Questions 27 & 28

The novel traces the Japanese American experience across more than a century, from the first immigrants of the 1880s through World War II incarceration and its reverberating aftermath into the 21st century. Each chapter centers on a historical or composite figure, blending archival documents, multiple narrative voices, and inventive literary forms. Central to the work are Questions 27 and 28 on the loyalty questionnaire administered to Japanese Americans in wartime internment camps, which asked whether respondents would serve in the U.S. armed forces and whether they would forswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor. The answers split families and communities with consequences that persisted for decades.

The early chapters establish the pre-war world of Japanese immigrants. "Yone: American Pillow Book" is narrated by Asagao, a fictional character created by the real poet Yone Noguchi. Asagao announces she will tell Yone's story as a corrective. In 1892, 17-year-old Yone arrives in San Francisco with literary ambitions, endures menial labor, and finds refuge as apprentice to the poet Joaquin Miller. He cultivates relationships with the writer Charles Warren Stoddard, journalist Ethel Armes, and editorial assistant Léonie Gilmour, then returns to Japan. Léonie arrives in Tokyo with their three-year-old son, whom Yone names Isamu, the future sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

"Kyutaro: Come, Japanese!" presents the confession of Kyutaro Abiko, a community leader who founds the Nichibei Shimbun newspaper and the Yamato farming colony in Livingston, California. His account is interwoven with excerpts from an 1887 guidebook advising emigrants on Western customs and with a parallel narrative by an unnamed figure, implied to be Indigenous, who nurses an injured stranger. The 1913 Alien Land Law and the 1924 Immigration Act progressively exclude Japanese immigrants from citizenship and land ownership. "Etsu: Woman Samurai" unfolds through letters between Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto and her American friend Florence Mills Wilson from 1903 to 1932; after Etsu's husband Matsuo dies suddenly, the two women raise Etsu's daughters together, collaborating on books for over two decades.

"Tsutomu: Code Name Storm" recounts the legendary exploits of a Japanese adventurer in the Mexican Revolution through a collective oral voice that debates and corrects itself. "Yamato: Rising Sun" stages a 1923 afternoon near Stanford where three-year-old Woody, son of Stanford professor Yamato Ichihashi, joins a Japanese naval captain (the future Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto) and English journalist Hector Bywater in constructing paper fleets on a koi pond, an ominous foreshadowing of the Pacific War. "Haruko: Mother Earth," narrated by Haruko Obata, wife of artist Chiura Obata, is structured around the ikebana (Japanese flower-arranging) principle of heaven, man, and earth. It describes their life together, their internment at the Topaz camp in Utah, Chiura's beating by a fellow inmate who accuses him of being a traitor for organizing art classes, and Haruko's efforts to create beauty in the barren desert.

The novel then turns to the internment. "Isamu: Becoming Nisei" follows sculptor Isamu Noguchi's voluntary entry into the Poston, Arizona, camp in 1942. The term nisei, meaning second-generation Japanese American, resonates throughout the novel. Isamu befriends Toshio, a writer whose book has been delayed by the war, and Jack, a troubled teenager who draws obsessively. A small boy in brown overalls goes missing and becomes a recurring spectral presence across the novel. The inventor Buckminster Fuller arrives to test his Dymaxion house prototype, but it fails in a dust storm. Artists stage performances and exhibitions, but a painter named Ray is beaten by fellow inmates suspicious of their activities. Isamu leaves the camp he entered freely, knowing he will not return.

"Violet: War Hysteria" follows Violet Kazue Matsuda de Cristoforo across decades. At the Tule Lake segregation center, Violet, an abandoned mother of three, confronts Rosalie Hankey, a white researcher sent to study the camp. After the war, Violet follows her husband to a devastated Hiroshima as a renunciant, someone who has given up U.S. citizenship. Her husband takes another wife, and Violet sends her children back to America one by one. In 1946, her mother Shika, bearing the physical effects of the atomic bomb, can barely be recognized. Decades later, after the 1988 signing of redress legislation, Violet drives across the country to confront the aged Rosalie.

"Joe: Forty-seven Yes-No Boys" assembles 47 testimonies from Japanese Americans whose lives were shaped by the loyalty questionnaire, military service, and citizenship renunciation, each paired with a bonsai cultivation instruction. The testimonies range from Joe Kurihara's bitter declaration of himself as "100 per cent Jap" to Daniel Inouye's account of losing his arm in combat and being sworn into Congress with his left hand. "Miné: Citizen" depicts artist Miné Okubo sketching near Topaz with Frank Beckwith, a white petroglyph researcher; Miné reveals that drawing is compulsive for her and makes people "disappear." "Charlie: Resettlement" interweaves actual diary entries by Charles Kikuchi at the Gila River internment camp with fictionalized accounts of camp life. "Richard: X" follows Richard Nishimoto, an issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) informant for the sociological study, living after the war in a basement closet surrounded by research documents, estranged from his family. "Jimmy: Origami Checkerboard" tracks the final months of the Minidoka camp as a researcher and a Christian minister play go, a strategic board game, while the population dwindles; they find origami animals folded from loyalty questionnaires.

The later chapters trace the long aftermath. "'Harry: Enryo Syndrome'"—enryo being the Japanese cultural tendency toward self-restraint and deference—is narrated by a trombone and follows young nisei musician Harry Kitano through the Midwest in 1944, passing as Chinese while forging a friendship with Cosmos, a light-skinned Black trombonist who passes as Italian. "Robert: Kiku & Katana" is a spy-thriller satire in which a nisei intelligence agent searches occupied Japan for a missing anthropologist amid philosophical debates about postwar identity. "Nobuya: Invisible Man" recounts a 1964 visit to the Harlem apartment of Yuri Kochiyama, a prominent activist, where the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Study Mission meets Malcolm X. A writer from the delegation, a hibakusha (atomic-bomb survivor), declares they are "invisible," invoking Ralph Ellison's novel.

"Michi: Infamy" stages a dialogue between the ghosts of Michi Nishiura Weglyn, author of Years of Infamy, and attorney Wayne M. Collins, tracing the decades-long legal fight to restore citizenship to Japanese American renunciants. "James: Pacifism" places brothers James and Gordon Hirabayashi on the picket line of the 1968 San Francisco State strike, where the famous civil rights plaintiff and Quaker pacifist counsels his younger brother about institutional change. "Dana: Six Persimmons," structured around watercolor paintings, follows Dana Takagi's involvement with the defense of a Japanese American woman while her father Paul Takagi teaches radical criminology.

"Aiko: Final Report" dramatizes the research partnership between lead researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga and attorney Peter Irons as they uncover evidence that the government suppressed proof the internment lacked military justification, laying the groundwork for reopening the Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui cases. "Michael: Racial Formation" follows sociologist Michael Omi grading student papers on race while his son analyzes the 1998 controversy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging, using the episode to explore racial hierarchies within Asian American communities. "Bruce: The Jetty" imagines two filmmakers haunted by their siblings' childhood memories of camp violence who design a video game where players must answer Questions 27 and 28 to navigate a concentration camp. "Yuki: Rashomon" examines internment photography through multiple perspectives, including wartime press cameras, a handmade camera smuggled into the Manzanar camp, and an iPhone 12, meditating on photography's power to document and commodify suffering.

The epilogue, "Dana: Telephone Call," consists of an unidentified caller asking Professor Takagi about the meaning of the last five digits in the War Relocation Authority's internment database. Takagi responds, "You mean you don't know?" A page of database entries follows, the final coded digits undeciphered, embodying the novel's insistence that the full truth of the internment remains encoded and incomplete.