Loyalty—a virtue elementary schoolers can explain clearly—has long seemed to confuse the United States government. Some administrations have equated it to patriotism, others to partisan allegiance. Some have tried to manufacture it: In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower declared May 1 to be Loyalty Day, an anti-Communist alternative to the labor movement’s May Day that hardly anyone now celebrates. Americans don’t throng to International Workers’ Day parades either, so the national disinterest in Eisenhower’s holiday seems to suggest that loyalty doesn’t happen on command. Such apathy might even imply that mandating loyalty is counterproductive; that if it’s not freely given, it’s not real.During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration made what may well be the nation’s most explicit and pernicious attempt to demand loyalty. In 1942, roughly two months after Pearl Harbor, the government began to detain Japanese and Japanese American residents of the West Coast and Hawaii. Eventually, some 120,000 people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were imprisoned in large inland camps. During their detainment, which lasted up to four years, internees had to take a survey that, among other things, asked whether they would serve in the Army “on combat duty, wherever ordered” and “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America”—that is, to the country that had just imprisoned them, presuming their disloyalty. If Loyalty Day is uninteresting because it’s artificial, then this was something far more sinister. For many internees, the so-called loyalty questions seemed like a threat.Questions 27 & 28, the author Karen Tei Yamashita’s tenth book, gets its title from those loaded questions. The novel roves through time, space, and literary styles to tell stories of many Japanese immigrants and their descendants in the United States. She brings to life nearly 100 people who were interned—or their ancestors were, or their children, or their legal clients, or a wide range of other connections. All of these stories merge into a sprawling exploration of what it was like to have to answer the loyalty questions, and how those questions echo through American history to this day. Crucially, Yamashita does this without ever legitimizing the test itself. “Those questions,” she writes, “that damned questionnaire, are meaningless, but the consequences of interpreting them, choosing yes or no, shape the future.” Manzanar Relocation Center, 1943 (Ansel Adams / Library of Congress) In a sense, Yamashita is the future to which she refers: Her parents were both interned. She also brings a scholarly perspective to her subject; before becoming a novelist, she spent nearly a decade researching the history and anthropology of Japanese communities in Brazil. Many of her novels mix this academic training with an experimental, playful sensibility. In her 2010 National Book Award finalist, I Hotel, an account of Asian American organizing in San Francisco from 1968 to 1977, she constantly switches forms and characters while remaining grounded in her study of real activists. In Questions 27 & 28, she goes a step further, collaging archival material related to the internment camps into her own richly creative writing.The documents she chooses—always footnoted to remind readers that they’re entering the realm of fact—represent a staggering array of approaches to the questionnaire. Within the camps, the correct answers were hotly contested among internees, in debates that Yamashita uses to illuminate the complications of loyalty. Some internees said “no” to both questions in order to express a real fealty to Japan. Others, who became known as “no-no boys,” answered “no” as a protest against detention, and maybe even as a statement that allegiance can’t be coerced. Other Japanese Americans argued that answering “yes” and actually enlisting were necessary demonstrations of “faith in my motherland America!” as one of the letters Yamashita includes puts it. For some internees, that sentiment predated the camps, and for others, it seems, choosing “yes” was a way to transform a coercive mandate into a voluntary expression of real loyalty. And many more internees set aside the very idea that their answer could be meaningful, instead doing their best to guess which response was most likely to keep them safe and their family intact.Questions 27 & 28 doesn’t take a side in the arguments it brings to life, though it does, unsurprisingly, take a clear stance against the “damned questionnaire” and the pain it caused. What seems to interest Yamashita most is the awful experience of guessing how to answer the questions. In fact, guesswork is core to both the plot of Questions 27 & 28 and the experience of reading it. Yamashita’s mixture of archival material and original fiction can be disorienting, and so can the book’s cacophony of voices. They require an alert audience. So does her strategy of releasing information in covert drips, often not revealing facts until the reader has likely figured them out. Even the questionnaire itself doesn’t appear until long after characters start to discuss it.In the realm of historical fiction, these tactics are highly unusual. By and large, novels that dig into the past charge their readers to learn and remember rather than analyze. But with Questions 27 & 28, Yamashita is not just seeking to interpret the loyalty debate, and perhaps the experience of internment, by writing fiction about it. She is also challenging her readers to do the interpreting themselves—to join her in deciphering history.Questions 27 & 28 begins in a relatively conventional way for a historical novel. It starts in 1892, with a real person, the poet Yone Noguchi—the father of Isamu—immigrating to San Francisco. But just as readers are settling into lush descriptions of Noguchi’s bicoastal, bohemian life in the United States, Yamashita starts to switch things up. One early chapter takes the cozy form of letters between close female friends; the next is a Western about the “the toughest, most agile ninja warrior kick-ass borderlands fighter before Bruce Lee.” In order to follow along, readers have to be game for this chameleonic way of writing: Questions 27 & 28 feels, at first, like a ramped-up version of novels such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, which bring seemingly disparate storylines into gradual connection.But Yamashita’s intention isn’t to connect the dots for us, as becomes clear once the archival documents arrive. She’s not interested in creating a single narrative from the complicated violations of internment. Instead, she layers and juxtaposes material, re-creating the research process—and all the confusion it can bring. She signals this initially by dividing Questions 27 & 28 into “boxes,” each of which contains folderlike sections. As the novel progresses, this decision becomes more than a conceit; it makes the book feel less like Cloud Atlas and more like an excitingly messy archive. In this way, Yamashita mixes historical discovery with literary analysis, turning “active reading” from classroom cliché into something far more tangible.She dramatizes both the agonies and the satisfactions of research by including a handful of scholars and archivists among her many characters. Some of them are interned themselves; one, a young man working for a Berkeley sociologist collecting data in the camps, tells a priest that studying what happened to him “has given me some distance from it all.” Others, investigating internment decades later, are seeking closeness to this history instead, and struggle to comprehend both how the camps came to be and how it felt to be shut inside one.[Read: He spent his life trying to prove that he was a loyal U.S. citizen. It wasn’t enough.]Questions 27 & 28 also features characters who interpret their reality through art. Yamashita shows the artists Chiura Obata, Miné Okubo, and Isamu Noguchi drawing, painting, and sculpting while they are interned (voluntarily, in Noguchi’s case; he didn’t live on the West Coast but entered the Poston War Relocation Center as an act of solidarity). Okubo and Obata also taught art—together, though Yamashita doesn’t emphasize this—and the novel dramatizes Okubo questioning her colleague’s approach to their harsh reality. Speaking to a third artist, Okubo describes Obata having his students depict “barracks and barbed wire at sunset, like romantic paintings.” Okubo’s interlocutor shoots back, “We need landscapes, need nature, especially living in barracks inside barbed wire. It’s not what they paint; it’s what they feel.” Yamashita, as a writer describing internment camps in often quite beautiful prose, clearly has stakes in this argument. However, she leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about whether reinterpreting barracks and barbed wire as a site of beauty is a human error or a human need. Birds on wire, Manzanar Relocation Center, 1943 (Ansel Adams / Library of Congress) Yamashita’s ability to express a point of view without handing her readers an opinion is most evident in the novel’s middle section, which serves as its center of emotional gravity and demands the most focus. It contains real testimonies from the internment camps, most of which deal explicitly with the writers’ decisions about how to reply to the loyalty questions. Yamashita accompanies each statement with a bit of fiction and a very short poem, usually grounded in nature in some way.In general, the links between the poems and the documents are associative or unclear, which means readers get to decide whether and how to connect them. For example, a testimony about a class-action suit on behalf of “no-no” respondents who got deported is paired with a poem about gardening that reads, “In spring and autumn / place outdoors / sun and breeze plentiful / dew at night.” A reader could take this in many ways: as a sign of hope, as a reminder that sun and breeze can be found anywhere, as a necessary distraction in the vein of Obata’s “romantic paintings,” or none of the above.In contrast to the poems, the testimonies tend to be direct, even raw. Although their content and attitudes vary widely, swinging from “yes-yes” to “no-no,” all of them speak to one of the loyalty questionnaire’s central cruelties: By dividing internees, it created even more pain in a community that was already living through something excruciating.Slowly, though, the testimonies also start hinting at facts the novel hasn’t yet introduced, such as the government’s decision to segregate people who answered “no” into a camp called Tule Lake that, according to Jimmy, the young sociology research assistant—and according to its historical reputation—is an even more “dark and hostile place” than the other camps. There, people “had a more volatile experience, didn’t trust anyone.” Later in the book, Yamashita uses an imagined dialogue between a scholar and a civil-rights lawyer who represents former Tule Lake internees to clarify those experiences, but by then, readers will likely have already pieced them together from the scraps she’s provided—and will have begun to see that answering “no” could be a patriotic choice. As the novel goes on, this point of view emerges distinctly. Refusing compulsory loyalty can be seen as an assertion of the very American value of freedom, and yet it led those who said “no” to an even harsher confinement than the internment against which they were rebelling.Being sent to Tule Lake was one striking result of saying “no” to the loyalty questions, but it was hardly the only one. Yamashita shows characters losing their citizenship or being indicted under conspiracy charges for counseling internees to resist the draft. She also shows young men clinging to their sense of independence from their families by going “‘all out’ on a stand for America”—saying “yes” to Question 27 in an effort to wring nuance from a questionnaire that contained none. Like the “no-no” boys, many of these men faced severe consequences: Some died or were gravely injured in combat.In the novel’s more than 400 pages, only one line rang false to me. At the very end, a character addressing a photograph of a child in an internment camp swears, “What happened will be remembered, and people will learn the lessons of the past.” The promise is too neatly optimistic, but also, top-down learning—here’s a lesson; take it with you—is not the book’s dominant approach. Yamashita is doing something rarer and more provocative than that. By writing a historical novel that doesn’t take a settled stance, she undercuts the idea that loyalty is straightforward—or, for that matter, reduced to “yes” or “no.” She also rejects the prospect of a single, stable story about the loyalty questions.Instead, she challenges her readers to join in the reconstruction of a debate, and a moment of the U.S.’s past, too complicated to understand or remember entirely. By compelling her audience to try alongside her, she shares the frustration of the attempt, but she also shares her own determination. In order to read Questions 27 & 28, you have to commit, if only for the length of the novel, to the messy project of American history.
