51 pages • 1 hour read
Kiku HughesDisplacement
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The West”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains discriminatory language including racial slurs, quoted directly from the source text. It deals with wider issues of racial discrimination and injustice, including unjust incarceration and inter-generational trauma.
Displacement opens in the past, with Kiku writing an account of her time travel experiences, having now been stuck in the past for over a year. She decides to tell her story from the beginning, starting with her first time-travel “displacement” in June 2016.
The first chapter shifts to June 2016. Kiku and her mother walk around San Francisco as tourists visiting from Seattle. Kiku’s mother is determined to find the house her mother, Kiku’s grandmother, lived in as a child before World War Two.
This is Kiku’s first visit to California, and she is unimpressed and bored. They are in Japantown, an area of San Francisco known for its Japanese immigrant population, and many of the street and store signs are in Japanese. Despite being fourth-generation Japanese American, neither Kiku nor her mother can read Japanese, and Kiku feels out of place. They wander the streets until they realize that the house has been torn down to make way for a new mall.
Kiku’s mother decides to walk through the mall but Kiku is tired and annoyed; she sits on a bench outside to wait. Kiku hears music and then a strange fog surrounds her. When it clears, she finds herself transported. She is sitting in a dark theater, surrounded by people she does not know, wearing clothes that are not hers. Her phone is missing. On the stage a young Japanese girl plays the violin, wearing a white dress and a blue hair clip. An older woman thanks the girl for her performance, calling her Ernestina Teranishi. Kiku thinks that may be her grandmother’s name, but she is uncertain and decides it is a coincidence.
She leaves the theater with the crowd and sees that her surroundings are from a different era. She sees a sign on the Native Daughters of the Golden West building that reads: “No Japs in Our Schools!” (18). Before she can react, however, the fog returns and she finds herself once again in front of the mall, as her mother comes out to find her. Convinced that she must have been dreaming, Kiku says nothing to her mother.
Her mother never talks about Kiku’s grandmother or their family. Though they are Japanese American, they do not take part in cultural activities. Kiku only knows that her great-grandparents were Japanese immigrants and worked as servants in white households in San Francisco. Her grandmother, Ernestina, was a talented violinist. The whole family was placed in an incarceration camp during World War Two. After the war, Ernestina attended Juilliard, and the family moved to New York. Ernestina died when Kiku’s mother was only 19 years old and soon after that her mom moved to Seattle. Kiku wants to know more but is too afraid to ask, for fear of upsetting her mom. In their hotel room, her mother watches the news: it shows a speech from Donald Trump during the 2016 election circuit, in which he claims that he will block Muslim immigration to the US.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
The next morning in the hotel room, Kiku looks out the window to an older building across the street and then suddenly sees the fog coming in again. As the fog clears, she stands in a crowded line with other Japanese people, once again dressed in the clothes of a different era. Everyone is somber and quiet. On a wall, Kiku sees a sign that reads: “Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry” (33). A white guard in military uniform holding a rifle stands to the side of the line. Kiku is so startled that she trips and falls, scraping her knee. A Japanese boy leans down to help her up and asks: “are you sure you’re supposed to be here?” (33). Kiku begins to respond that she does not know when the fog returns and she is back in the present.
Kiku and her mother prepare to return to Seattle. In the taxi, Kiku sees that her knee is still scraped and bloody and she realizes that she has not been dreaming. She really is traveling back in time, being “displaced” (31). Once she realizes that the displacements are real and can happen any time, she becomes more afraid. The only warning is the fog. However, because the displacements began in San Francisco, Kiku convinces herself that they will only happen there. She will be safe when she is back home in Seattle.
Still, she worries about the boy’s question when she fell—if she is sure she is supposed to be there. Kiku never felt “particularly Japanese” (40) because she is only half-Japanese and her family rarely “[takes] part in any Japanese culture” (40). Curious, she researches the incarceration camps on her phone during the plane ride home. She learns that the official order declared that “anyone with one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry or more was incarcerated” (41), meaning that she (as well as her mother and sister) would have been placed in the camps “no matter how white-passing” (41) they were. Kiku feels that in this sense she was “supposed” to be there, feeling a sudden new connection to her Japanese ancestry. She also recognizes that none of them belonged there at all.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The first part of Displacement introduces some of the principal characters and the overarching themes that will be central to the story. The protagonist and narrator of the story, Kiku, is introduced, and readers gain a sense of her detachment from her family history. The first chapters also introduce Kiku’s mother and her grandmother, Ernestina. Importantly, the opening chapter reveals necessary context, situating Kiku as a Japanese American, descended from Japanese immigrants who survived the incarceration camps during World War Two. This is vital information to establish the significance of the time travel displacements that follow.
Kiku’s lack of knowledge about her family history, including even her grandmother’s first name, lays the foundation for the interlocking themes of the graphic novel. One theme, that of Generational Trauma and the Power of Memory, leads directly to the second theme of Heritage and Immigrant Identity. These themes are expanded as the text progresses, but the fact that Kiku’s family does not speak Japanese and does not talk about their family history hints at the ways the generational trauma of the camps have led to the loss of their Japanese heritage. Kiku’s second brief displacement re-enforces the complexity of identity and belonging, when the young man asks her if she is sure she belongs there. The question echoes Kiku’s own question of immigrant identity: because she is only half-Japanese and does not participate in Japanese culture, she does not feel Japanese enough to qualify. This section highlights an important aspect of racial discrimination: her feelings of identification are not relevant to others’ labelling of her. This is underlined by the racist language and assumptions of the government’s “white-passing” terminology. The structural racism of the government (and white society) catalyzes Kiku’s awareness of the tensions of adopting an identity. Kiku understands this both when she learns that anyone with one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry or more “counts” as far as the relocation order is concerned, and when she sees the sign on the street that reads “No Japs in Our Schools” (18). Racism dehumanizes the individual in removing their right to self-identify.
The opening part of the novel draws explicit parallels between the past of the 1940s and the present day of the narrative. Kiku’s mother watches Donald Trump’s speech on the television in the hotel, just after Kiku’s first displacement. This is the first of recurrent references to Donald Trump and his campaign speeches during the 2016 Presidential Election, and its position in a narrative of efficient detail make clear that this will be a crucial element of the story.
Visually, the first part presents the cohesive color palette of muted blue-greens, reds, tans, and browns that will persist throughout the graphic novel. This color palette and well-placed visual markers help the reader to keep track of the various characters as the story progresses. Kiku wears shirts and dresses of a teal/greenish-blue, while her mother wears primarily red. Her grandmother, Ernestina, wears white and brown, with an ever-present blue barrette in her hair. This helps the reader identify characters quickly in later scenes even without voice-over narration to explain, aiding the flow and pace of the novel, and fostering a feeling of familiarity and intimacy with the characters.
The visual motif of Ernestina’s violin and music appears early, an image which is key to the story. The image of musical notes drifting across the page marks Kiku’s first displacement, as she hears music just before the fog appears. Then Kiku sees Ernestina herself playing the violin, an image that repeats throughout the story. Introducing Ernestina—and by extension her generation of Japanese Americans—through her musical prowess helps to situate the internment of the community in its proper context, highlighting her humanity.
