SECRET HARVESTS

The noted writer and organic farmer looks deep inside his family history to give voice to the unspoken.

“I am haunted by gaps in family memories, nebulous responses and twisted behavior that must be examined within the context of history—not to uncover excuses but rather reveal family baggage we all must carry and learn to live with,” writes Masumoto near the beginning of this memoir. The author looks forward to a country where his fourth-generation Japanese American children, the yonsei, are incontestably American, unlike the nisei who were interned during World War II, the author’s ancestors among them. Masumoto, a sansei in the middle, finds himself conflicted by the transformation, about “how quickly we became white, and I don’t want to be white.” His deep search into the past turns up at least one family-rattling discovery—for example, an assumed-dead aunt who suffered a disease-wrought intellectual disability, still living in an institution long after her contemporaries had been released from their wartime concentration camps. Masumoto is a collector of ghosts, and he listens to them as he explores the Gila River Indian Community of Arizona, where his family was detained, and the hospital where his aunt was locked away. He even finds ghosts among the orchards and garden beds of his central California farm, a place jeopardized by water shortages and a warming climate. “We live in a constant blur,” he writes, joining themes of past and present. “It’s easy to forget the past and instead only strive to move forward. Clinging to yesterday is perceived as a disability. Innovation and change rule. Historical amnesia is rewarded. Commerce and business drive life.” As a farmer, of course, Masumoto has to look forward, reckoning with risk and loss, but though his meditations are pensive and sometimes melancholic, it’s a pleasure to see him joining his place to the generations that came before him.

A simultaneously elegant and sharp-edged exploration of the hidden past.