The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest

"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 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

"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

"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

"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 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

"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

"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 US 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 Ryuken Williams, Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and author of The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan

"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." Fiona Bell, 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