"'Border Patrol deals with people across geographical as well as cultural and linguistic lines.' So reads a sentence from the penultimate story of this thesis. While the main characters are all either Japanese or Japanese-American, and they live in Japan or Southern California or Fairbanks, Alaska, the stories explore such universal issues of love, obligation, and freedom. The characters' ethnicity and place serve mainly to inform the larger themes. The point of view from which the stories are told varies from story to story, from a young third person female to a middle-aged first person male. The amount of time in which the stories take place differs as well, from minutes to decades. The stories themselves, though, concern the characters' struggle for independence from constricting relationships and a search for identity through a passion--golf, music, origami. The line between dependence and inner strength is the border that they walk"--Leaf 3.