"The Eskimo Connection" begins in the late winter of 1975, when Emiko Toyama, a Nisei poet and widow living in Los Angeles, receives a letter from a young Eskimo prisoner-patient at a federal penitentiary in the Midwest. Alden Ryan Walunga has read one of Emiko's poems in an old Asian-American magazine and wants her to critique an essay he has written for a prison publication. This foreshadows a connection between the prisoner and Emiko.