Mine Okubo

Mine (pronounced MEE-NEH) Okubo is the author of the book and is the "Citizen 13660" of the title. She relates, in a very objective and usually detached manner, her experiences as a relocated Japanese-American during World War II. She begins the narrative when war is declared on Germany, and her subsequent struggles with fleeing from Europe to get back to her home state of California, and ends the narrative as she thinks about her experiences in relocation camps from a bus driving her to freedom.

Mine does not let much emotion or personal thoughts bleed into the narrative, and in this sense Citizen 13660 is less an autobiography than a historical account. The idea for Citizen 13660 starts with Mine, an artist by training, sketching images of her everyday life in a relocation camp. Later she supplemented her sketches and added "captions" which are essentially the written text of the...