Displacement

Kiku’s mother is in many ways like Kiku herself, not only because she reveals that she also traveled back in time as a young woman, but because she also finds a way to resist the trauma of her community and come out of the experience ready to fight for others. It is part of the novel’s message and structure that Kiku and her mother come to recognize their shared experiences and feel a new sense of connectedness. Their intergenerational connection is related to the novel’s resolution of intergenerational healing.

Kiku’s mother is full-Japanese Sansei (third generation) and is the first generation of her family not to learn the Japanese language or participate in her Japanese heritage. She adamantly opposes the “model minority” myth that began in the 1960s and 70s when she was child, showing how racial prejudice has directly impacted on her own formative experience and sense of self.

Unlike Kiku, however, she was never able to speak to her own mother about her time travel experiences, or Ernestina’s experiences in the incarceration camps. It is only with Kiku’s help that she breaks the uncomfortable silence around the topic, so that they can face the past and the future together. Both this long self-imposed silence, and her decision years before to leave New York for Seattle, are evidence of the way the generational trauma had affected her without her awareness. Reawakening her connection to her heritage is part of how she, and Kiku, gain the ability to resist injustice elsewhere.

Ernestina Teranishi, Kiku’s grandmother, is Nisei, born in the US and therefore a citizen, unlike her immigrant parents. She and her parents are sent to Topaz, the Japanese incarceration camp in Utah. She speaks fluent Japanese with her parents, but later does not teach it to her children. She is a brilliant violinist who receives a sponsorship to leave the camps early and attend Juilliard. However, instead of becoming a professional musician, she earns a teaching degree and teaches kindergarten instead. She has three children, and dies young, at the age of 48 years old, from leukemia. Her talent is her and her family’s route out of the camps but is also expressive of a life of deep compromise and trauma.

As the trauma that Kiku describes haunts the Japanese community, Ernestina haunts the story. Throughout the narrative, Ernestina herself never speaks. In every scene where Kiku watches her grandmother, or tries to interact with her, Ernestina is only shown playing the violin, or walking away as Kiku tries to chase her. Just as the experience in the camps robbed Ernestina and her family of the Japanese language, so too does it rob her of any voice at all in the story. Ernestina is an embodiment of the generational trauma that the Japanese American community, and each individual family, faced. She also represents the Japanese heritage and sense of identity that Kiku attempts to find throughout the story, as Kiku literally chases her connection to the past and must come to terms with being only proximate to the Japanese identity as Ernestina experienced it.

Aiko Mifune is a Nisei woman who, as a single woman with no family, is placed in a barracks room with Kiku while they are in Tanforan Assembly Center. In direct contrast to Kiku’s view of Issei and Nisei (like her grandmother) as quiet, contained, and cooperative, Aiko is a foil to Ernestina; Ernestina never speaks on the page, whereas Aiko is “never quiet” (77). She is independent, vocal, rebellious, and never cooperative. Instead, she protests the unjust treatment in the camps at every available opportunity, argues with the white guards who check on them, and calls out those Japanese Americans who work for the administration as stooges and sell-outs. When the questionnaire comes out, she answers no to loyalty questions and is therefore sent to Tule Lake with the other “troublemakers.”

Aiko represents those Japanese American people, especially women, who actively rebelled against their treatment. As Kiku’s mother later says, the media represented the Japanese community as the “model minority” who did not put up a fight or even complain about their unfair treatment during the war. This is still often the story presented in history books, and Kiku herself has been influenced by it. With the defeat of Japan in the World War Two, this messaging was a racist effort to impugn the Japanese identity with slurs of cowardice, passivity, and disempowerment. The character of Aiko stands in direct opposition to this claim, and shows the ways many Japanese Americans fought their incarceration, tried to stand up for themselves and others in the face of prejudice, injustice, and cruelty, and still continue to do so today.