Kiku Hughes

Kiku is the novel’s protagonist. Since the novel is part family history and part fiction, the novel’s author, Kiku Hughes, shares a first name with the protagonist. As the novel opens, Kiku and her mother walk around Japantown trying to find Ernestina’s home. Kiku gets frustrated and bored, and this represents the degree to which her family history is not important to her. At this time, in fact, she does not even know her grandmother’s full name. This ignorance of her family history and her people’s history becomes disturbing to her over the course of the novel because, as she experiences history first hand, she realizes all that has been kept from her. She is ignorant of this history for multiple reasons. First, her education did not provide her with accurate information about that time period. Second, her family tried to forget...