A Place for What We Lose

A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake

By Tamiko Nimura. 

In a moving conversation with the past, writer and public historian Tamiko Nimura explores her father’s life and her family’s wartime history at Tule Lake, one of ten concentration camps built to imprison Japanese Americans forcibly removed from the West Coast states during World War II. The typewritten pages of her late father’s unpublished memoir—written decades earlier about his childhood behind barbed wire—sparks a journey toward reckoning with the long shadow of parental loss and the unresolved legacy of incarceration. 

Following an innovative structure, Nimura interlaces her father’s vivid recollections with her own: scenes of camp life, family separation, and resistance alongside her present-day journey as a mother, writer, and descendant. Joining a community pilgrimage to Tule Lake transforms inherited pain into collective remembrance. 

With honesty and lyrical precision, Nimura shows how intergenerational trauma and silence are transmitted, and how confronting them can foster healing. Part memoir, part dialogue with the past, this book illuminates the enduring costs of incarceration while honoring the persistence of family, memory, and story. It is a profoundly moving exploration of grief, history, and the fragile but necessary work of resilience. 

Hardbound: 152 pp.

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