Kimiko watched her there, that dark shape on the edge of the trees. Later she would wish she had spat some subtle insult in the direction of that threatening shadow but in reality she said the only English word she could yet bring to mind: ­“Coffee.” And then she turned back toward the little house, around through the side yard and to the back, and there she lowered herself to the step and lay her head in her hands and wept.

WHEN I RETURNED FROM DRIVING to and from San Jose that first time, I asked my grandmother about Mrs. Wilson’s relationship to Kimiko Takahashi, and the memory she came to was the same memory that was held by the old postman and the woman who had worked at the fruit shed and by the elder members of the Tokutomi family I spoke to later. They all shared the same image of the same May day in 1942, the afternoon in which the buses came to take nearly half the county’s occupants away, first to Tule Lake and later to other camps scattered around the country. The gravel square was busy with anticipation that day, men and women and children gathered in knots along the edge of the square, the Takahashis and the Dois and the Hatas and the Nodas and the Nishikawas and many others besides, some white landowners and townspeople among them, many more, watching at a distance as the Issei and Nisei and Sansei waited amidst the stacked bundles that constituted their lives: some combination of suitcases and rough boxes covered in cloth or paper, bundles and simple sacks that might once have contained feed corn or grain and which now, in the heat of the summer sun, contained instead the sum total of their lives, organized into low stacks in the gravel as they—all of them, white and Japanese—waited for the arrival of the buses. Across the gravel, the slab doors of the fruit sheds were open so that the dim, dusty interiors could be seen, the belts silent, the box-machines still.