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 2, Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Wastes”
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary
Content Warning: This section deals with wider issues of racial discrimination and injustice, including unjust incarceration and inter-generational trauma.
Now back home in Seattle, Kiku lies on the grass while her mother sits inside watching more news about Donald Trump. As Trump shouts that he will ban immigration and “make America great again” (48), Kiku finds herself once again surrounded by fog and displaced into the past. This time, she sits at a station with many other Japanese people, as an armed guard stands by and a man with a clipboard calls out numbers for people to board a bus. Every Japanese person in the station wears a paper tag with a number on it.
Kiku sees her grandmother, Ernestina, and her family in the crowd but does not speak to them. On the bus, everyone is quiet and somber. The bus drives out into the country. Kiku tries to comfort herself that these displacements are temporary and she will go home at any moment, but she is terrified and wonders if these displacements will follow her forever.
Finally, the bus arrives at their destination: Tanforan Assembly Center, a large horse racetrack that has been converted into a waystation for the displaced Japanese population before they are sent to permanent camps. One by one, the people go through a medical examination. Kiku answers questions about her health and vaccinations, and she receives shots for smallpox and typhoid. Both the nurse and doctor tending to her are Japanese, though they work for the government officials. When she says she has no family with her, she is assigned to a room with another single woman in Barracks 14, Unit 9.
Kiku goes to her assigned room. It, like all the others, is a barren wooden structure filled with dust and two empty cots. To her surprise, Ernestina and her parents go to the room next door. They speak in Japanese, but Kiku does not understand them. Kiku’s roommate arrives. Her name is Aiko Mifune, an independent outspoken woman who sets them to work making their room more livable. Kiku is surprised by Aiko. She always imagined the Issei and Nisei, like her grandmother, as quiet and cooperative, but Aiko is “rebellious and vocal about her opposition to incarceration” (77). Kiku says: “I had grown up thinking that nobody resisted the camps, that the Nikkei cooperated quickly. But Aiko was never quiet” (77). During that first night at Tanforan, Kiku cannot sleep and lies awake hoping she will soon be home in Seattle.
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
When Kiku awakes the next morning still in the assembly center, she is overcome with shock and depression. Thanks to Aiko, however, she survives those early days. Aiko drags her out of bed and makes her eat. Kiku admits that she did not, at the time, remember that everyone around her was just as shocked, disoriented, and depressed. The other Nisei at the table talk about their fears of being sent to Japan, a place none of them have ever seen. They share rumors that do little but stoke their own fears.
To keep their mind off their dire situation, Aiko puts Kiku and herself to work fixing up their living quarters. They work so hard that Kiku is tired enough to sleep at night. Eventually, Kiku adapts like everyone else around her. One night, she and Aiko hear Ernestina’s family arguing in Japanese next door. Kiku asks what they are saying. Aiko explains that the older Issei are having a particularly challenging time, “especially the men [who] are used to being in charge, head of the household. But now they have no control and they don’t know what to do” (94).
As before, Kiku feels disconnected from the community because she does not understand Japanese. She asks Aiko to teach her, but Aiko refuses, telling her she does not need it. She insists that they are American, not Japanese, and that Japan is “even more fascist than America” (95). Aiko’s vehement opposition to her Japanese heritage, even while objecting to the prejudices they face, gives Kiku a better understanding of why there is so little connection to Japanese culture in her own family growing up.
Over time, the Nikkei community works hard to transform the barren racetrack into something livable. They plant gardens of vegetables and orange flowers. They give their barracks fun names: Kiku and Aiko call their room “Amazonia” (98). Kiku adds, no amount of work can hide the underlying “ugliness of [their] unjust incarceration” (99), which she confronts when she walks out to use the latrine in the middle of the night. An enormous spotlight surrounds her and she sees the armed guards in the watchtower. Terrified, she rushes back to her room.
Yet even as she feels helpless, others fight to exercise their rights. The Nikkei starts their own newspaper, though it is heavily censored by the white administration. They also vote for representatives to have a say in their conditions. Some believe that the white administration have hand-picked the candidates and that they will falsify the results. Still, everyone takes the vote seriously. There are three candidates: a Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) candidate who “wants to reject all Japanese culture and maintain cooperation with the camp administration”, a “Leftist Nisei candidate who wants to protest for civil rights and against fascism abroad and at home,” and a “modern Nisei candidate who emphasizes the need for Issei and Nisei to come together” (104). Though the moderate candidate wins on Kiku’s block, all news of the council disappears soon after.
Eventually, the camp residents start classes for the children again. Aiko says she will be teaching one of the classes, and Kiku agrees to attend in hopes that she might be able to interact with Ernestina. She believes that if she could talk to Ernestina, she might understand why she has traveled to the past. Unfortunately, Ernestina is older than her and placed in a different class. Instead, Kiku meets a girl her own age, May Ide. May becomes her first friend besides Aiko. Kiku also takes art lessons with an art instructor in camp, Miné Okubo, who encourages her to sketch everything she sees around camp. Kiku admits, however, that she mostly draws May. She realizes that, despite the horrible conditions, they have all made something of a life in Tanforan, even having dances for the students, which Kiku attends with May.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
One night, as Kiku and Aiko are in their room, soldiers carrying rifles barge in for a surprise inspection. The soldiers dig through their belongings and confiscate a pocketknife and a copy of The New Republic (a political and current affairs magazine). Rumors spread that they will be leaving Tanforan soon for their new, permanent camp location. They speculate about where they will be sent, though Kiku knows from her family history that they will be sent to Topaz. Despite no official announcement, everyone starts packing in preparation.
As they prepare to leave, an older Issei man named Mr. Matsuzawa visits Kiku and Aiko. He does not speak English, but he hands out small wooden toys he has carved for all the children. For Kiku, he has made a small wooden paintbrush with her name written on the side. Kiku has seen something like this gift before. In a box of mementos her mother keeps from Ernestina’s childhood, there is a small wooden violin toy also carved by Mr. Matsuzawa. Kiku says, “I felt an intense connection to my grandmother in that moment. We were linked through this community, and I held the proof in my hand” (128).
Part 2, Chapters 3-5 Analysis
Part 2 moves into the material of the main plot, as Kiku finds herself transported along with the rest of the Japanese community of San Francisco to Tanforan Assembly Center, exposing the cruelty and injustice of the internment program by literally “displacing” Kiku. The novel makes an explicit comparison between her displacement and that of the other internees, as she comes to see her own sense of disorientation, loneliness, and fear as no more than theirs. The novel here telescopes the experience of inter-generational empathy for historical experiences, playing into the theme of Generational Trauma and The Power of Memory. The deep sense of displacement is also played out by the colors of the locations. Chapter 3 visually marks Kiku as being at home, even before the voice-over narration, with the lush green background of trees and grass that fill the whole page panel (45), clearly separating it from the reds, browns, and tans that made up the San Francisco setting of Part 1. These colors impart a sense of relaxation, comfort, and hopefulness: Kiku lies in the grass, confident that the strange displacements she experienced in San Francisco are now over. Tanforan is drawn in shades of tan and brown, making it obvious even without narration that the place is barren, dirty, and shoddily constructed.
Just as in the first part, Donald Trump’s campaign speech plays in the background, as Kiku’s mother once again watches the news. As Donald Trump rails against immigration and says his infamous catchphrase, “Make America Great Again” (48), Kiku covers her ears in clear distress. It is at this moment that the fog displaces her again. This is integral to the novel’s treatment of Generational Trauma and The Power of Memory. The implication is that Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies trigger a memory of the generational trauma passed down from Kiku’s grandmother to the current day, and thus propel her into the past.
During this time, Kiku meets another principal character, Aiko Mifune, a Nisei woman who stands in contrast to Kiku’s perceived image of the Nisei as quiet and submissive. Aiko, described as independent, rebellious, and “never quiet” (77), is a foil to Ernestina, who never speaks on the page. She also calls into question the accepted narrative Kiku has learned about the Japanese community quietly submitting to their incarceration without complaint or protest. Aiko’s constant protests show just one way in which this claim is false and is an example of the theme of Resilience and Resistance that emerges in Part 2.
Another element of the theme of resilience and resistance appears in the form of the orange flower motif. Throughout Part 2, orange flowers appear in important places to signify a form of persistence in the face of their mistreatment. The first occurrence is in Chapter 4, as Kiku describes the way the Nikkei community worked to “transform the horse track into a livable space” (98). They plant gardens and the orange flower makes its first appearance. It appears again at important moments in the second half of this section. The community also demonstrates this sense of resilience, of life persisting under adverse conditions, when they open a school within the camp for the children, and even hold dances. As Kiku states, the Nikkei are “determined to make something of life here” (114).
The theme of Heritage and Immigrant Identity runs through Part 2, most particularly in Kiku’s disconnection from the Japanese language. In several places, dialogue is portrayed in Japanese kanji and hiragana, meant to portray Kiku’s inability to understand the spoken language. This also makes the reader feel the same disconnection. She laments for the first time that her family did not learn the language, and slowly begins to understand why her grandmother might have made the decision not to teach to her children after the war. This is especially clear when Kiku tries to convince Aiko to teach her Japanese, and Aiko refuses, insisting that she does not need the language because she is American. Aiko’s disdain for her Japanese culture, even as she protests the racism they face in the camp, shows the complex and often contradictory facets of immigrant identity. However, Kiku starts to close the gap between her identity and heritage when she receives the toy brush from Mr. Matsuzawa. The gift, an echo of the toy violin Ernestina receives, helps to connect her to her family history in a concrete way she has never experienced before, and reinforces the violin motif once more.
