Dear Reader:
Asako Yamashita died this year, 2015, at the age of ninety-eight. She would have been ninety-nine on November 10. She was the last, by marriage, of the nisei generation of the Yamashita family. Occasionally I set before her these letters, and she perused them silently without comment. All these years later, the family into which she married still seemed too chatty and too voluble, a garrulous bunch. I think she disapproved of making this correspondence public or revealing private lives to others, and yet they contain a history that profoundly shaped her. Still, aside from honest outbursts, her thoughts remained contained, and she, mostly refusing to say. Living with her for over a decade, I heard her memories surface and recede, change and solidify, cloud and diminish. It is in this way that she bid us good-bye.
With kind and gentle regards,