For Kimiko what began as a kind of grudging ­acquiescence faded until there was only the fact of her, of Mrs. Wilson, the woman who was the wife of her husband’s hakujin friend. Although even this she secretly questioned, the idea that Homer Wilson thought of her husband in the same way her husband thought of Homer Wilson. Such things simply did not seem possible to her. She had come to America as a kind of package meant to satisfy a business arrangement between the nakōdo and the two families—her own and the Takahashis—and once they had bustled her onto the ship that transaction had been completed. And yet so much of that transaction had lacked the necessary propriety. She had been too young, for one. And there had been no meeting between herself and her prospective husband, so even that part of the process, the omiai, was absent. Only later did she puzzle out the dire circumstances of the whole event, that her parents must have needed her gone, that their finances must have fallen awry to such an extent that when they heard of the Takahashis’ unmarried son in America they jumped at the chance to unload the financial responsibility of their only daughter before the window for sending picture brides to America was closed forever by government decree. And perhaps the Takahashis did not actually understand just how young she had been, not twenty-two or twenty-three but seventeen years old, in most ways still very much a child. Looking back at herself years later, a sepia photograph the nakōdo had sent to Hiro in America and which he would keep for all the years of his life, she was struck by just how innocent she appeared: dressed in a formal kimono, her thin, tapered fingers woven together upon her lap. She could not remember what she had felt that day in the photographer’s studio, her expression utterly blank and vacant, the white face powder giving her features the appearance of a mask.

What she would remember forever were those days on board the ship. Sick for the first week and then slowly coming into some semblance of rightness, she had considered her options with a level of detail that sometimes shocked her: jumping from the deck into the roiling sea (but alas she preferred to live), disappearing into the first city the ship moored at (but she did not know how she would survive there), trying to convince the sailors to take her back to Japan (but she could only live there now in a kind of exile from her own family). In the end, she decided to at least meet this man, this Hiroshi Takahashi.