So maybe when he came into the dooryard and saw, at long last, the faces of strangers, white faces, in the dusty windows of the only home he had ever known, maybe then it finally began to feel real. There stood the home in which he had grown up, a small rectangular box, white-painted—Ray and his father and Jimmy Wilson had made a short day of that work while Ray’s sisters and mother supplied them with lemonade—with a grass yard and the shade tree upon which the tire swing still hung. Behind it he could see the first row of the five acres of plum trees his father had planted when Ray had been a boy of six or seven, their shapes now gnarled and battered with age. His father had intended that they be removed and replanted, work they had begun together in 1941, the year before Tule Lake. They had pulled the trees at the back edge of the property and replanted them with saplings. That the rest of the work had been neglected, that the faces of strangers had appeared and now reappeared in the windows, these facts only increased the sense of outrage building in his chest moment by moment until he thought the accumulation would burst clean of him altogether. But like the soldiers in the train car his eyes told nothing, not the stare of some caricatured Asian, stoic and enduring in the face of loss and hardship—gaman, his father might have called it—but the eyes of a soldier, a soldier who had survived Anzio and the horror of the Vosges Mountains and Bruyères and the Gothic Line and all the rest, survived when so many others had bled out into European soil that held no meaning for any of them whatsoever.

He already knew what he would find there, that they were simply tenants upon land owned not by his father or by himself but by Homer Wilson, a plot that the Wilsons had rented them as part of a shared agreement, some percentage of the harvest’s yield. So they did not own it but it was still the Takahashi family home. None of us would have denied it had we been asked and yet Tak also would have accepted—did accept—the right of Homer Wilson to rent it to someone else, a right as unalienable, as American, as our right to food, to water, to air. Tak would have accepted it but Ray would not, did not.

“Who are you?”

A young woman had come around from the back of the little house and stood now partially shielded by the dusty and rust-spotted vehicle parked in the dooryard. She was a few years older than Ray, her hair the color of old straw and her face so thin as to appear drawn.

“Ray,” he said. “I’m Ray.”

“You just . . . ,” she began. Then she said, quickly, “My husband’s just in back.”