51 pages • 1 hour read
Displacement
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Symbols & Motifs
Orange Flowers
Orange flowers appear in several places throughout the graphic novel and are expressive of memory, love, hope, and endeavor. The first appearance accompanies voice-over narration that says: “The Nikkei worked hard to transform the horse track into a livable space” (98) and shows the Japanese community planting gardens. This is the first sign that the orange flowers are a motif connected to the theme of Resilience and Resistance, as the Japanese community works to bring color and beauty to the barren landscape they are trapped within.
The orange flowers appear again as the chapter header image for Chapter 7 and on the next page, standing beside Aiko amid the sandy landscape. In this scene, Aiko tells Kiku that she answered no to both loyalty questions on the questionnaire and will therefore be sent to Tule Lake. Again, the orange flower appears in a moment of resilience and resistance, as Aiko stands up against the injustice of the camps. The orange flowers appear again a few pages later among other images of camp life—a montage of the Nikkei once again building a life within the confines of the camp (186). Having left Tanforan, the community must start over again in planting vegetables and flowers and making their new homes livable.
The orange flowers appear the last time when the Nikkei landscapers build a memorial dedicated to James Wakasa, after his murder by camp guards. The orange flower stands tall beside the memorial in one section, and then by itself in the next, after the administration has the memorial removed. The text beside it reads: “a memory is too powerful a weapon” (203). The implication is that the orange flower will stand as a memorial, in defiance of the administration, all on its own, thus connecting it both to resistance and the theme of trauma and memory.
The Japanese Language
The uses of the Japanese language throughout the narrative are a symbol of Kiku’s disconnection from her Japanese heritage and identity. Her loss of the language symbolizes the trauma of the Japanese American community following the war. In the opening pages, Kiku laments that she feels out of place because she cannot read the street and store signs in Japantown in San Francisco. Neither she nor her mother can read the letter written in Japanese they found with Ernestina’s old address on it. The fact that none of the family can speak or read Japanese is a symptom of their larger disconnection from Japanese culture and their own pasts and also a practical barrier to them when they seek to reconnect.
This disconnection follows Kiku throughout the story. When she is settling into the room at Tanforan, she can hear Ernestina’s family the Teranishis arguing in Japanese next door but cannot understand them (73). The images and dialogue bubbles reinforce this alienation by visually presenting Japanese kanji and hiragana for the Teranishi’s dialogue, so that the non-Japanese reader feels the same linguistic separation as she does. Later, the Japanese language appears visually on the page, so that the reader does not need Kiku’s voice-over narration to know that she does not understand what is being said. Though Kiku had never felt the need to learn the language before, her time surrounded by it in the camp makes her feel her own disconnection more. So much so that she asks Aiko to teach her Japanese in secret, despite the dangers, and is shocked when Aiko tells her she does not need it (95).
Aiko’s attitude is echoed at the end, when Kiku’s mother explains that Ernestina spoke it around her parents but refused to teach it to her children. Kiku and her sister realize that speaking Japanese had proven dangerous while living in the camps, and that Ernestina was trying to protect her children from similar kinds of persecution by making their assimilation as seamless as possible. This once again reinforces the loss of language as a symbol for the generational trauma inflicted on the Japanese community.
Ernestina’s Violin
The recurring motif of Ernestina’s violin is used by Hughes in two ways. First, it is related to the moments of displacement, represented by the musical notes that visually drift across the page. Kiku’s very first hint of displacement is the sound of violin music drifting in along with the fog, before she appears in the theater in San Francisco, as her grandmother plays on the stage (12). This same visual representation of music appears when Kiku settles into the barracks at Topaz and is comforted by the sound of Ernestina practicing her violin on the other side of the wall (146). The music also signals the end of Kiku’s displacement when she watches Ernestina’s graduation just before returning home. Again, both Kiku and her mother hear the music just as the fog surrounds them and they travel to 1960s New York City. The music shared by them is a familial link, especially important as Ernestina never speaks.
Secondly, the violin appears in the form of the carved wooden toy violin. In this form, the violin connects Kiku to her grandmother and the Nikkei community incarcerated in the camp in a profound way. She says this herself when she receives the gift of a toy brush from Mr. Matsuzawa and realizes that he had also made the toy violin her mother had saved in a box of mementos from Ernestina. Kiku says: “I felt an intense connection to my grandmother in that moment. We were linked through this community, and I held the proof in my hand” (128). The toy brush and the toy violin are tangible representations of their shared experience, their familial connection, and the legacy of trauma that ran through them all. The toy violin appears one last time, in the last chapter, as Kiku and her mother and sister look through the box of mementos. Kiku feels that her experience of displacement had likewise displaced Ernestina’s feelings of gratitude into Kiku as well, once again reinforcing that feeling of connection (268). Carved miniature sculptures, of ivory, wood or other materials, are a distinctive feature of Japanese art and culture, called Netsuke. In carving and giving these miniatures, Mr. Matsuka is preserving and sharing Japanese culture with the younger generation in a way which embraces and encourages their personal talents. Netsuke are tiny, so they were traditionally carried as keepsakes or souvenirs, significant in the novel’s context of displacement, loss, and homesickness.
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