Sakamoto and MacLean were on different sides of the war, based solely on their race. So when Maclean arrived in Alberta to a hero's welcome after the war, Mitsue could have been angry and refused to meet him because of the things that had gone wrong in his life. Instead, he is thinking about what foods to prepare and is culturally sensitive in wondering whether he was forced to learn to use chopsticks in the fields and whether he would be okay with using them here. Therefore, their meeting over dinner and their subsequent friendship represented mutual forgiveness for the atrocities that occurred during the war. Furthermore, by moving forward with an open heart and forgiving each other, they were able to symbolically unite two countries on opposite sides of the war through the union of their two families and subsequently bring new life into the world. After the stories of Mitsue Sakamoto and Ralph MacLean, we get the third dimension of the book three-quarters of the way through and it is Mark Sakamoto's story. He paints a picturesque backdrop of his childhood, with his mother in the kitchen preparing breakfast and telling her two children, "I love you." However, this image is quickly erased with his parents' divorce and his mother's subsequent death at the age of fifty-one due to