Content Warning: This section contains discriminatory language including racial slurs, quoted directly from the source text. It deals with wider issues of racial discrimination and injustice, including unjust incarceration and inter-generational trauma.

Displacement opens in the past, with Kiku writing an account of her time travel experiences, having now been stuck in the past for over a year. She decides to tell her story from the beginning, starting with her first time-travel “displacement” in June 2016.

The first chapter shifts to June 2016. Kiku and her mother walk around San Francisco as tourists visiting from Seattle. Kiku’s mother is determined to find the house her mother, Kiku’s grandmother, lived in as a child before World War Two.

This is Kiku’s first visit to California, and she is unimpressed and bored. They are in Japantown, an area of San Francisco known for its Japanese immigrant population, and many of the street and store signs are in Japanese. Despite being fourth-generation Japanese American, neither Kiku nor her mother can read Japanese, and Kiku feels out of place. They wander the streets until they realize that the house has been torn down to make way for a new mall.

Kiku’s mother decides to walk through the mall but Kiku is tired and annoyed; she sits on a bench outside to wait.