Dear Homer:

You ask, even though you had from the very beginning suggested it, even though the body of your scholarship (as I interpret it) is given to this idea: why forgiveness? I puzzle over this, but sense that it is a question from which you cannot be released. I also appreciate that your query is Socratic and teacherly, an insistence to pursue my thinking, saying that, despite your guidance, I do not understand is a kind of understanding. Forgiveness, you offer, requires the confrontation of two parties, a meeting face-to-face between people who have the capacity to hurt each other, and thus, perhaps, to discover grace. This is to carry the idea into practice. You translate the request, please forgive us, to say: Please receive us in our fullness. But such encounters are impossible because all the players are dead—jailers and inmates, Chizu and Kay. And what about evil, you ask. This is a much larger question.

As for history, you note the historian’s problem that writing about an event is not the same as living it. History is an inquiry, and there is an attempt here to, as you say, clear the ground with these letters, meaning perhaps to properly bury the dead. Yet even so, you say, we are rendered speechless, dumb, when it comes to the hearts. There are, you agree, things beyond history, which history may point to yet also obscure. Beyond or behind history are glimpses of what matters.

You pause after the first section to note that what you recognize in this writing is a letter about letters, what you call an invocation.

You requested a clarification about Chizu’s letter in which her words suggest Japanese Americans had a choice about their imprisonment; she describes people who have torn themselves from all living—sacrificing their life work, their homes, and their rights to live as other free people. Perhaps the words torn and sacrifice indicate free action, but no such freedom existed, even though this incarceration was called a wartime necessity. At the same time, it occurs to me now that Chizu’s way of describing this event was in itself a refusal to be a herded prisoner, a refusal to lose dignity.

I am gratefully yours,