During the third year of World War II, a teenage boy is shocked and upset when a Japanese farmer suddenly moves onto the barren land near their home. On the day after Pearl Harbor, he and some friends dig up trenches near the farmer’s land and fire BB guns at him. They are too far for the pellets to reach, but the boy sees his Uncle Boswick throw a rock through the window of his shack. When the boy’s father hears about it, he goes to the man and pays for the window. He relays the farmer’s story of being second-generation Japanese with American citizenship. His previous farm was confiscated and sold when the war started, and he had just been released after spending two year in an internment camp. The war drags on, and the boy’s family worries about their oldest son who is fighting abroad. When the boy tries to destroy the farmer’s crops with his knife, he gets scared and runs away without his knife and bag. The next day, the Japanese man fills the bag he left with vegetables and gives them to the boy’s mother. Months later, the boy catches his friend destroying the Japanese man’s shack after his father was killed in the war. Another one of his friends celebrates the safe return of his Uncle Jed from war. While abroad, he had sent back a box with guns and Japanese swords. The boy sees Gussie, Jed’s partner, using one of the Japanese swords to cut vines. Jed approaches from behind to take the sword from her, but she startles and falls onto the blade. Jed shoots himself on the porch. When the Japanese farmer starts raising chickens, Uncle Boswick is upset he will not sell or eat the eggs. He rants about how the farmer said he knew the hens too personally to take their eggs. The chickens and farm start to fall into disarray, and the boy notices he never sees the farmer anymore. The war is coming to an end, and the boy watches as the now-starved chickens begin fighting and eating each other. He goes to the shack and finds it vacant except for a wall with newspaper clippings about the war. The Japanese man is gone, and the lone chicken that survived emerges from the coop covered in blood and featherless.