In Your Path (2020)

The following are select pages from the 174 page book.

From the Foreword

In Your Path is a four-chapter, autobiographical graphic novel that represents the culmination of my graduate degree studies.

My grandfather, Yoshiteru Murakami, was born in 1926. He and his family were incarcerated at Manzanar War Relocation Center during the Second World War. He left the camp to attend school at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where I would go on to enroll for my own undergraduate studies some 60 years later. He enlisted in the army as a translator and met my grandmother, Miki, while stationed in Japan. Yosh and Miki returned to Northfield and endeared a largely white, post-war community to their family: Yosh, as he was fondly known, taught music to Northfield high schoolers for close to two decades while embedding himself in both the fabric of the small farm town as well as Minnesota’s music community at large. He died from undiagnosed Addison’s disease in 1975, long before I could ever hope to meet him.

The book chronicles my experience researching my grandfather’s life against the context of intergenerational trauma. As I worked, The book transformed from the biographical research project I thought it would be into letters to Yosh. I was immediately faced with questions: What does it mean to write a letter to someone who can never read it? Whom does this act of catharsis benefit? And in the spring of 2020, as the world changed before my eyes, I was faced with more relevant questions as I considered my grandfather’s life: What does it mean to persevere in a time of anxiety and uncertainty? What happens to the process when your world is upended in front of you? What does it mean to keep living, and keep creating? What happens when you make that choice? 

For so long I’d been enamored with this mysterious and legendary character in my own personal history, and for so long I’d known so little about him. In writing, my notes and thoughts about themes of home, loss, hope, and love, gave me the opportunity to look for instances where my grandfather’s footsteps and my own overlapped. 

The family story never leaves us; it is a thread that connects me through my father to the grandfather I never met, to his parents before him and so on, back farther than I’ll ever know. His story lives in me, and I am the living product of my own historical moment, as you are yours.