Karen Tei Yamashita w/ Karen Maeda Allman, QUESTIONS 27 & 28

Karen Tei Yamashita, author of I, Hotel, Sansei and Sensibility, and more, discusses her new novel Questions 27 & 28, a masterful polyvocal history of Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community. She is joined by Elliott Bay alum Karen Maeda Allman.

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.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of nine books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award. Recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she is Professor Emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2024 Yamashita was inducted as a Literature Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Karen Maeda Allman is a bookseller alum, having worked for over 30 years at Independent Bookstores (including as author events co-coordinator for the Elliott Bay Book Company). She has served on many jury and awards panels, including for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the DSC Prize and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. She’s currently at Wales Literary Agency and also serves on the Board of Seattle Arts and Lectures.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company