Review: The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda

reviewed by Cynthia Arrieu-King

The Grave on the Wall 
by Brandon Shimoda
City Lights Publishers, July 2019.
$16.95; 222 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-87286-790-1

Brandon Shimoda’s experimental memoir The Grave on the Wall builds itself around his search for his grandfather, Midori. Using passages from filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, archival and family transcripts, Japanese folklore, and investigative literary and historical journalism, Shimoda asks muscular questions. His travels to Japan to find traces of Midori feel haunted by ghosts and voids. Where some creative nonfiction provides readers with introductory paragraphs and decrescendos, Shimoda offers no such railing to hold onto. In fact, all seems haunted by a philosophical syllogism: if Shimoda knows certain names, memories, and landscapes, can he solve for X, the shifting and longed for keys to understanding the family’s past?

Before examining Shimoda’s sharply lyrical book, I’d offer that what he’s doing isn’t creating a monument to an ancestor. His collaging of the historical document with the personal, the folkloric, and the frustrating silences and absences he faces along the way, creates a text that pushes against commemoration. As James E. Young writes about the European Holocaust memorials: these are insufficient performances of narrative. And analogously, so would be any attempt at an epistemological puzzle-solving in the face of Midori’s story. Shimoda knows intuitively that his pointed search for his grandfather’s footsteps through tiny villages in Japan and through internment camps cannot be padded with expansive supposition or feelings. By letting these artifacts speak their truth about what Midori suffered and what he valued, they provide the material guidance by which Shimoda’s family carries on.

In the Fort Missoula’s internment camp log, which notes Midori’s deposition, Shimoda gives us space to be in this archive by ourselves where its affectless detail is almost unbearable. Through this collage of documents and stories as an artifact, Shimoda has brought alive a counter-memorial: Nothing of what he has collected assembles into remembrance so much as it offers a process. Or a touch of terror, the terror of knowing that a story never remains intact.

In Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, the fox with the face of an old man reminds Shimoda of foxes in a woodblock piece of art. To him, “Foxes… can turn into humans by means of climbing into their bodies.” It’s as if Midori is playing hide and seek with Shimoda’s living family and each of his sightings and vanishings changes how the family can recall him: was he a man? Was he a fox? Did he leave us a story or did evade a story? Shimoda writes, “Familiarity inspires affection—a crush, infatuation.” Layers of writing and recollection confirm how, for the second generation of immigrants, ancestors become elusive. They exist as objects of an inner life or as avatars that help the younger person comes to know the self rather than commemorate the past.

Additionally, the black and white photographs included in this book remind the reader of the language of desert landscapes and martyred real-life heroes in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. It feels as though Shimoda has gathered the multiplicity of ancestors alongside or behind Midori. He moves from stark federal reports to maps to photos of his grandfather that records attempted humiliation. Like Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, a poetry book that collages historical photos and texts, and Cha’s Dictee, Shimoda’s black and white photos and cultural references chart the onset of historical dementia: the desert wanderings, dead ends, loose outlines, and missed understandings.

Shimoda’s poetic mind yields a memoir that feels less about explanation arriving at a conclusion than about somber folktales that become  Is Shimoda recounting a folktale or is he using his imagination to conjure a ghost story? His trip to the ancestral village filled him with dread and his words are italicized as if Shimoda is not sure that it is real.

In an historic essay that readers might not have seen coming, Shimoda discusses the people of “the first year [of immigration from Japan]”. This essay lists shipwrecks and the survivors drifting across the Pacific. It reminds me of the archive for Cha at UC Berkeley’s Art Museum which has felt haunted to some: Shimoda feels he’s violating the space of the dead when he is in the archive—the reaction and slight revulsion is different in cemeteries. Possibly because it is such a space trying to defy decay.

The satisfaction of reading The Grave on the Wall remains in Shimoda’s ability to liberate meaning from still images. For Shimoda, the landscape of the desert holds magic for the younger generation in his family because it is/was so clean and open. The monument cannot remain flat and static; the writer mulls a photograph of his grandfather in Monument Valley and, through it, builds what feels like wisdom. The landscape, subject to day and night, teaches us what happens to our ancestral stories in a nation hostile to them. In doing so, the earth’s literal monuments show the shortcomings of artifacts. Shimoda’s guidance through the landscape photograph—with all its dead ends and unknowns—is a counter-monument to his ancestors’ life:

……….The genuine spectacle of the monuments begins in the evening, when shadows stretch
……….across the valley. When the shadows touch, the valley is deprived of color, which feels
……….truer to the disequilibrium and degradation of the land and its people. The monuments
……….are liberated from the glare of the sun and the gaze of strangers. They remake
……….themselves out of time.

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an associate professor of creative writing and a former Kundiman fellow. Her poetry books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus Books 2010) and Manifest, winner of the Gatewood Prize selected by Harryette Mullen (Switchback Books 2013). Her books Continuity (poetry, Octopus Books) and The Betweens (creative non-fiction, Noemi) are forthcoming in 2021. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Louisville, Kentucky. cynthiaarrieuking.blogspot.com.