Secret Harvests

Starred review from December 15, 2022
The noted writer and organic farmer looks deep inside his family history to give voice to the unspoken. "I am haunted by gaps in family memories, nebulous responses and twisted behavior that must be examined within the context of history--not to uncover excuses but rather reveal family baggage we all must carry and learn to live with," writes Masumoto near the beginning of this memoir. The author looks forward to a country where his fourth-generation Japanese American children, the yonsei, are incontestably American, unlike the nisei who were interned during World War II, the author's ancestors among them. Masumoto, a sansei in the middle, finds himself conflicted by the transformation, about "how quickly we became white, and I don't want to be white." His deep search into the past turns up at least one family-rattling discovery--for example, an assumed-dead aunt who suffered a disease-wrought intellectual disability, still living in an institution long after her contemporaries had been released from their wartime concentration camps. Masumoto is a collector of ghosts, and he listens to them as he explores the Gila River Indian Community of Arizona, where his family was detained, and the hospital where his aunt was locked away. He even finds ghosts among the orchards and garden beds of his central California farm, a place jeopardized by water shortages and a warming climate. "We live in a constant blur," he writes, joining themes of past and present. "It's easy to forget the past and instead only strive to move forward. Clinging to yesterday is perceived as a disability. Innovation and change rule. Historical amnesia is rewarded. Commerce and business drive life." As a farmer, of course, Masumoto has to look forward, reckoning with risk and loss, but though his meditations are pensive and sometimes melancholic, it's a pleasure to see him joining his place to the generations that came before him. A simultaneously elegant and sharp-edged exploration of the hidden past.

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March 1, 2023
Masumoto has shared his experiences as an organic farmer in central California in books and as a columnist for the Sacramento Bee. Here, he details his family's remarkable discovery in 2012 of an aunt--his mother's sister Shizuko (Sugi)--whose childhood case of meningitis rendered her mentally disabled, and who was thus forcibly separated from her siblings and parents during the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII. Long presuming her to be dead, the family was stunned to learn she was in hospice care in Fresno, California, close to their prewar family farm. Masumoto thoughtfully ruminates on the swirl of emotions the war wrought on his family, such as their accepting the flag for a son (the author's uncle) who was killed defending the country that was imprisoning them, and their shame in realizing that institutionalized care for Sugi might have been better than what they could have given her. Ultimately, there is pride in Sugi's resilience, so fierce that, after seven decades of separation and institutionalization, it inspires her caregivers to coin the motto, "Be a Sugi."

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.