Dead Letter Room is a transhistorical correspondence with the late Japanese poet Hara Tamiki (1905–1951). Known for his slender output of prose during the pre-WWII and immediate postwar periods, Hara is most popularly for authoring “Summer Flowers”, a short story about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which he survived. Hara becomes both a historical figure and a collaborator, as the work explores how violence, memory, and loss are shaped through historical archives. Presented as a collection of thirteen imagined letters written between Allie Tsubota (US) and Hara, the correspondence elaborates on the legacy of atomic disaster, while weaving a pliable, potentially fictive narrative that crosses historical time.

The prologue to the correspondence engages with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), a visual archive produced by the United States military in Occupied Japan in 1945. It contains over 10,000 photographs and extensive film footage documenting bombed Japanese cities, in particular Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tsubota questions the apparent objectivity of the survey and treats it as a political instrument framing destruction through the state’s gaze.

The epilogue consists of photographs taken in Hiroshima and Tokyo in 2022 by Tsubota, mixed with excerpts from Hara’s writings. The images search for the material, literary, and spectral traces of Hara’s life, while reflecting on postwar erasure in the contemporary landscape. They echo the visual language of the USSBS, but act as an index of absence, where disappearance becomes a form of presence.