EACH OF THE LETTERS they received from the Wilsons was almost identical to the one that had come before, as if the first had supplied a kind of blueprint. When Kimiko considered them later they seemed not unlike the rooms they were assigned at Tule Lake and later at Jerome: each a copy of the last. But the families had worked hard to build within the confines of their rooms a sense of the people within. The differences were small but they were significant enough to give those spaces at least the semblance of home, not for the Issei and perhaps not for the older of the Nisei either but for the children, at least for them. She had just come to understand this not long before I first met her when the older of her two granddaughters, age thirteen, had chosen to write a report on her family history. That child’s mother, Doris, told her daughter what she recalled of those years—she had been eight at the start and eleven when the war had ended. It had not occurred to Doris that the girl would ask her grandmother and it would not have occurred to Doris that the girl’s grandmother would speak of such things because never in Doris’s life had her own mother so much as mentioned their time in the camps. “She answered your questions?” Doris stuttered. “Really?” and her daughter answered, “Sure she did. Why wouldn’t she?” as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Doris read her daughter’s notes later, notes which spoke to a variety of uncomplaining suffering that Doris herself found all too familiar, as if what had happened to her family were natural and could not be helped: the shared toilets, the barbed wire, the dust through the boards, the loss of their family home, all of it.

And yet it had not felt so badly to Doris herself at the time. One Sunday after church, when she and her mother sat in her living room in San Jose, she told her mother that it had not been so much like prison to her, nor, she surmised, to her sister Mary, but had been more like going on a kind of vacation, like camping. The children she knew were all assembled there together so that instead of only seeing her friends at the grammar school or at church on Sundays, she got to see them every day, and as there were few chores for children apart from homework, they were allowed to play together for hours and hours.

“But we had no choice,” her mother had said in response, her hands, like soft paper now, held crossed upon her lap. “They put us there because they were afraid of us.”