Haiku from the Internment Camp: A Fiction

• Chapter 1 Executive Order 9066
• Chapter 2 What Fits in Two Suitcases
• Chapter 3 The Train with Covered Windows
• Chapter 4 Arrival at Owens Valley
• Chapter 5 Dust in the Barracks
• Chapter 6 Paper Walls and Latrine Lines
• Chapter 7 The First Hot Summer
• Chapter 8 Writing in the Margins
• Chapter 9 Sagebrush and Straw Mattresses
• Chapter 10 Autumn Behind the Wire
• Chapter 11 The Guard Tower Light
• Chapter 12 Winter Wind from the Sierras
• Chapter 13 New Year's Mochi
• Chapter 14 Questions 27 and 28
• Chapter 15 A Divided Mess Hall
• Chapter 16 High School Behind Barbed Wire
• Chapter 17 Baseball on the Alkaline Dirt
• Chapter 18 Seventeen Syllables of Dust
• Chapter 19 The Orphanage Garden
• Chapter 20 Letters from the 442nd
• Chapter 21 Another Year Turns
• Chapter 22 Ink on Scraped Wood
• Chapter 23 The Gates Swing Open
• Chapter 24 Packing the Stolen Words
• Chapter 25 The Last Night in Block 16
• Chapter 26 Beyond the Fence

Starlight on the glass, Rumors whisper in the dark, Winter holds its breath.

The frost on the front window of our house on Bush Street was thin enough to scrape off with a thumbnail. Every morning in mid-February, before the sun managed to burn through the thick wool of San Francisco fog, I stood by the glass and carved small circles into the ice with my thumb, watching the streetlights flick off one by one along the avenue. Down at the corner, the newsstand guy, Mr. Higgins, was already unbinding the first bundles of the morning paper with a wire cutter. You could hear the sharp snip-snap from three doors down, clear as a pistol shot in the quiet morning air.

My grandfather, Jiichan, sat at the kitchen table behind me, wearing his dark wool vest over his kimono, his thumbs tucked into his sash. He was seventy-one years old, born in Hiroshima Prefecture, but he had spent forty years hauling crates of produce off the docks and running a small dry-goods shop in the heart of Japantown. He didn't speak much English beyond what was necessary to sell a sack of flour or negotiate the price of winter cabbage, but he understood the radio better than any of us.

"Minoru," he said quietly, his voice dry as old straw. "Is the paper there yet?"

"Not yet, Jiichan," I said, rubbing the pad of my thumb against my trousers to warm it up. "Higgins is still cutting the wires."

"Look for the thick black letters," he said. "The ones that look like iron bars."

He didn't need to explain what he meant. Ever since December, when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and turned the world upside down overnight, the newspapers had been full of heavy, black ink. At first, it was just the headlines about the war in the Pacific—names of islands nobody in my high school class had ever heard of, like Wake and Midway. But by late January, the tone had shifted. It was no longer just about the navy across the ocean. It was about us. It was about the groceries on Laguna Street, the tailor shops on Geary, the fishing boats docked at Monterey, and sixteen-year-old boys like me who spent their Tuesday afternoons sitting on the front steps of Lowell High School trying to memorize the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice.

My father came into the kitchen, buttoning his collar. He worked as an accountant for a import-export firm that had been sealed up by federal marshals two weeks after the war started. Since then, he spent his days sitting in his small study upstairs, filing receipts that nobody was ever going to ask to see, or staring out at the bay with his hands jammed deep into his pockets. He was an Issei—born in Japan, like Jiichan—which meant that under the law he wasn't allowed to become an American citizen, no matter how many tax returns he filed or how many Liberty Bonds he bought during the last war. My sister, Emi, and I were Nisei, born right here at Mount Zion Hospital. We had birth certificates stamped by the State of California, but over the last two months, those pieces of paper felt about as useful as theater tickets for a play that had already been canceled.

"Turn the dial low, Min," my father said, nodding toward the Philco console in the corner.

I stepped over and turned the wooden knob. The vacuum tubes glowed warm orange behind the woven cloth speaker, hummed for a second, and then filled the cold kitchen with the static of the early morning broadcast.

The announcer’s voice was crisp, clipped, and completely lacking in warmth—the tone of a man reading stock reports or weather forecasts for a city he didn't live in.

"President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 late yesterday afternoon," the voice said, vibrating through the small wooden cabinet. "The order authorizes the Secretary of War and military commanders to prescribe military areas from which any or all persons may be excluded. While no specific group was named in the text of the directive, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command indicated that the Pacific Coast coastline will be designated a restricted zone..."

My father stopped with his fingers halfway through his necktie knot. He didn't look at Jiichan, and Jiichan didn't look at him. They both looked down at the linoleum floor, where the yellow light from the overhead bulb reflected off the polished pattern of small blue diamonds.

Ink upon the post, Black words on a square of white, We must disappear.

"Restricted zone," Emi repeated, walking into the room with her schoolbooks tucked under her arm. She was fourteen, sharp-tongued, and still believed that rules were things created by sensible people to keep order. "What does that mean? Does that mean we can't go to the beach on Sunday?"

"It means more than the beach, Emi," my father said softly. He finished his knot, smoothed his collar down, and sat at the table. He picked up his cup of black tea, took a small sip, and set it down precisely in the middle of the saucer. "It means the military can tell us where to live. Or where not to live."

"But we live here," Emi said, her voice rising just enough to reveal the nervousness she was trying to hide behind her usual schoolgirl authority. "We've lived here since before I was born. Min was born in the room upstairs before they remodeled the house."

"The military doesn't care about the room upstairs, Emi," I said, leaning my back against the cold glass of the window.

"Minoru is right," Jiichan said in Japanese. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out his small bamboo pipe—the kiseru—and filled the tiny metal bowl with a pinch of dark, dry tobacco. He didn't light it; he just held it between two brown, calloused fingers, resting his wrist on the table. "When the river rises, you do not argue with the water. You look for high ground."

"There is no high ground," my father said quietly. "Not when the river covers the whole coast."

That afternoon at school, the air felt different. It wasn't that anyone said anything cruel to my face—not yet, anyway. At Lowell High, most of the kids I had known since grammar school just looked away when I walked down the hallway toward my locker. Jimmy Miller, who sat next to me in geometry and usually spent the first ten minutes of class trying to copy my homework, spent the entire hour staring intensely at his own inkwell as if he had never seen dried black liquid before in his life.

When the bell rang for third period, Mr. Henderson, our English teacher, called me up to his desk while the other students shuffled out, their leather saddle shoes scraping noisily against the oiled floorboards. Mr. Henderson was an older man with wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose and hair the color of wet slate. He had spent three weeks in January trying to get us to understand the rhythm of iambic pentameter, tapping his wooden ruler against his desk to mimic the beating of a human heart.

"Takada," he said, folding his hands over a stack of graded essays. "How are things at home?"

"Fine, sir," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the lapel of his tweed jacket.

"I read the papers this morning," he said softly. He reached into his desk drawer, pulled out my notebook—a small, black-cloth composition book I used for my creative writing assignments—and pushed it across the desk toward me. "I wanted to give this back to you directly. I didn't want it sitting in the turn-in box over the weekend."

"Thank you, Mr. Henderson."

He looked at me for a long moment, his eyes small and gray behind his thick lenses. "You have a good ear, Minoru. You understand that poetry isn't about using big words to make yourself sound important. It's about finding the exact frame for the picture you're trying to show people."

"Yes, sir."

"Keep writing," he said, turning back to his paperwork. "No matter what happens over the next few weeks. Write everything down. Don't let them take your words away from you."

I took the small black notebook, tucked it inside my algebra textbook, and walked out into the corridor. The school smelled of sweeping compound, wet umbrellas, and floor wax. It was a completely ordinary smell, the same smell that had filled the building every rainy Tuesday since September, but as I walked down the wide concrete steps toward the street, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was looking at everything through a sheet of thick glass.

On the corner of Webster Street, two blocks from our house, a crowd of about twenty people had gathered around a wooden telephone pole. A city worker in grease-stained canvas overalls was hammering a white paper notice directly into the dark wood, using short, heavy taps of his roofing hatchet. The sound echoed off the storefronts—thwack, thwack, thwack.

I squeezed past Mrs. Morita, who ran the dry cleaner's down the block, and looked up at the fresh black ink printed at the top of the poster.

WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY WARTIME CIVILIAN CONTROL ADMINISTRATION

INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY

The words were printed in crisp, sans-serif type, completely stripped of any emotion or flourish. It looked like an eviction notice, or a announcement for an auction of bankrupt farm machinery.

"All Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien," I read under my breath, "will be evacuated from the above area by twelve o’clock noon..."

"Non-alien," Mrs. Morita whispered next to me. She was holding a brown paper bag of groceries against her chest like a shield. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the paper. "They mean citizens. They mean our children."

"They can't say 'citizen,'" said Mr. Takahashi, the hardware store owner, standing behind us with his hat pulled low over his eyes. "If they say 'citizen,' it sounds like they are breaking the Constitution. So they say 'non-alien.' It makes us sound like something caught in a net."

Paper on the pole, A cold nail driven through wood, Citizens no more.

I stared at the poster until the individual words began to blur together into thick black lines. Alien and non-alien. It was an strange phrase, cold and surgical. It took eighty years of family history, forty years of my grandfather’s sweat on the San Francisco docks, sixteen years of my own life sitting in public school classrooms saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning with my hand over my heart, and wiped it out with a hyphen.

"Min!"

I turned around. Emi was running down the sidewalk, her skirt bouncing around her knees, her leather school satchel banging against her hip. Her face was flushed from the cold air, but her eyes were wide and dark with something that looked very much like panic.

"Min, come home," she panted, grabbing my sleeve with her free hand. "There are men at the house."

"What kind of men?"

"Men in dark coats," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "They came in a black sedan. Father is in the parlor with them, and Mother told me to go find you."

We ran the two blocks back to Bush Street. The fog had begun to roll back in from the bay, thick and gray, carrying the smell of salt water and diesel exhaust from the ferries. Parked right in front of our porch was a shiny black Buick, its engine idling with a low, rhythmic thrum that vibrated through the damp soles of my shoes. Two men in heavy wool overcoats and fedoras were standing near the front door, while a third man was inside the hallway, his silhouette visible through the frosted glass of the front door.

We slipped around the back of the house, going through the narrow trade alley between our building and the Fujimoto house next door. The wooden back steps were slick with moisture. We opened the kitchen door quietly and stepped inside.

Mother was standing by the stove, holding a copper kettle that wasn't boiling. Her hands were shaking so hard that the lid rattled against the rim with a soft, metallic clicking sound—tik-tik-tik-tik. Jiichan sat in his usual chair by the table, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes fixed on the small framed photograph of his wife that hung on the kitchen wall.

From the parlor, we could hear voices. One was my father's—calm, slow, slightly formal, the tone he used when he was explaining complicated tax forms to elderly clients. The other voice was louder, flatter, accented with the hard, flat vowels of the Midwest.

"We just need to check the shortwave radio, Mr. Takada," the flat voice was saying. "And any cameras, binocular equipment, or maps you might have in the residence. It’s standard procedure under the Treasury regulations."

"The radio is in the corner," my father said. "It does not have shortwave capability. It is a standard broadcast receiver."

"We'll take it anyway," another voice chimed in. "Along with the camera on the shelf in the hall."

"That is my son's camera," my father said. His voice didn't rise, but it grew denser, heavier. "It was a gift for his birthday. He uses it for school projects."

"It's a Kodak, Mr. Takada," the flat voice replied. "Under the proclamation, all cameras owned by Japanese aliens must be surrendered to the proper authorities. We'll give you a receipt."

Emi looked at me, her mouth open slightly. I had saved my paper-route money for four months to buy that Kodak Brownie box camera. I had three rolls of exposed film sitting in my desk drawer right now—pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge wrapped in cloud, pictures of Emi sitting on the front steps squinting into the sun, pictures of Jiichan sitting in the backyard trying to graft an apple branch onto a quince tree.

"Let them take it, Minoru," Jiichan said from the table, speaking in Japanese so quiet it barely carried across the room. "A camera only sees what is in front of it. What is coming, no camera can take a picture of anyway."

A minute later, the door to the kitchen opened, and my father walked in, followed by a tall man in a dark gray coat. The man had blue eyes, a thin mustache, and smelled strongly of peppermint and wet wool. He held my Kodak camera in one hand by its leather strap, and under his other arm he carried our Philco radio, its power cord dangling down and dragging across the linoleum like a dead snake.

He looked at Emi and me, his eyes sliding over our school clothes, our books, the scuffed toes of our shoes. He didn't look angry; he didn't look mean. That was the part that made my stomach turn into a tight, hard knot. He looked like an inspector checking the dates on milk crates at a dairy depot.

"You kids speak English?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Good," he said, adjusting his grip on the radio. "Make sure your folks get everything packed up when the detailed notices go up. Don't leave it to the last minute. The trucks aren't going to wait around for people who can't keep to a schedule."

He turned and walked back down the hallway. The front door clicked shut, the heavy footsteps went down the wooden steps, and a second later the Buick’s engine revved up, its tires churning against the wet asphalt as it pulled away from the curb.

The house was completely silent. Without the radio, without the kettle boiling, the only sound was the foghorn out on the bay, blowing its long, low warning every thirty seconds—a deep, mournful groan that shook the glass in the upper windowpanes.

Cold house in the mist, The silence where music lived, Foghorn calls the night.

My father walked over to the kitchen table and sat down heavily in his wooden chair. He didn't take off his coat. He just reached out and took the copper kettle from my mother’s hands, setting it gently down on the cold iron burner of the stove.

"They are taking the leaders first," he said quietly, looking at the tablecloth. "Mr. Sato was taken this morning at five o'clock. The FBI came to his house while he was still in his nightclothes. They took Mr. Ota from the newspaper office, and the priests from the Buddhist temple on Pine Street."

"Why the priests?" Mother asked, her voice hardly higher than a whisper. "What does a priest have to do with the war?"

"They think anyone who speaks Japanese and has influence is dangerous," my father said. "They call them 'potentially dangerous aliens.' They are sending them to camps in Montana and North Dakota. Real camps, behind high wire."

"And us?" Emi asked, sitting down on the stool near the door. "Where are they sending us?"

"They haven't said yet," my father replied. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of blue paper—the receipt the man in the dark coat had given him for the radio and the camera. He folded it neatly in half, then in half again, until it was a tiny square no bigger than a postage stamp, and slid it into his vest pocket. "Somewhere inland. Away from the water. Away from the cities."

Jiichan stood up slowly, using the edge of the table to support his weight. His old knees made a faint cracking sound as he straightened his back. He walked over to the small window above the sink, which looked out over our tiny backyard—a patch of damp grass six feet wide, bordered by a wooden fence and three small potted bonsai pine trees he had brought with him from Japan forty years ago.

"The wind is turning," he said, looking out at the foggy yard. "It comes from the mountains now. Dry wind. Dusty wind."

"Jiichan," I said, coming up next to him. "What are we going to do with your trees?"

He looked at the little pines sitting on their wooden benches in the yard, their dark green needles dripping with droplets of fog. He had spent four decades pinching back their candles every spring, wiring their branches into elegant, windswept shapes, keeping them small enough to sit in the palm of a man's hand while giving them the appearance of ancient trees that had survived centuries of ocean storms.

"We leave them," he said simply.

"They'll die if nobody waters them," I said. "If we're gone for a month..."

"We will be gone longer than a month, Minoru," he said, turning his gray, watery eyes to look at me. "When a government builds a fence, it does not build it for a month. It builds it until it forgets why it built it in the first place."

He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out his old fountain pen—a black Parker with a brass clip that had lost most of its plating—and a small piece of rice paper he used for wrapping his tobacco. He laid the paper flat on the drainboard next to the sink, unscrewed the cap of the pen, and wrote three short lines of Japanese characters in neat, precise strokes.

He didn't read it out loud, but I knew enough of the kanji to translate it in my head as I watched the dark blue ink dry into the fibers of the soft paper:

Roots caught in the stone, The gardener goes away, Rain must do the work.

That night, I couldn't sleep. The house felt unnaturally dark without the small amber light from the radio dial burning in the corner of the living room. Every sound from the street—a passing delivery truck, the distant clatter of a cable car on California Street, the heavy footsteps of a night watchman—sounded like the black Buick returning to our curb.

I sat up in bed, wrapped my wool blanket around my shoulders, and pulled my black composition notebook out from under my mattress. I opened it to the first blank page, unscrewed my silver mechanical pencil, and looked out the bedroom window.

The fog had cleared a little, leaving a pale, watery moon hanging low over the rooftops of Geary Boulevard. Below, on the telephone pole at the corner, the white notice paper caught the bluish light of the streetlamp, glowing like a small square tooth in the dark mouth of the street.

I clicked the pencil lead out twice, held the notebook on my knee, and wrote down the date: February 19, 1942.

Beneath the date, I wrote seventeen syllables. I didn't write about politics, or general commanders, or the President in Washington signing his name to a piece of thick paper with a gold pen. I wrote about the small, cold things that were sitting on our kitchen table downstairs, waiting for the morning to come.

Three cups on the board, The kettle cold on the stove, Morning has no sound.

Iron locks snap shut, A lifetime measured in pounds, Which thread shall we keep?

The military instructions nailed to the telephone pole on Webster Street did not use the word "evacuation." They used the phrase "orderly removal," as if we were a pile of old newspapers being cleared out of a basement to make room for winter coal. But the most difficult part of the white paper poster was not the cold, bureaucratic language. It was the small, printed list of what we were allowed to bring with us. The instructions were printed in a neat, boxed-off column near the bottom of the page, right below the warnings about penalties for non-compliance. Each evacuee was permitted only what they could carry by hand. No pets. No heavy tools. No furniture. Only bedding and linens, toilet articles, clothing, and the "essential personal effects" of each member of the family.

By Thursday morning, our parlor looked like a dry-goods store that had been hit by a sudden gale. My mother had dragged four heavy canvas-and-leather suitcases down from the attic, along with two wooden sea-chests that Jiichan had brought with him from Hiroshima in 1902. The chests were bound with thick iron bands and smelled of camphor, cedar, and old salt water. They had sat in the dark under the rafters for forty years, untouched except by the spiders, but now they lay open on the carpet, their deep wooden bellies waiting to be filled with the remnants of our lives.

"Two bags each," my father said, standing over the trunks with a small brass scale he had borrowed from the produce market. He tapped the hook of the scale with his finger, making the spring hum. "That is the limit. If you cannot carry it yourself, Minoru, it does not go. The soldiers will not carry your shoes for you."

Emi was sitting on the floor in the middle of a pile of cotton dresses, woolen sweaters, and high school yearbooks. She was holding a blue velvet box that contained her collection of glass marbles and three porcelain dolls our aunt had sent from Kyoto before the shipping lanes closed.

"They aren't heavy, Father," she said, holding up a doll with a pale, painted face and a silk kimono. "I can put them in the pockets of my heavy coat. Nobody will see them."

"A coat is for keeping warm, Emi, not for smuggling toys," my father said, his voice flat and tired. He didn't look at her; he was busy counting the flannel shirts he had laid out on the sofa. "We are going to a place where the wind blows hard. You will need every inch of wool we can pack. Leave the dolls."

"But they're mine," she whispered. Her chin trembled just enough to make her look ten years old instead of fourteen, but she didn't cry. We had all learned over the last week that crying was a waste of dry air.

"We keep what is useful," Jiichan said from the corner. He was sitting on a low stool, grease-stamping our family name and our assigned registry number onto small wooden luggage tags.

19117.

That was our new name. It was printed in thick black ink on ten small rectangles of pine wood, each one drilled with a small hole for a piece of hemp twine. Takada, Family Number 19117. The clerk at the Civil Control Station on Sutter Street had given us the tags on Wednesday morning, sliding them across the counter with the same indifferent flick of the wrist he might use to hand over raffle tickets at a church bazaar. He hadn't looked at my father’s face, nor had he looked at the birth certificates my mother had neatly arranged in a manila folder. He had simply stamped the number on the folder, stamped the tags, and told us to hang them from our lapels and our baggage where they could be easily seen by the guards.

"Use the heavy twine," Jiichan told me, handing me a tag. "If the tag falls off, the bag belongs to the government. Everything without a name becomes sand."

I threaded the rough twine through the hole in the wood and tied it to the handle of my leather school satchel. Inside the satchel, I had already packed my black composition notebook, three pencils, a small pocket knife my uncle had given me for my thirteenth birthday, and a copy of The leather-Stocking Tales I had forgotten to return to the school library. It felt strange to be stealing a book from the San Francisco Public Library at the very moment the government was taking our house, but I couldn't bear the thought of having nothing to read but the instructions on the back of army ration cans.

Ink on wooden tags, We are numbers in a row, The wind knows our names.

My mother spent the afternoon in the kitchen, her hands moving with a frantic, rhythmic speed that seemed completely disconnected from the quietness of her face. She was sorting through the pantry, deciding what to cook for our final dinners on Bush Street and what to give away to the neighbors. The kitchen cabinets, which had always smelled of dried shiitake mushrooms, soy sauce, and sweet vinegar, were nearly empty now. The white porcelain jars that held flour and sugar sat on the counter, their lids off, looking like hollow teeth.

"Mrs. O'Brien from next door came by while you were at the store," she said to my father, her hands busy wrapping three blue-and-white ceramic bowls in old newspaper. "She offered to buy the refrigerator. She offered ten dollars."

My father let out a short, dry laugh that sounded like a dry branch snapping underfoot. "Ten dollars for a Sears cold-cabinet we bought last winter for ninety? That is not an offer, Hiroko. That is a tax on our departure."

"We cannot carry a refrigerator on our backs, Kenji," she said softly. "Ten dollars will buy shoes for Emi when the winter comes again."

"Tell her fifteen," my father said, turning back to his trunk. "If she says no, we leave it plugged in with the door open. Let the utility company collect the bill from the wind."

There was a strange, feverish commerce taking place all along Bush Street that week. The neighborhood had turned into a giant, outdoor bargain basement where the buyers held all the cards and the sellers had only days to live. Every afternoon, small groups of people who didn't live in Japantown walked slowly up and down the sidewalks, their eyes scanning the windows for signs of sale. They were secondhand dealers, junk-wagon men, and ordinary housewives from across town, all looking for cheap washing machines, mahogany sideboards, sewing machines, and Persian rugs that had been beaten clean every spring for thirty years.

I saw a man in a greasy leather cap buy Mr. Fujimoto’s entire inventory of hand-carved garden ornaments—stone lanterns that had been imported from Okayama, bronze cranes, and gravel-rakes—for five dollars and a half-empty bottle of gin. Mr. Fujimoto had stood on his porch, his hands tucked into his sleeves, watching the man hoist a three-hundred-pound granite basin into the back of a rusty Ford truck. He hadn't said a word. He had just nodded once when the truck engine backfired and rattled down the street toward the bay.

"They look at us like we are already dead," Emi said, watching from the front window as a woman in a yellow hat walked off with our parlor lamp under her arm. "They come into our garden and take things before we even have our coats on."

"They are only buying what we cannot keep," I said, though my own chest felt tight as I watched the lamp go. It was the lamp we sat under every evening while my father read the Shin Sekai newspaper and my mother mended our socks. The yellow silk shade had a small grease spot on the inner lining where I had dropped a piece of buttered toast when I was ten years old. Now it was going to sit in a parlor in the Mission District, lighting up books written by people who didn't know our names.

By Friday night, the house was mostly empty. The carpets had been rolled up and tied with heavy wire, sitting in the hallway like giant gray sausages. The pictures had been taken down from the plaster walls, leaving small, pale rectangles where the sun had not faded the wallpaper over the years. The silence in the rooms was different now—it wasn't the quiet of a family sleeping, but the hollow, echoing silence of a packing crate that had been cleared of its straw.

Empty shelves of pine, Only dust is left behind, Where the pictures hung.

We sat on our suitcases in the kitchen to eat our dinner. Mother had made a large pot of rice and cleared out the last of the pickled radish and salted salmon from the cellar. There were no plates left; we ate out of small paper cups she had bought at the corner drugstore, using split bamboo chopsticks that we could throw into the stove when we were finished.

Jiichan sat on his wooden sea-chest, his old knees nearly touching his chin. He had packed his entire wardrobe into a single canvas rucksack that looked small enough for a boy to carry to summer camp. The only extra item he had permitted himself was his heavy wooden go-board, its thick pine surface scarred by decades of black and white slate stones. The stones themselves were packed in two small hollow gourds that rattled like dry peas whenever he moved his feet.

"Your father tells me we are going to the high desert," he said, holding a piece of salted fish between his chopsticks. "The wind there is dry. Good for the bones, but bad for the lacquer."

"How do you know where we're going, Jiichan?" Emi asked. "The papers didn't say."

"The wind always goes east from the sea," he said simply. "And the soldiers do not build camps where the land is expensive. They build them where nothing else will grow but sagebrush and dust. I know that land. I worked the rails in Nevada when I was thirty. It is a place where the sun is your master in the morning and the ice is your master at night."

"The military says it is for our protection," my mother said, her voice dropping as she looked toward the dark window.

"Protection from whom?" my father asked. He didn't sound angry anymore; he just sounded empty, like an instrument that had been played so hard the strings had lost their tension. "If they want to protect us, they do not turn the machine guns inward toward the barracks. They turn them outward toward the road. We are not being protected, Hiroko. We are being stored."

He stood up, took his paper cup to the sink, and rinsed it out with cold tap water. The pipes made a loud, rattling shhh-tup sound that echoed through the empty walls of the pantry. It was the same sound they made every night, but in the bare kitchen, it sounded like an engine winding down.

After dinner, I went up to my room to make my final selection. My desk drawer was open, its contents scattered across the green blotter. I had to choose between my high school track medals—three small bronze disks on faded blue ribbons—and my collection of foreign stamps I had been trading with a boy in Canada for three years. I held the stamps in my hand, their small, colorful faces showing pictures of palm trees in Borneo, kingfishers in India, and the stern face of King George in red ink. They represented a world that was vast, open, and completely indifferent to the boundaries of the Western Defense Command.

I dropped the stamp book into the bottom of my suitcase, right between two thick pairs of wool socks. The track medals I left on the bare wood of the desk, sitting in a neat row next to the inkwell. They looked small and slightly foolish now—prizes for running fast in a circle on a cinder track behind the school, when the real running was about to begin and there were no medals for the finish line.

Bronze upon the desk, Faded ribbons in the dust, I have run my race.

I lay down on my bare mattress with my winter coat wrapped around me for a blanket. The springs beneath me felt hard and stiff without the thick cotton pad we had packed into the bedding roll. Through the uncurtained window, I could see the silhouette of the Fujimoto house next door. Their lights were still burning, casting long, yellow fingers of light across the narrow trade alley between our buildings. I could hear the sound of heavy hammering—bang, bang, bang—as Mr. Fujimoto nailed wooden boards over his front windows to keep the neighborhood boys from throwing rocks through the glass while they were gone.

It was a sound that was being repeated all up and down Bush Street, Pine Street, and Laguna. The sound of wood meeting wood, of nails being driven deep into the frames of homes we had rented or bought with forty years of small coins. It sounded like a city preparing for a hurricane that was coming from the mountains instead of the sea—a storm of paper and ink and iron that was going to sweep us all up and scatter us across the dry places of the earth like handfuls of dry salt.

I reached down, found my pencil in the dark, and wrote four words in the margin of my algebra book before the light from the next-door window went out:

Nails in the window, The street is turning to wood, We are locked outside.