California

California is the novel’s central setting, but it is more than a backdrop: its official records and desert landscapes expose how public history enters family life. Anne Casey’s search for Jenny Shimada leads from the noise of fugitive sightings to the deeper record of Jenny’s father, Jim Shimada, while a later visit to Manzanar brings that history into view as a place marked by both abandonment and remembrance.

California as a field of records and rumors

In San Francisco, after tracing the route taken by Jenny and Pauline, Anne understands that Jenny remains outside the version of events the public recognizes. During the year before the arrests, reports of Pauline’s whereabouts had been so numerous and contradictory that the FBI could not distinguish useful information from false leads. Anne had checked that Jenny was a known fugitive, then left the fact aside. Even after learning that Rob Frazer’s account was true, she sees how easily Jenny can remain unrecorded in the larger story: Anne expects that she, too, may eventually file Jenny among the interesting but unusable details she has collected.

The contrast between what California’s institutions preserve and what they omit becomes explicit in the state’s records. California holds far more extensive files on J. Shimada, born in 1924, than on Jenny, born in 1949. The records open a route into Jim’s earlier life, but they do not make Jenny’s experience equally visible. The gap gives the state’s archive a double role: it supplies the history needed to understand the family while reproducing the imbalance that leaves Jenny at the edges of the public account.

Jim Shimada and wartime California

Jim was the only child of Japanese immigrants who had worked as truck farmers before saving enough by the late 1930s to open a small produce stand in Los Angeles. A skilled baseball player, he won a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley and intended to attend film school and make Westerns. After Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist, as some of his friends had, but was refused because of his Japanese ancestry. He was only seventeen. In the fall of 1942, instead of beginning college, he and his parents were sent by the United States federal government to the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the Owens Valley.

Jim’s later unease carries the history of that confinement into ordinary life. Months before he learns of Jenny’s arrest, he recognizes in himself a heightened sensitivity that may be paranoia—or guilt. He has felt a baseless guilt since being interned, and recalls that it once made him feel disgust toward his parents and others who had been wrongly accused. Although he files his taxes on time, he still sweats at the sight of a policeman and expects FBI agents to appear at his door. California’s past is not presented as finished: for Jim, the expectation of renewed scrutiny persists long after the camp has become a memory.

Manzanar as landscape and memorial

When Jenny and her father return to Manzanar for a reunion, the site first appears as an anomalous patch of green in the desert, a ragged quilt of grass and weeds. The vegetation is a trace of the water once diverted to grow crops for the camp; some fruit trees are said still to survive. Beyond it, the Sierra Nevada rises like a wall behind the abandoned, overgrown prison. A dirt track leaves Highway 395 for the gathering, where cars stand at uneven angles and people set up a rough stage and long tables, weighing them down with rocks against the wind.

The reunion’s preparations make remembrance practical and communal rather than abstract. Hammers sound across the open ground as people work; dust lifts in handfuls and falls again. Jenny ties a bandanna around her neck as her father had, then thanks him for bringing her. A young man carrying a taiko drum welcomes them and offers the choice of helping or simply taking in the view. Her father appears not to see him. Jenny recognizes that the young man is about the age her father was when he was forcibly brought to Manzanar. The moment joins generations without erasing their difference: the site that once imposed confinement now hosts a reunion, while its landscape and her father’s silence retain the force of what happened there.