Displacement

“It was one of those classic San Francisco row houses, divided for several families to live. My grandmother and her immigrant parents lived there until 1942…when they, along with 120,000 other people of Japanese descent up and down the west coast, were forced out of their homes and into American incarceration camps.”

Kiku sets the stage with some necessary historical context, preparing the reader for what is to come. It is important to know about her background as a Japanese American and descendant of an incarceration camp survivor before her first displacement, to understand the significance of the moment when she arrives there.

“I felt out of place here, tailing behind mom as we looked for evidence of any real connection to the neighborhood.”

Kiku and her mother walk around Japantown in San Francisco and do not understand the street and store signs because neither of them read or speak Japanese. Kiku briefly hints here at one of the overarching themes of the story, which is her disconnection from the Japanese language and thus from her Japanese heritage. She expands on this feeling of disconnect and the reasons for it throughout the graphic novel. The novel suggests that is this feeling of disconnectedness in the real world which triggers Kiku’s “displacement” into the past.

“I heard the music first. And when I opened my eyes, all I could see was a thick fog. But when it cleared at last…I was somewhere entirely different.”

This is the moment of Kiku’s first displacement in time and location. It is also the first occurrence of the motif of Ernestina’s violin, seen first as the visual markers of music notes drifting across the page and then in the form of Ernestina herself playing her violin on a stage.