One of the many wonderful things about Mariko Asano Tamanoi's book, Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, is its framework. In investigating four different ways people remember Manchuria, and presenting those four scenarios as “memory maps”, Tamanoi recognizes that “the past” and “the present” differ for different constituencies. By identifying different pasts and presents for each of her groups, and acknowledging that these pasts and presents change with time, she is able both to respect the stories her informants want to tell and to make sense out of the conflicting strands of memories. Her four memory maps are composed of oral interviews with Japanese agrarian settlers who moved to Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s, written memoirs of agrarian settlers, representations of orphans left behind in China at the end of the war, and writings of or interviews with Chinese people who were tied in some way to Japan's colonial project in Manchuria. This deceptively simple organizing device allows flexibility for an array of changing variables and facilitates the reception of complex information. It relieves the pressure to force every informant's story into the same chronology.

The book is rich with insight into how people negotiate memory. In the second memory map, for example, Tamanoi evaluates hikiagemono, repatriate memoirs, and makes sense of this particular genre. She provides yet more evidence (if any more is needed) against the notion that the victims of traumatic experiences are silent, noting that “the Japanese refugees remained quite talkative, even at death's door” (p. 79). In the fourth memory map, Tamanoi explores the representations of memories of three groups of people in China: people who had lived under Japanese colonialism in Manchuria; adoptive parents who raised Japanese orphans left behind in China at the end of the war; and orphans who chose to remain in China even after it was possible for them to return to Japan. A key difference between the first and second groups of Chinese informants, as she makes clear, is that adoptive parents of the orphans still have a relationship with the Japanese state.

One initially puzzling but ultimately rewarding aspect of the book is this focus on the state, as indicated by the book's title. At first glance, the link between how people remembered Manchuria and the state did not seem obvious to me. Tamanoi, perhaps out of honesty or modesty, exacerbated my skepticism about the relevance of the state by saying outright, “To focus on the state, however, may be futile …” (p. 7). Her discussion of scholarship on the state, and the state in Japanese colonialism (pp. 140–51), left me somewhat confused as to its central message. What I took away was that instead of putting efforts into the impossible task of drawing clear lines between “state” and “society”, we should instead look at how distinctions between the two are produced. If that is the mission, then Tamanoi delivers. The many instances in which she mined her own materials for revelations about the state supported one of the central claims of the book: “that the memoirists and interviewees discussed in this book recounted to us their subjective beliefs about the Japanese state in several specific historical settings, in which they tried either to separate themselves from the state or attach themselves to it” (p. 151). As for former agrarian colonists, “they tried to draw and redraw the boundary between themselves and the Japanese state” (p. 152). For the orphans, the issue is negotiating citizenship and national benefits. Adoptive Chinese parents still have to negotiate with the Japanese state because “they are far more preoccupied with the present and the future rather than the past” (p. 134). Unlike other Chinese people, who saw themselves as victims of the colonial state, adoptive parents reveal their continuing connection to the postwar state by way of their criticisms of it: that it has failed both their children, some of whom returned to Japan only to live in poverty, and themselves, the people who raised Japanese children only to lose them late in life. Tamanoi has captured a dynamic process of groups of people, far from the halls of power, who are negotiating a relationship, partly in memory and partly in the present, to a changing state.

Suggested, more than argued specifically, is that the history of the war-torn and extended families of agrarian colonists in Manchuria reflects the history of the world transformation from empires and colonies into nation-states and now into global capitalism, a world in which at least one of her informants, the Chinese son of a Japanese orphan father, does not fret over his lack of Japanese nationality but rather tries to take advantage of the fact that his family contains both Japanese and Chinese citizens (pp. 110–12). It is easy to overlook the fact that Tamanoi succeeds in holding different nationalities within the same framework: that is, that she is doing transnational history. She offers representations of dozens of memories of the fallout from the end of the agrarian project in Manchuria, stories that give a texture to the history, testify to the wide range of experiences, and allow voices to speak through. The presence of these anecdotes suggests that the book may be useful in teaching undergraduates, who are able to process complexity well when presented with nuanced and conflicting case studies.

While the discussion of memory studies scholarship seems somewhat compressed, Tamanoi has made a real contribution to the ongoing process of understanding collective remembrance. The methodology of “memory maps” may be portable, in terms of a framework that allows for variable pasts and presents. Tamanoi had to confront a persistent problem in memory studies, the issue of how to use memoirs generated in single party states, in this case, the People's Republic of China. While there is no simple answer to this problem, her approach seems like a good one: ask a lot of questions about how the memoirs are produced and then use them as well as possible. Her exploration of the nostalgia that runs through Japanese memories shows that it is not just yearning but rather a “strategy” (pp. 6, 160) that contributes to the mystification of the rupture between the end of the war and the colonies and postwar Japan. In exploring the state in the memories of Manchuria, and placing it in tension with nostalgia, Tamanoi's study has succeeded in complicating nostalgic representations, like the photograph on the cover of the book, of the colonial experiment in Manchuria.