Dear Editor:
You’d think by now this would be over, but there you are waiting beneath every sentence, dipping below the surface of the text, suturing the stuff of it by attachments of word to meaning, sentence to flow, and back to larger meaning. Are you the last critical filter, my best collaborator, or my ideal reader? After your scrutiny, will it be nearly perfect? Done?
How many times have we together read through this thing? Unlike my other five epistolary muses, your concerns have been to make the book in its entirety work. If, for example, I answered their questions about the narrative “I” and “you,” you’ve removed my answers to their queries. Academic questions that offend the literary. Similarly, you’ve removed my apologies for my lack of knowledge in their fields and also my responses to their technical marginalia, questions about captions and archival access. Unnecessary, your marginalia implies and remarks. Save this for the afterword. And you’ve excised digressive references reflecting my fascination for historic serendipity. For example, in 1953, author of the song, “Strange Fruit,” Lewis Allan, a.k.a. Abel Meeropol, and his wife, Anne, came to a holiday party at the home of W. E. B. Dubois, where they met and adopted two boys, Michael and Robert, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cut; interesting but extraneous. Phrases, sentences, entire paragraphs have been erased, so many precious words. This, you point out, is the center of the work, and you proceed to cut the surrounding stuff. Now the meaning can breathe. I think, okay, I’m cool with these cuts. I’m a grown-up writer. I’m breathing.
I think more difficult in this process has been the excising of archival materials. The original draft included entire letters and other associated artifacts. You pointed out that the letters cannot be reproduced in the confines of a printed page at a size that can be read. The handwriting is aesthetically and historically interesting, but who nowadays can read this except my elderly epistolary muses? What remains is a selection of excerpts—of letters, photographs, art, and documents that frame my letter writing as physical gestures to lived history. The reader may access these records for full viewing in the big family archive online. And here is where we insert the link to the archive website: http://yamashitaarchives.ucsc.edu. This is a new literary world, completed by an infinite cyber cloud. It is part of the fictional experiment that I have come to be a part of and to embrace. I mourn the impossibility of print, but you reassure me. This experiment makes possible another way of reading, even as you carefully honor what is written, what I’ve written here. Your honoring confidence I assume with the vulnerability of an interpreter and translator, matching memory with artifact to the present.
This matching of memory to artifact is perhaps finally the difficulty of what has been attempted here, to speak to the contrapuntal nature of reimagined encounters that are familiar but not similar—that is, metaphorically and fictionally familiar, but not commensurably or accountably the same. You have questioned and argued in some instances for a family story that corrals interpretations around similar histories, and I have pushed in another direction to expand the meaning of living and dead histories and belief systems across bodies familiarly defined by nation and race. Perhaps this was John’s project that I have attempted clumsily to complete. We are none of us the same. But there is my family and the familiar you beyond my family, here hopefully resonating.
Well, I owe you a drink. Okay, dinner.
Dinner it is,