The protagonist and narrator, Kiku, is a 16-year-old Japanese American girl, based on the author, Kiku Hughes. The novel follows her journey—literal and metaphorical—as she grapples to gain a sense of identity and purpose; in many ways this is a coming-of-age narrative. Through her story, the parallel story of the Japanese American community is told.

At the beginning, Kiku feels little connection to her Japanese heritage. She never felt entirely Japanese, because was she only half-Japanese (her father, who never appears in the story, being white). Neither she, nor her mother and sister, speak Japanese, and they do not take part in Japanese cultural traditions. As she and her mother walk around Japantown in San Francisco, she feels out of place because she cannot read the signs all written in Japanese. She shows little interest or curiosity to learn and her hesitation in influenced by the fear that asking about her family’s past will be upsetting for her mother.

After the displacements begin, she realizes she is more deeply connected to the past than she had thought. She wants to learn more about her grandmother and the rest of her family. She even wants to learn the language, and asks Aiko to teach her Japanese in secret, despite the dangers of speaking Japanese in the camp.