“I know,” Doris said. She paused a long moment then. Her husband, a white man who sold electronic components and was often on the road, stood in the doorway listening, and Doris glanced up at him briefly before continuing. “I guess what I mean is that you did a good job,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Of making us feel like everything was going to be all right. Block fifty-seven felt like home.”

Kimiko exhaled sharply at this, her tone dismissive, her hands rising as if to wipe away the absurdity of such a statement. “It was a prison,” she said. “Not home.”

“I know, Mom,” Doris said then. “I can’t imagine what it was like for you. As a mother, I mean. I just wanted you to know that you did a good job of keeping things normal.”

“Okasama, she’s trying to give you a compliment.” This from Doris’s husband. He used the formal Japanese word for mother, something he did when he was trying to clamber past Kimiko’s defenses, and while Kimiko herself recognized this ploy she could not help but smile inwardly at the man’s care.

“I know,” Kimiko said. “I know she is.”

“It’s not such a bad thing to be told you’ve done a good job,” Doris’s husband said now.

But she could say nothing to this. She had survived. Her husband had survived. Her daughters had survived. That was all.

IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S living room, Mrs. Takahashi talked of the camps only sporadically, telling me—and sometimes Mrs. Wilson as well—what their lives had been like in that dismal shadscale desert in the far north of the state. Her grand­daughter’s school paper uncapped what had been, for decades, a period of Mrs. Takahashi’s life which was simply not discussed, so that it might have felt to the generations to come after as if their parents and grandparents had simply decided to move from one place to another in a manner identical to the way in which those same parents or grandparents or great-grandparents had once decided to emigrate from Japan. She had not treated it quite as a secret or as something to be ashamed of but instead considered it under the wide umbrella of what she called, in passing, gaman.

“What did you call it?” I asked her when she sat upon my grandmother’s settee on that warm summer afternoon, a fan buzzing from the corner. She had said the word twice or three times before, not offering enough pause afterwards for me to interrupt.

“It means to suffer in patience.” A pause. Then: “To endure what you cannot control.”