The book is set in Kyoto, Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The war is over, and though Kyoto escaped the demolition that Tokyo and other Japanese cities suffered, it did not escape the poverty. Watkins takes us to Kyoto's back streets where the homeless roam hungry and cold and dig through garbage for food and seek shelter in warehouses and under bridges. This world contrasts greatly with the world Yoko and her family knew in Nanam, Korea, before their escape, where Watkins says she lived in "a beautiful big house . . surrounded by a graceful bamboo grove." The war devastated both the land and the people, and Watkins' vivid descriptions of Yoko's world in post-war Kyoto makes the desolation of war painfully obvious.

The places Yoko calls home include a cold, drafty clog warehouse with couple of futons for beds and an apple box for a...