His brother’s marriage had pushed him away and yet it was his brother who also provided his salvation. Hiro was employed in Vacaville by then, picking fruit for a stern Japanese farmer ten years his senior, and when his brother’s letter arrived Hiro was excited to hear news of home. But there was something else in the small envelope as well: wrapped in the letter’s paper was a photograph of a young woman, a girl really, in a traditional kimono, her hair swept up in a style that so reminded him of his home that he nearly shouted with longing. He supposed she was attractive, although he also knew that such a thing hardly mattered. Powdered face and black eyes. The letter offered sparse details: Hiro’s parents and brother had arranged the match with help from a nakōdo. The woman came, the letter continued, from a family of good standing in Tokyo. It did not occur to him to question the specifics: the unlikeliness that a city girl from a good family would needs be shipped off to marry a farmworker in California. What he wondered instead was if she would be able to adapt to the life he had in ­America, although he knew too that it had been the matchmaker’s job to determine the answer to this question and many others as well. He knew very little, the fairer sex yet a mystery to him, and he could hardly fathom the notion that this woman, ­Kimiko, whose photograph he carried in his shirt pocket, was to be his own.

When she arrived in Vacaville early in the fall of 1920, he had moved to Loomis and then Penryn, and she followed. By the time I returned to Placer County in 1969, these towns were little more than brief off-ramps from the roaring freeway that passed from San Francisco to Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and beyond, but then they were bustling hamlets, each with its own identity and purpose, and Newcastle yet among them. Hiro had come northeast on the word of a man he had met at the ­Vacaville Buddhist Church, following that man’s word only because he felt, in his heart, that he was not meant to be a laborer all his life but that there had to be something more to the years that would follow than working some other man’s plot of land.