In one of their kitchens-Emi Saito's-a black telephone rings and rings. Last loads of laundry still cling to the line. Dying koi in a pond over at the Yamaguchis'. A listless canary glimpsed through the Fujimotos' front window. There was a boy on roller skates who did not care where it was he was going as long as there were paved streets." The final chapter is written in the first person of someone who watched her Japanese neighbors herded away: "We began to receive reports of lights left on in some of the Japanese houses, and animals in distress. There were children who left thinking they were going hiking, or to the circus, or swimming for the day at the beach. There were children who left thinking they were going camping. Otsuka follows them up until World War II, when their lives or the lives of their children and grandchildren were disrupted with sudden removal to internment camps for the duration of the war: "There were six brothers from a strawberry ranch in Dominguez who left wearing cowboy boots so they wouldn't get bitten by snakes. For most, it was a joyless life of hard labor and disappointment. Otsuka's beautifully written, heart-wrenching novel is written as a first-person everywoman memoir of Japanese mail-order "picture brides" brought to San Francisco in the early twentieth century to work alongside their laboring husbands.
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