If the kind of experiences I had in Vietnam have already become a tired American myth, overtold, overanalyzed, then perhaps this is a good enough reason to justify what I am trying to do in these pages, returning to the 1969 of my memory not to write about Vietnam at long last but instead to narrate the story of someone I did not know but whose time in Placer County has come to feel inextricably tied to my own. That Ray Takahashi was a real person, not a product of my imagination, has complicated matters some, for much of his story is impossible to know for certain and I have indeed relied on my imagination when facts have proven inadequate to the telling of the tale. Nonetheless, I have researched with enough thoroughness to know when he exited the train and to whom he spoke and what the woman I have here called Evelyn Wilson said to him on the porch of her house when he first stood there after returning from the terror of the war in Europe.

That I did not finish the story of Ray Takahashi in 1969 or in the subsequent fourteen years to follow, that I am finishing it only now, in 1983, can be explained by several recent occurrences, not the least of which have been the deaths of the principal players in this story, especially the passing of the woman I sometimes called my aunt, although she was, in reality, a second cousin twice removed. What you will find in these pages is an attempt to re-create events that occurred primarily in the late summer and fall of 1945, the details of which I mostly understood in 1969 and which I am finally putting down on paper today.

I have seldom written so close a narrative as the one here assembled, a narrative which overlaps my own family’s history. My great-grandfather, John Frazier, after whom I am named, was an early resident of Placer County, a man who was, family legend holds, the first to plant peaches here. Since then my family has scattered across the state, putting down roots in Southern California and the Bay Area and some, like my parents, remaining in Placer County although not in agriculture, my mother teaching at the old grammar school in Auburn until she had her three children, and my father, a dreamer with a head filled with plans and schemes that never came to fruition, sporadically producing amounts of cash at unpredictable intervals, mostly via the repair of household appliances.