On the American experience in Vietnam, I found useful sources in Joseph W. Callaway Jr.’s Mekong First Light, Andrew Wiest’s The Boys of ’67, Frederick Downs Jr.’s The Killing Zone, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Also important was Liz Reph’s documentary Brothers in War. Special thanks too for the memoir In Pharaoh’s Army and to its author, Tobias Wolff, for his kindness in looking over my pages on the Vietnam War and spending some time in discussion with me over email. In terms of naming the nameless, a task my protagonist was never able to do, the reader might explore Dương Thu Hương’s ­Paradise of the Blind and Novel Without a Name, Hữu Ngọc’s Wandering Through Vietnamese Culture, Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, Nguyễn Huy Thiệp’s The General Retires and Other Stories, Nguyễn Ngọc Tu.’s Floating Lives, Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam, and the anthologies Wild Mustard: New Voices from Vietnam (edited by Charles Waugh, Nguyễn Lien, and Văn Giá), Night, Again (edited by Linh Dinh), and Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (edited by John Balaban and Nguyen Qui Duc).

I would particularly like to thank Marie Mutsuki Mockett and Naomi Williams for their attention to questions of Japanese culture, character, and language. For support and care: Tetuzi Akiyama, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Alexander Chee, and Emily Nemens. Special thanks to Michael Spurgeon and Jonathan Franzen for helping me find those moments when the unruly eccentricities of my sentences tilted toward the unreadable.

To my agent and dear friend Eleanor Jackson: much love and gratitude for everything you have done and for all you continue to do and, in particular, for continuing to have faith in my work, even when I can’t find such faith for myself. My editor at Liveright is Katie Adams, a true genius who could somehow see what I was trying to do here in the midst of what I first gave her to read: an unwieldly and impossibly entangled narrative. Katie, you make my work better every time but this book you absolutely rescued. To the rest of team Liveright, especially Cordelia Calvert and Gina Iaquinta: my sincere gratitude.

Of the 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry displaced under Executive Order 9066, 18,789 were imprisoned behind barbed wire at the 7,400-acre concentration camp at Tule Lake. Today, the site of the camp is little more than a desolate field of dry grass through which the wreckage of concrete foundations can barely be seen. The field is once more surrounded by barbed wire and the weekday I visited, with my friend the writer Debra Gwartney, there was no ranger available to open its locked gate. Somehow this seemed fitting enough: the impossibility of entering that space, its fence meant to keep us out, rather than to keep anyone locked inside.