“You’re not—” Marston began, cutting off his own sentence and then starting again, “I mean—” and then cutting off that second attempt just as the floor lady called his name from somewhere inside the sheds: “Frank? Where’s Frank?” and Marston turned toward that sound, just for the briefest moment. When he turned back to Ray Takahashi it was to find the soldier walking without haste down the dusty street, his head slowly rotating from one side to the other as if taking in the scene before him: the dirt-and-gravel clearing that acted as the town’s main square, its surface flanked by the long low metal-roofed fruit sheds and, opposite them, the small collection of structures that made up the town, clean box-like homes and occasional older Victorians. Among them grew oaks and the gray twisted shapes of digger pines and, here and there, an otherwise out-of-place palm, planted in some lost time to denote a status long forgotten.

As if the whole topography from the air: each ripple of the land distinct and clear and named and owned and perfect, a geography that knit us together in ways we did not even understand until the war was over. In the draw, the little ramshackle Japantown huddled in the shade of the cottonwoods, above which rose the slopes of the Tokutomis’ orchard upon the flanks of Chantry Hill. To the southwest the ridges ran in descending waves toward the Buddhist church at ­Penryn and the ­Methodist church at Loomis, towns no larger than ­Newcastle itself and yet focal because of the Sunday gatherings where they would dress in their finery and which they looked forward to, not because of the service but because it allowed them each a chance to see their Sunday friends, especially the children, sharing the curious experience of growing up in America and Japan simultaneously, this push and pull the tide of their lives. It was all still here, at least physically, seemingly unchanged even after everything that had happened.