Haiku from the Internment Camp: A Fiction

About this book:

Through the spare, cutting beauty of haiku, *Haiku from the Internment Camp* follows sixteen-year-old Minoru Takada as his world collapses from a San Francisco kitchen into the alkaline dust of Manzanar. One morning he's memorizing Shakespeare; the next, his family is reduced to a number—19117—painted on wooden tags, their lives measured by what fits in two suitcases. Minoru's notebook becomes his lifeline, each seventeen-syllable poem a small act of rebellion against erasure: *Roots caught in the stone / The gardener goes away / Rain must do the work.*

Across twenty-six chapters, the novel traces the intimate architecture of incarceration—the guard tower's sweeping beam, the latrine lines that strip dignity, the bitter fracture over loyalty questionnaires, baseball games played on dirt diamonds, letters from brothers in the 442nd. Jiichan's bonsai are left to die; a Kodak camera is confiscated; a teacher slips back a notebook with a command: *Don't let them take your words away.* Here is the Issei father's quiet devastation, the Nisei daughter's sharp terror, the grandfather's ancient wisdom reading wind like scripture. History breathes through the quotidian: cold tea in paper cups, the smell of camphor in sea-chests, the foghorn's moan over a bay they may never see again.

This is not merely a document of injustice but a testament to what endures when a nation turns its guns inward. Minoru's verses—etched on scrap wood, scribbled in margins, carried past barbed wire—accumulate into a profound act of witness. *Haiku from the Internment Camp* renders the unthinkable immediate, the historical heartbreakingly personal, and the silenced voice impossible to forget.