Even after everything that happened, there is no doubt in my mind that Mrs. Wilson would not have approved of me writing this book, despite my having gone through the usual efforts to obfuscate the facts while still keeping an eye on the truth: changing the names and a few pertinent details until no one can be blamed but me. The two of them are unlikely protagonists, she and Kimiko Takahashi, their coming together, once I understood it, seeming nearly impossible—that ­Evelyn Wilson would, two and a half decades after the war, in the era of ­Vietnam and in the terrible wake of the assassinations of ­Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and when she must have felt as if the very fabric of her country was coming apart at the seams, that she would return to Kimiko ­Takahashi’s side as if connected by some great and invisible thread, unbottling not only her own terrible history but the terrible history of the town itself. It hardly seems possible and yet so much had aligned: that I would be in the town at all, that I would be working that day at the filling station (or that I would even have a job at a filling station) and that the woman I knew or had once known as my Aunt Evelyn would arrive to fill up her Pontiac just at the right moment. She must already have been pondering how to get from Newcastle to San Jose and then came upon me as if by providence, something I did not yet know or understand until a few days later when a knock came upon my grandmother’s door.

I was at my desk, staring at my increasingly dusty and disused typewriter next to which rested a small stack of note cards covered by a nearly incomprehensible cramped script which constituted what I still hoped would become my book. I heard first the murmur of my grandmother’s voice and then another voice which I did not recognize.

I had no intention of stepping out of that room, assuming that the visitor was one of my grandmother’s friends, for the front room of the house was, in the afternoons, something of a meeting ground for Newcastle’s septuagenarian and octogenarian set. So I was surprised when my grandmother’s pale, thin knuckles rapped gently on my door and her dry voice called my name.