Literary accounts of the World War II-era “internment” of Japanese Americans have grown in range and depth, expanding out from works like No No Boy and Farewell to Manzanar of past decades, to more recent and tonally diverse representations like When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka and this year’s We Are Not Free by Traci Chee. Kiku Hughes weaves a riveting, bittersweet tale that highlights the intergenerational impact and power of memory. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself “stuck” back in time. Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II.

A teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother’s experiences in World War II-era Japanese internment camps in Displacement, a historical graphic novel from Kiku Hughes.

Kiku hughes displacement