Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

In three hours of searching in the basement of the Panama Hotel, Henry doesn’t find anything related to the Okabes. He finds an old copy of the Japanese-language newspaper Hokubei Jiji dated March 12, 1942—the last issue before the newspaper was closed down. Ms. Pettison comes down to check on his progress, and Henry asks for permission to return next week to continue searching. He wonders guiltily what Ethel would think of him for searching for information regarding Keiko but realizes she would approve of anything that made him happy.

The next day Henry returns home from a walk to find Marty waiting on his front porch steps. Marty seems nervous, and Henry worries that Marty has to come to confront him about keeping Ethel at home during her last days rather than in a hospice house. This decision is the source of an unresolved argument between them.

Marty instead reveals that he has something else to tell his father, something he’d put off telling partly because of Ethel’s illness and partly because he doesn’t know how Henry will react. Marty’s news is that he has a fiancée named Samantha, who is Caucasian. Marty expects Henry to disapprove, the way Henry’s father would have disapproved of a relationship between mixed races.