By the Shore of Lake Michigan

By the Shore of Lake Michigan, a translation of WWII-era  Japanese concentration camp poetry, recovers the lost voices of Japanese  immigrants.  By Tomiko and Ryokuyo Matsumoto. Edited by Nancy Matsumoto. This collection of Japanese tanka poetry, is now accessible to English-language readers for the first time. The volume offers a rare  look into the inner lives of an often-overlooked generation during the most difficult period of their lives. In 1960, the Matsumotos, Issei (first-generation) immigrants, published their collection, Mishigan Kohan/By the Shore of Lake Michigan. Their tanka—a traditional form of Japanese poetry—chronicled their lives over a seventeen-year period, from their 1942 forced relocation from Los Angeles to the Heart Mountain, Wyoming prison  camp, through their resettlement in Chicago at war's end.  While many second and third-generation Japanese American voices have  told the story of the wartime incarceration in fiction, essays, on  stage, and in film, very l