Amid a sweltering Los Angeles heat wave, Murano, a reclusive high school English teacher, is muddling through life as he reels from his father’s sudden death and his own recent cancer diagnosis. The monotony breaks when he inherits his great-uncle Benjiro’s unpublished memoir. What Murano expects to be a grim reminder of his position as the half-white son of the family’s outcast instead whisks him away to 1930s California, to a time when his family was inseparable. Now, faced with the reality of his family’s dissolution, Murano becomes determined to understand its breaking point following their incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II, no matter what hidden truths he might uncover about his ancestors or himself.