In the fable I was told, the year was 1923 and Hiro Takahashi must have felt that his dream of a new life in America had been an illusion, its shape blowing away like the thin road dust that rose in pale eddies around their feet: his own and those of his young wife, infant child in her arms. He had been working for a variety of ranches and orchards and the constant scrambling from one to the next had run him down to a thin hard wire of worry and fatigue. Now that his young wife held a child to her breast that worry had become a kind of fever.

So consumed was Hiro in his own thoughts that he did not even hear the voice that came from the peach trees that lined the road: “Goddammit all to hell!” It was Kimiko who reached forward and touched her husband’s arm and told him, in quiet Japanese, to wait. “Chotto matte yo,” she whispered.

Hiro stopped and looked about him as if waking from a dream. Trees. The road. And Kimiko with the baby in her arms. Looking at her there, glowing in the sunlight, it is not hard to imagine that, for all his exhaustion, he might yet have felt all his labor worthwhile. His grown daughters would tell me that he often spoke of Kimiko with a kind of awe, as if, even after all their lives together, he still could not believe that she was his, that she remained by his side through all their years of struggle, his constant failure to establish himself in a country he had assumed, back when he had still lived under the protection of his family in Yamanashi Prefecture, would provide him with opportunities that his home simply did not, especially after his eldest brother had married, and thereby laid official claim to the orchard that had been in the Takahashi family for generations, an event that starkly defined what he had always known, that the family orchard would never be his.