The attack had come on a Sunday and although the ­following week’s church service was the same as it ever was—the chanting the same, the smell of incense, the sound of the priest’s voice—it also felt as if the very air of that room had changed. In the parking lot afterwards, the men clustered with the men, the women with the women, and the talk was of what might come, the voices around Kimiko in a state of quiet panic.

—My husband says they’ll come to see how Japanese we are.

—They can’t do that.

—They can do what they want.

—What will they do?

—My husband says they’ll have the police guard our homes.

—Guard our homes from what?

—From people.

—What people?

And then the last words before the group fell into silence, the statement so resolute that Kimiko felt it like a single needle of ice plunging into her heart:

—From Americans.

It was but a few days later, after Doris and Mary had gone to school and Raymond was out with his father in the orchard, that Kimiko burned the little Buddhist ancestor shrine Hiro had built soon after they had moved into the house, breaking its shelf from the wall with a claw hammer and then taking the individual pieces from the small cabinet one by one out into the yard where a steel barrel smoked, its open circle holding within a cradle of flame into which she slid the broken pieces of wood, stirring the fire until it twisted from the mouth of the barrel like a small bright tornado. The incense holders. A small sheet of paper containing the Seikatsu Shinjo, which Hiro had written out in English for the children to practice, beside which rested the black lacquered box containing Shinran Shonin’s hymns, all of which now, piece by piece, Kimiko resigned to the fire. The various lacquered wooden stands for offerings. The red candle. The cloth burned with a ferocity that surprised her. Of the metal—the bells and lanterns and such—for these she had dug a small hole near the edge of the orchard trees where the grass was thick and she thought the pieces would not be found.

She did not burn the Buddha until after she had smashed the shrine itself and had resigned each piece to the flames. Only then did she lift Amida Nyorai from where she had set it on the kitchen counter, an image of the Buddha seated upon a lotus flower, his eyes closed, thumbs and knuckles touching gently just below the curve of the open neck of his robe. For a long while she watched that impassive face blacken in the barrel, the coal spark creeping across its features, the bright glow, and finally its disappearance into flame.