Anne and Louisa return to the United States. Tobias agrees to help settle their affairs in Japan. He visits their old apartment, which still contains many of the Kangs’ belongings. In the sleeping room, Tobias finds a torn-out diary entry written by Louisa. The entry relates Louisa’s dream of standing with Serk on a hill overlooking the sea. A tower of water approaches them and swallows Louisa up. Tobias takes the diary page with him when he leaves Japan in October 1978.

Anne and Louisa move in with Anne’s brother, Gerald, and his wife. Gerald becomes irritated by the pair’s carelessness around the house. When Louisa finishes fourth grade, he throws them out. With Anne’s meager savings, they move into a small apartment. Louisa starts working at a pizza restaurant when she turns 13. Anne gets a job at a foundation supporting people with multiple sclerosis. During Louisa’s adolescence, Anne refuses to let her daughter see her pain because she doesn’t want Louisa to pity her.

When Louisa leaves for college, Anne moves to a nicer, more open apartment. Sometime in the late 1980s, Anne meets Walt, a neighbor who helps her when she falls out of her car. Walt is surprised to hear her name, which he recognizes from the mailbox; Anne takes this to mean that he expected to her to be Asian. To apologize for his error, Walt offers to help her with dinner that evening.

Before Walt returns, Anne reminisces about her life with Serk before they left for Japan. She briefly took Japanese lessons with a teacher named Mr. Ogawa. Once, she invited Mr. Ogawa to dinner. When she told Serk, she was surprised to see him take charge of dinner preparations. Although the two men had a lively conversation in Japanese, Anne later discovered that Mr. Ogawa was not a native Japanese speaker, but learned it from his first-generation immigrant parents.

Walt deftly navigates Anne’s kitchen, but complies when Anne gives him meticulous instructions for food preparation. While she waits for him to finish, Anne recalls the day she saw a circus elephant being made to cross a bridge. Anne learns that Walt spent some time in Korea, which explains his interest in her name. The pasta dinner they have is better than Anne had expected, which makes their ensuing lack of conversation awkward. Walt offers to wash Anne’s dishes, which she begrudgingly accepts to make him leave. Walt learns that the cat that frequently roams the apartment complex is Louisa’s. The cat’s real name is Holden, but Anne calls him “Damn Cat” while Walt calls him “Orange Tom.” Walt offers to take care of the cat, seeing how little affection Anne has for it. To Anne’s annoyance, Walt comes back the following day. She accepts his invitation to have dinner at his unit. Walt cooks steak and rice using a Korean recipe.

Anne is conscious of her ingratitude in contrast to Walt’s excessive gratitude. The more Anne gets to know Walt, the more she recognizes and resonates with his lifelong loneliness. The biggest difference between them is Anne’s experience as a parent. Walt refers to Anne’s children with both deference and resentment, never having had any kids of his own.

In spring, Holden goes missing, which prompts Walt to lead a community search. He finds the cat in a neighboring construction site, about to be crushed to death by machines. Anne calls Louisa to tell her the news. Louisa screams at Anne over the phone, angry over her mother’s inability to take care of even a cat. A few days later, Louisa calls again and gets angry when Anne reveals that she didn’t even witness Holden being killed. For years, because Anne didn’t see what happened firsthand, Louisa insists that Holden merely ran away.

Walt distracts himself from his grief over the cat’s disappearance by throwing himself into study. He recommends books to Anne about Korea. He also helps Anne to develop an interest in professional basketball. Anne considers the possibility that she may be in love with Walt. She gets frustrated when he insists on seeing keepsakes of Anne’s time in Japan. Anne directs Walt to a box that she has kept and refused to open.

The box contains audio cassettes and Louisa’s old backpack. Anne only kept the latter because it contains a label that Louisa carefully marked with her name, which Anne remembered Louisa agonizing over. Anne allows Walt to listen to the cassettes—recordings of Japanese radio shows for Anne to improve her language proficiency. The backpack contains items that Anne associates with Gerald’s growing discontent with Louisa—Anne dumped the items in the backpack to avoid the embarrassment of feeling like she was a bad mother.

After several days of avoiding him, Anne gets irritated when Walt checks in on her and offers to help her unload her groceries. Walt helps her anyway, carrying her to the sofa. Anne tells Walt to look through Louisa’s backpack and explains its significance. Walt reassures her that she didn’t do anything to deserve her self-hatred. He asserts that Louisa turned out well in spite of the challenges of her family life. Unable to stand Walt’s compliments, Anne asks him to throw the box away. Walt urges her to reconsider.

Walt explains that Anne inadvertently recorded a numbers station, which broadcast messages intended for spies in deep cover. This particular broadcast came from Radio Pyongyang in North Korea, which he knows because during the Korean War, he was tasked with locating secret messages for decoding. This reminds Anne that Serk, just a few days before his disappearance, explained the different names that Japan and Korea have for the body of water between the countries. Then, Serk noticed a boat whose light was too powerful to be a fishing boat. Though Serk never explained why, the boat made him uneasy.

Louisa starts college and is immediately ostracized by her dorm mates. She meets intelligent but unpopular Amalia and her parents; they are too different to be friends. One day, Louisa meets pianist Tamar, who quickly includes her in a group of bohemian peers. Louisa adopts their disinterested, ironic behaviors and spends more time learning things outside her course curriculum. The same friends impress on her the importance of spending the summer in Europe.

Two years later, Louisa manages to save enough money to travel to Europe. Just before the semester ends, Tobias visits, which Louisa interprets as Anne’s ploy to talk her out of her trip. Tobias denies such agenda and ends up staying over in Louisa’s suite, much to her chagrin.

Louisa is surprised to learn that Anne has given Tobias money to travel despite her small salary. Anne would rather Tobias used the money to on plane tickets than waste his time traveling by ship to reach her. Louisa understands that Anne is trying to compensate for abandoning Tobias, which is why she’s never offered Louisa the same support. Louisa points out that Tobias’s kindness to Anne makes Anne feel worse about herself. Tobias is naturally inclined to show Anne kindness; her abandonment doesn’t affect him. Tobias has had plenty of opportunities to get mad at Anne, including when he was left to settle their family affairs in Japan. Instead, he only feels compassion, as well as regret for his failure to play a bigger role in Anne and Louisa’s lives during their grief.

Before they part ways, Tobias gives Louisa the diary entry about her dream. Louisa does not remember writing it and gets upset with Tobias for holding on to it. On her flight, she is so overwhelmed by her vague memories of the past that she cries upon arriving in London.

One night, at Louisa’s hostel, a group led by a woman named Vanessa holds a séance using a flashlight. Eager to win Vanessa’s approval, Louisa participates. When one of the young women is terrified by the ritual, Louisa uses a scientific explanation to assure her that Vanessa is simply playing a trick on them. The young women refuse to trust Louisa over Vanessa, ostracizing her. Before she leaves the hostel, Louisa apologizes to Vanessa. Vanessa dismisses her concern, but insinuates that an unspoken trauma caused Louisa to have a terrible personality.

One day, Louisa rereads the diary entry and tries to figure out how it ended up in the place where Tobias found it. Adding to her confusion is the fact that the entry is dated the year they arrived in Japan. She dismisses this as a mistake, believing it was only possible for her to have written the entry a year later, when she and Anne had already moved back to Los Angeles. Even then, Louisa still feels that she is missing something crucial about the diary entry.

In August, Louisa leaves for Paris; she is to meet Tamar at the apartment of her brother, Daniel, and his fiancée, Christiane. Tamar takes Louisa partying around town. One morning, Daniel takes Louisa and Tamar to his job site, where an excavation accidentally uncovered medieval ruins. Yves, an archaeologist tour guide, meets them to show them around.

During the tour, Louisa finds it difficult to imagine all the excavated artifacts in their original state. The tour goes through dark tunnels, where Louisa has to use a flashlight. When she returns to the apartment, she is stunned to learn that Christiane is throwing her out. Louisa resolves to return to London. After she boards a train without buying a ticket, she is caught; the fine for fare evasion is half of her travel money. The station officer suggests taking the overnight bus instead, noting, however, that it is the transport route favored by criminals.

At the bus station, Louisa is bitter. She only wanted to travel to get Tamar’s approval. She consoles herself that she is wiser, more mature, and more practical than Tamar will ever be. After a long wait, an exhausted Louisa settles into a bus seat. An American named Gabby asks to sit next to her. Gabby is traveling with Roman, whom she met in Tangier. On the drive, Roman invites Louisa to lean on him when he sees her falling asleep. He dispels her concern that he and Gabby are romantic partners. He wakes her up when they reach Dover so that they can pass through immigration. An officer separates Louisa from Roman and Gabby, putting her in a line with a strict immigration agent. The agent accuses Louisa of trying to circumvent a customs check of her luggage and hands Louisa over to a female colleague, who leads Louisa into a private room and subjects her to an intrusive cavity search. The prolonged inspection causes Louisa to miss her bus.

Louisa boards a different bus, pleading with the driver to let her on. On the way to London, she worries that Roman and Gabby may have been smugglers who used her as a scapegoat. When the bus reaches Victoria Coach Station, Louisa bumps into Gabby and Roman, who are relieved to reunite with her and treat her to an English breakfast.

After Gabby flies back to the United States, Roman takes Louisa to an apartment. They begin a romantic relationship. Louisa grows comfortable with the gaps in her knowledge of Roman’s life, concluding that it is better to understand him than to know him. Louisa drops out of college and marries Roman; they have a son named Julian.

Three years later, Louisa goes to Barcelona with Roman and Julian. There, she encounters her former suitemate Amalia, who finished college and is now working for a pharmaceutical company. Their reunion reignites Louisa’s scorn for Amalia’s conformity. Amalia reveals that her parents still remember Louisa and were impressed by her independence when they first met her. This validates Louisa, who always feels the need to surprise people from her past.