Displacement is a brilliant debut graphic novel featuring a 16 year old half-Japanese main character who winds up traveling back through time (or something like it). Kiku Hughes can be doing anything, just living her life, and suddenly she can be swooped along in a mist and find herself some other place and some other time. The first time it happens she sees her grandmother playing violin at a concert or recital in the late 1930s.

She doesn't know much about her grandmother. She knows her grandmother wound up in Topaz, an internment (prison) camp for Japanese Americans. She knows her grandmother died of Leukemia when she was still relatively young, long before Kiku was born.

Kiku's displacements, the times where she winds up out of her own time and place, take her to experience internment for herself. She learns first hand truths that she hadn't learned in school or from her own Japanese-American community. She learns later just how the traumas of internment camps continue on, even generations later, causing her to be disconnected from the culture of her grandparents. She discovers how the aftermath of interment led to the creation of anti-black stereotypes of Japanese as the "model minority". Our history effects us all, whether we know it firsthand, secondhand, or not at all. But when we know our history, we can do our best to be better.