One morning in Toronto, Cathy Matsumoto’s father, Yasuo, calls to announce he intends to visit a dying cousin in Victoria.
Cathy’s never heard of this mysterious relative before, but she begrudgingly agrees to plan a cross-country family trip. It's only in British Columbia that Cathy learns this “cousin” is actually Yas’s younger brother, Stum, who’s been languishing in psychiatric care for decades, abandoned, ever since Yas committed him to Essondale Asylum before World War Two, inadvertently sparing Stum from the atrocities of the Japanese Canadian internment camps.
Yas tries to fend off probing questions from his daughter, but revisiting old haunts stirs up memories of the brothers’ boyhood rivalry and coming-of-age near Victoria’s Chinatown, when Yas’s steely resolve to hold their fractured family together clashed against Stum’s troublesome turn toward a life of gambling, crime, and consorting with prostitutes.
In this stirring multigenerational saga, two brothers, both old men not far from death, must at last confront long-buried family secrets — and their lingering effects on subsequent generations.