Portrait of myself as a Yūrei' is a folktale that wanders into the afterlife of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. It brings to life yūrei, Japanese female ghosts drunk on hatred, sorrow, revenge, and rage with wild long and limp hands broken at the wrists and calls upon their unapologetic chaos to surface emotions about the camps rarely expressed in Japanese American families.

The US has entered the stage of Japanese American Incarceration that writer and poet Brandon Shimoda calls “the ruins.” The camps are no longer open, the generations who lived through them are getting older or have passed, and many of the sites themselves are in ruins. Kimiko’s generation lives in the afterlife of the camps and like the yūrei can access powerful emotions in the afterlife, Kimiko questions what emotions she can access that the older generations weren’t afforded. This is a ghost story that is as much about the future as it is about the past.