Picture bride

In 1917, a young woman named Hana Omiya steps off a ship in San Francisco holding a single photograph of the man she has agreed to marry, a husband she has never met. She is one of several hundred Japanese women who crossed the Pacific in the early twentieth century to wed men they had only seen in pictures. Hana's life becomes tangled with those of Taro Takeda, the Oakland shopkeeper who awaits her; Kiku and Henry, who turn away from degrading city jobs to take up farming; and Dr. Kaneda, a respected leader in the Japanese community whose beloved land becomes his undoing. The novel then follows them into the upheaval of World War II, when Japanese Americans on the West Coast are forced from their homes and locked away in detention camps in the desert.

Each of these characters suffers a serious blow, yet Hana draws on the same determination that carried her across the ocean to endure. The book is set in the Japanese American communities of the Bay Area and captures a period of displacement and resilience. Author Yoshiko Uchida was herself a Japanese American writer who was incarcerated during the war, which informs the novel's perspective.