and Nikkei writing.

Questions I had:

• Why did Malhotra choose to write some poems in stilted English? I personally interpreted these sections as a shift in narrative voice, from Malhotra to someone whose primary language is not English. Is this other voice Isako? The book is dedicated to two Japanese women, neither of whom is named Isako. I read Isako as a stand-in for the Japanese women in Malhotra’s family, but I wonder if this is what Malhotra intended when she created Isako. I wonder, too, about how Malhotra wrote these sections – are they direct quotes (or quotes as she remembered or (re)created from real-life situations), or are they, too, a stand-in for how the women in Malhotra’s family spoke English? What does it mean for a native USian English speaker to (re)create dialogue spoken by members of their family whose primary language is not English? I’ve asked this question previously on this blog, but what is the relationship between this type of intergenerational memory and the documenting of history? From what I’ve seen, the JA community does a decent job of recognizing there is no “one true” historical narrative, instead focusing on the preservation of a collective memory from as many sources as possible. I personally believe there is a major difference between Malhotra, as a descendant of the people whose voices she appears to be documenting/remembering, creating and/or recording a transcription (in these poems or elsewhere), and a non-Japanese person (historian or otherwise) transcribing (usually in English) the words (in English or Japanese) of a Japanese person.
• Did Malhotra envision a particular audience for this book? What motivated her to write this book? How does she wish her work (and herself, as the creator of the work) to be situated in nikkei literature?

Follow-up:

• Does Malhotra have any plans to write a book of essays or a memoir? It would be fascinating to see her explore the ideas from Isako Isako in prose.