Pearl Harbor and beyond: Historical Novels and Short Fiction

The late O.A. Bushnell, first winner of the Hawai’i Award for Literature in 1974, was a professor of microbiology and medical history, and a writer of historical novels. His first, The Return of Lono, a fictional account of the arrival of Captain Cook, was published as early as 1956. Moloka’i deals with that island’s leprosy settlement on the inaccessible Kalaupapa peninsula, Ka’a’awa is set on Oahu in the 1850s, relating the effects of the

‘Great Mahele’ and of the diseases introduced by white men. Obviously, his professional knowledge informed these books.³⁰¹ He also wrote two novels about the first Japanese

299 For a critical analysis of available histories, see Trask 1999, especially 113-35.

300 Article in The Honolulu Advertiser, 01/26/2002.

301 As the writers of an obituary state, he “saved his most deeply felt work for last. His ‘Gifts of Civilization:

Germs and Genocide in Hawaii,’ published in 1993, is a masterful combination of his skills and interests:

contract laborers, Stone of Kannon and Water of Life. In his novels, Bushnell included historical figures such as Captain Cook, Hawaiian royalty and leading men of state, or Father Damien, the famous Catholic priest who lived with the lepers. “Ozzie,” a descendant of Portuguese and other European immigrants, attempted to combine gripping storylines with the depiction of complex and problematic historical situations. He created narrators whose point of view allows the author to reflect on their time or specific situation: In The Return of Lono for example, the young crew member of Cook’s voyage tells his story after fifty years have elapsed, and can thus wisely comment: “The truth is that I saw, but I did not see all. […] I saw only what I wanted to see. My only comfort now is that I had much company in my paradise of Fools, for few among our joyful group that day saw the signs which denoted that with us the Serpent was also come into Eden.”³⁰² While Bushnell’s narrators may be prejudiced or even racist, they are the means to illustrate historical situations, never spokespersons for the writer himself. Besides paving the way with his own works, the author tirelessly challenged Hawaii’s writers to tell their stories in their own voices, calling for the ‘Great Hawaiian Novel,’ and warning that if “us local kids” will not write it, “the outsider” surely will.³⁰³

Another eminent figure was the late John Dominis Holt, a “descendant of Hawaiian and Tahitian chiefs, European nobility, and New England missionaries”³⁰⁴ who wrote nonfiction, short stories, a play about Queen Lili’uokalani, and one of the great novels about Hawai’i, Waimea Summer. Written in 1976 and republished in 1998, it is set in an old hapa haole family in the 1930s. Hawaiian superstition and white elitist thinking characterize the people who live in remote Waimea on the Big Island, and young Mark, visiting from Honolulu, is torn between the old and new: “They were totally inimical to

microbiology, Hawaiian history and literary craftsmanship” (Honolulu Advertiser, 08/24/2002. Aged 89, Bushnell had died on August 21^st).

302 Quoted in Sumida 1982: 296. Such ‘seeing but not seeing all’ is a common phenomenon in narratives of discovery. Informed by paradise myths and Oceanist discourse, what visitors to Hawai’i (and other such imaginatively predetermined places) ‘saw’ was always already shaped by their expectations and by such

‘models’ as the noble savage and the beautiful island maiden. There is the often cited example of Arthur Barlowe’s account of his 1584-85 voyage to what is today North Carolina: Two days before land was sighted, he recounted that the crew “smelled so sweet and so strong a smell, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kind of odoriferous flowers” (quoted from an excerpt of “The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1, New York/London 1994, 67-75, here 68). Expectation clouds perception, and our seeing of the ‘other’ is always already culturally conditioned. Objectivity is thus impossible.

303 See Maxine Hong Kingston’s account of the Talk Story conference in Kingston 1998: 47-51.

304 Stanton 1997: 7. Holt’s essay “On Being Hawaiian,” published in 1964, was an early exploration of native Hawaiian identity.

the present. […] Spirits did not thrive in my world of bright lights, clanging streetcars, and modern plumbing, where scientific education continually refuted the lore which still clung, like coral clusters on reefs, at the outer edges of memory.”³⁰⁵ The isolated place influences the big city kid:

I had the sense that the gods had blessed Waimea as once the God of the Old Testament had bestowed magical, extravagant beauty upon Eden. […] Waimea weather has the power and violence of the volcanic peaks, the luxuriance of the wet upland forests: an atmosphere too rich, too dramatic for the human scale (11/40).

This paradise is dangerous, it suffocates you with its dusty mansions and backward attitudes, or it drowns you in superstitions and rain. In the end, a grown Mark manages to break free from the past, to run from the lure of Waimea. He has realized that ferociously clinging to a glorious and noble past that is not even discernible anymore keeps the Waimea people in their self-made paradisiacal prison:

Hawaiian songs too often were a harkening to the past, to your people, reminding you always of breakdown and defeat. […] Perhaps we all needed to be a little more indifferent; we whose lives were rooted in the indigenous compost heap of island history. […] A pagan air, lingering on from earlier days, seemed to surround us. We had stepped out of time, were really phantoms skittering perilously close to the outer edges of reality in our play (90/95).

Holt’s interpretation of ‘paradise’ in Waimea Summer recalls the Celtic land of the fairies which is beauti- and bountiful but can imprison you forever.

A third role model for Local novelists is Milton Murayama, whose plantation novelette All I Asking for Is My Body can be said to have paved the way for the contemporary Hawaiian novel, setting the theme, local history, and employing Pidgin to convey atmosphere and authentic flavor. Having met with resistance from commercial publishers to his innovative presentation of plantation voices, the writer eventually published his novel himself. Having grown up in a Maui sugar plantation camp, he authentically relates the appalling living conditions, the poor pay, the strict hierarchy, and the racial segregation which was perpetuated by the workers: He describes how, if Filipinos went on strike, the Japanese would go to work as strike breakers; how the

305 John Dominis Holt, Waimea Summer, Honolulu 1998: 10, 48.

different groups anxiously saw to it that there was scarce interaction and no intermarriage.

Protagonist Kiyo and his older brother Toshio have to deal with the conflict of filial duty, being expected to help pay off the family’s huge debt, but desiring to get out of the plantation system and establish a life of their own. Toshio rages and fights with his parents, begging for a chance: “I’d be going to high school and college instead of slaving in the cane fields. […] Shit, all I asking for is my body.”³⁰⁶ He is the first in the family to realize that his generation will have to choose their loyalties: “We have to cut off all our ties with Japan and become American” (37). But it is quiet Kiyo, the second son, who in the end manages to break the vicious circle of fatalism and hollow traditions. The war becomes his liberation. After sons have been told all their lives not to bring shame on the Japanese race, the attack on Pearl Harbor in turn has Japan bring shame on each of them.

Subsequently, Japanese values can finally be questioned. Kiyo signs up for the army, postponing his filial duty: “Everybody in Kahana was dying to get out of this icky shit-hole, and here was his chance delivered on a silver platter. Besides, once you fought, you earned the right to complain and participate, you earned a right to a future” (98). It may be called a sleight-of-hand plot device when in the training camp on Oahu, Kiyo wins enough money to pay off the debt in a single gambling bout: “Go for broke. Have absolute faith in the odds. I wasn’t fighting myself anymore” (101). Its point though is that only by leaving the plantation treadmill could Kiyo take the next step towards personal freedom: refusing plantation feudalism as well as family paternalism, he adopts Americanism instead. Murayama’s ending implies that the nisei AJA’s had few choices but to embrace America (skeptics facing exclusion like Okada’s No-No Boy). Their adoption freed them from the bondage of traditions.

Undoubtedly, World War II changed the world and its setup. Local writers have explored its impact on Hawaiian society and lives in various ways. Collective phenomena

306 Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body, Honolulu 1988: 42, 48. The author wrote a prequel about the same Japanese family in 1980, Five Years on a Rock as well as a sequel in 1998, Plantation Boy. These are well-crafted, but do not reach the intensity of the primary text. Also, Murayama wrote a rather unwieldy play on the basis of All I Asking for Is My Body (included in Stanton et al. 2000). In a sense, Philipp Ige’s decidedly Local texts like the short story “The Forgotten Flea Powder,” published as early as 1946 in the Paradise of the Pacific magazine, have to be seen as precursors of both Murayama’s novel and Darrell Lum’s short stories. His child narrators and their Pidgin voice foreshadow a Local mode of writing that would gain momentum in the decades to come. The glossy magazine, long-established and now called Honolulu, proved prescient in expressing “the hope that a regional literature would sprout from Hawaii’s grass roots” (Sumida 1991: 98). For an assessment of the various ways of employing Pidgin in Local writing, please refer to chapters 5.3.2 and 5.3.3.

like Japanese internment can be made tangible by rendering them from an individual perspective. That is one of the prerogatives of historical novels. Thus, Graham Salisbury, who has written several coming-of-age novels for adolescents, has captured the period and its sway over Hawai’i very well in his 1994 novel Under a Blood-Red Sun. The straightforward narrative, set in 1941, shares its main concerns with All I Asking:

Thirteen-year old Tomikazu has to negotiate the conflicting demands of American society and Japanese ancestry:

But then, Grampa was issei, first-generation Japanese immigrant, and looked at things a certain way. The Japanese way – which was stern and obedient. […]

Sometimes I thought he had a point. The old way was fair and honorable, which was good. But it was so inflexible. Jeese. Who knew what to think?³⁰⁷

Early on, class and ethnicity are introduced with the bullying landlord’s son. Tomi is consoled by his loyal friends, a mixed bunch of Portuguese, Caucasian, and Japanese youngsters, united by their passion for baseball. Their preoccupation with the game signifies an innocent feeling of Americanness. But although Tomi still measures time by baseball games, the war slowly forces its way into his conscience. Fighter planes overhead, maneuvers at night, and the ever-growing army and navy presence in Honolulu slowly prepare for what at least the adult reader knows must happen on December 7^th. The actual attack catches Tomi and his friend at their early morning baseball practice:

An ear-shattering roar suddenly thundered down on us, a plane flying way too low. A dark fighter. […] Billy and I waved, but the pilot didn’t notice us. What was going on? They never flew that low. […] Another dark plane charged down on us from behind, screaming out of the valley from the mountains. Billy and I turned just as it boomed over, heading down toward the sea. The noise stabbed into my ears. […] Then it hit me. Dark plane. Not silver. Not a navy plane. It didn’t even have a star on it. It was amber. All the planes were amber. A rush of fear swept over me. Amber. Amber, with a blood-red sun on the fuselage and under the wings…blood-red sun…the symbol of Japan (105-7).

With a father out at sea on a fishing trip and a grandfather who is too Japanese not to be suspicious to the authorities, Tomi wakes up to the weight of responsibility. His initiation

307 Graham Salisbury, Under a Blood-Red Sun, New York 1994: 5-6.

into a complex and unfair world is bloody: he has to kill his father’s cherished racing pigeons because a neighbor has falsely reported them as messenger birds.

Without a word, Grampa and I reached in and removed the pigeons one by one and silently bled them to death with quick, clean slits across the throat. […] The memory of the gentle cooing of thirty-five silky-feathered pigeons slowly died away, faded away, bled away… and, finally, in silence, flowed down into the earth forever (127).

Though the boy has to experience that everything Japanese is now under suspicion, Salisbury endows his Local kids with more integrity and common sense than the general American public had: “For a moment I forgot about the war. It was me and Billy again…

like it used to be. Only now we shared a sadness” (150). Ultimately, this is a book about

‘growing up Local,’ about coming of age at a crucial and confusing time in history. While the Japanese are caught between a host country that doubts their integrity, and an ancestral country that has turned into an enemy, the old native Hawaiian gardener knows their only avenue: “‘This island,’ Charlie said to Grampa, his voice kind. ‘This territory, Joji-san, this is your country now’” (163). Still, abandoning Japan is of no avail: Both Tomi’s father and grandfather are interned at Sand Island, later on the mainland. “If we ever needed baseball, it’s right now…” (189). In the cosmos of the game, there is order, there are rules and clear sides, everything the world outside the diamond can no longer offer.

The war, however, brought worse things than shame and confusion to some. Nora Okja Keller’s 1997 novel Comfort Woman tackles the long-silenced story of the forced prostitution of Korean women by the Japanese army. The ordeal of these women as well as the psychological effects that continue to overshadow the lives of “recreation camp”

survivors are imagined in a fractured narrative that is set in contemporary Honolulu but reaches back in time and place: After her parents have died, a twelve-year-old Korean girl is sold to the Japanese army by her older sister. In her two years at camp, her initial duties include tending to the other women and cleaning up. Thus, she becomes their means of communication:

We were taught only whatever was necessary to service the soldiers. Other than that, we were not expected to understand and forbidden to speak, any language at

all. But we were fast learners and creative. […] We taught ourselves to communicate through eye movements, body posture, tilts of the head, or – when we could not see each other – through rhythmic rustlings between our stalls; in this way we could speak, in this way we kept our sanity. The Japanese say Koreans have an inherent gift for languages, proving that we are a natural colony, meant to be dominated. […] I would sing to the women as I braided their hair or walked by their compartments to check their pots. When I hummed certain sections, the women knew to take those unsung words for their message.³⁰⁸

One woman, however, refused to be quiet:

In Korean and Japanese, she denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop their invasion of her country and her body. Even as they mounted her, she shouted: I am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive. I am seventeen, I had a family just like you do, I am a daughter, I am a sister. Men left her stall quickly, some crying, most angrily joining the line for the woman next door. All through the night she talked, reclaiming her Korean name, reciting her family genealogy, even chanting the recipes her mother had passed on to her (20).

Language becomes a secret, an anchor, a shield, and a weapon. The Japanese drag the vocal Induk (renamed Akiko 40) away and kill her, and the girl has to replace her and become Akiko 41. After endless men and a bungled abortion, she manages to run away.

Nursed back to health by American missionaries, the fugitive agrees to marry the minister who can take her to America, far away from the place of her suffering. Repulsed by her husband’s repressed lust and surprised at being able to have another child, she focuses all her love on her baby daughter, Beccah. On a figurative level, the child resurrects her from the dead: “My body feels cold against her sleep-flushed warmth, yet she still snuggles, roots against me. As she nurses, her heat invades me and becomes mine, her heart beats against mine, becoming mine, becoming me, and gives me life” (55).

Her account of the past alternates with Beccah’s memories of growing up in a poor neighborhood in Honolulu. On top of the usual problems of an American teenager, Beccah has to handle a mother who communes with spirits and falls into trances that can last for days. Warring with the ghosts of her past life, Akiko dresses her concern and

308 Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman, New York 1998: 16, 20.

advice as spells and protection rituals. Men are absent from their lives, and after her first positive experience it is small wonder that Beccah should become aloof:

When Max took me home that night, I let myself into the house, my hair still dripping the water of the stream. My body smelled clean, electric like a rainstorm on the Ko’olaus. But when I walked through the door, my mother yelled, ‘Stink poji-cunt!’ and charged forward with a knife. […] Now, after my subsequent experiences with sex, I am almost positive I am mistaken about the intensity I thought I felt when he slipped inside me, the way all sound and sight spiraled into blackness so that the only thing I knew was the rhythm of our bodies, elemental as the river’s song. […] And I began watching the two of us making love, the way we groped and lunged, as if from another’s eyes (134-6. “The Ko’olaus” refers to Oahu’s northeastern mountain range; poji is a Korean word for vagina).

Her mother is set up as a medium and fortune teller by Auntie Reno, an original Local character drawn deftly with a sure Pidgin voice, who earns huge profits from this arrangement. When Akiko dies, her grown-up daughter retreats to the mother’s Manoa home to grieve, discovering a legacy of Korean newspaper clippings and a cassette tape with her name on it:

Still, I listened, but only when I stopped concentrating did I realize my mother was singing words, calling out names, telling a story. […] So many true names

Still, I listened, but only when I stopped concentrating did I realize my mother was singing words, calling out names, telling a story. […] So many true names