Kiku is a twenty-first century American girl with some Japanese ancestry. She is in San Francisco with her mother. They are from Seattle, but while they are visiting California, they go to Japantown in San Francisco because Kiku’s mother wants to find the home where her mother lived when she was young. Neither of the two speak Japanese, and Kiku looks around at all of the signs, none of them in English. Finally, they find the correct address, but they discover that the home has been torn down and turned into a mall. Kiku’s mother decides to go in, but Kiku is uninterested and sits outside by herself. She starts to hear music and notices a fog. Instantly, she is transported, displaced, back to a theater where a Japanese girl plays the violin. She learns that the violinist’s name is Ernestina Teranishi, and she recognizes the last name as belonging to her ancestors. This is one of very few things she knows about her family’s history. Kiku also remembers that her grandmother played the violin. She goes outside with the rest of the crowd and she sees a sign saying, “No Japs in Our schools!” (18). She is transported back to her own time and place and wonders if the displacement could have been a dream. When questioned, her mother tells Kiku that Kiku’s grandmother’s name was Ernestina. The mother and daughter get back to their hotel, and Donald Trump is on the television talking about his immigration plans.

Kiku is again displaced the next morning, and this time she is in a group of Japanese and Japanese-American people who are in a big group about to be sent away to the Japanese internment camps. She falls and cuts her leg, and a man asks her if she is supposed to be there. She does not know because she is not 100% Japanese. She travels back to her own time, and she consults Google to learn that anybody with at least 1/16 Japanese ancestry was interned during World War II. There is blood on her leg, so she knows the displacement was not a dream.

Kiku and her mother return to Seattle, and Kiku hopes that the displacements will stop. Her mom watches Donald Trump speak again on television, and Kiku is displaced yet again. She is forced to board a bus and is taken with other internees to Tanforan Assembly Center. She has to receive vaccinations there, and she is assigned to a stall with a young woman named Aiko. The stalls the people are assigned to live in are old horse stalls. Aiko takes Kiku under her wing, and they clean up their smelly stall and make it as tidy as possible. Kiku’s neighbors are her grandma and great-grandparents. She hears them argue occasionally, but she cannot understand them because they speak in Japanese. She asks Aiko to tell her what they are saying, but Aiko refuses, saying she is better off not knowing what they are saying. She also refuses to teach her Japanese because she says it is worthless to know the language of fascist Japan.

Kiku had always heard that nobody resisted the internments, but Aiko is against them. The people hold elections, and the internees fall into three main political camps. Despite the elections, nothing really comes of them. The young people start going to school in the camp, and they are encouraged to sketch. No photographs are allowed in the camp, so the sketches are important.

Eventually, the internees are rounded up and taken to another camp named Topaz. Kiku knows where they will end up because she remembers her family talking about Topaz. It is another of sparse facts about internment that was shared with her growing up. She is again assigned to a room next to her family, but this time she lives with a mother and her two daughters. The girls’ father had been rounded up and sent away right after Pearl Harbor because, as a teacher, he had maps. This made him appear dangerous and suspicious.

Eventually the interned people are all given a survey in which they have to answer whether they are willing to fight in the American armed forces wherever they could be sent and also if they will renounce their allegiance to Japan’s emperor. People vary in their responses. The oldest generation of Japanese immigrants are still Japanese citizens and are not allowed to become American citizens, so to renounce ties to Japan could leave them without a country. Aiko responds no to these questions, and as such, is sent to a higher security camp. Kiku responds yes out of fear.

People eventually start to make plans to leave the camp when the time comes. Some people choose to fight in the war. Others are sent out to work days and return to the camp at night while others still are able to be sponsored by employers in other parts of the country. Ernestina graduates from high school in the camp and prepares to leave the camp to go to Julliard to study music.

Kiku is transported back to her home with her mother. As she tries to find the words to explain her displacements to her mother, her mother surprises her by telling her that she, too, had been displaced when she was younger. The two decide to learn more about their family history and the history of other detained people. They also prepare picket signs to protest what they believe are unfair and dangerous immigration policies by Donald Trump.