By the time they arrived, Koji was hot and sweaty, his body sore and bruised from the rough plywood wagon. His legs no longer felt anything. He sat up when the wagon jerked to a stop at the front gate of the plantation and the driver yelled out in awkward, practiced Japanese, “Homu, suito homu!” Home, sweet home! Beyond the gate, not more than half a mile down a dirt road, the driver pointed to three separate wind-weary clapboard buildings that housed the plantation office, the school, and a store. Farther down the road stood a larger building, the sugar mill. And past the mill, as far as the eye could see, were acres and acres of tall, billowing sugarcane.
His family had remained quiet and apprehensive, while Koji could hardly contain his excitement. He wanted to jump down from the wagon and run the rest of the way, but he felt his father’s tight grip on his shoulder and knew to stay put. His mother held on to his younger sister in the back of the wagon, her face pale and thin from weeks of seasickness. They were surrounded by the sticky buzzing heat, the low, dark sky threatening rain, and the endless sea of cane. He remembered that his mother had leaned toward his father and whispered in Japanese, “So big and endless, but where is the beating heart?”
They were one of many Japanese families squeezed into the cane grass huts, huddled together at the northern end of Puli Plantation. There was no running water or electricity, and the outhouse was in the yard. His mother and father were put to work cutting cane and clearing away the cane trash, while ten-year-old Koji and his sister went to the one-room plantation school. He was a restless and distracted student until he began working as a “hoe hana,” weeding and loosening the endless rows of dirt to plant cane under the hot sun, watching the cane cutters along with Razor and other boys his age whose families had also emigrated from Japan. Through good times and bad they all lived together in a cluster of similar grass houses that comprised the Japanese village. While their tightly knit Japanese enclave continued to grow, and was aptly named Kazoku, or Family Village, Koji noticed that they were also kept separated by acres of cane fields from Chinese and Filipino and Portuguese workers and their villages on the plantation.
* * *
Koji kept moving between the rows of waving cane, known to grow as tall as twenty feet high before flowering. Most of the cane workers had already come in from the fields for dinner, walking back to their separate villages scattered around the plantation. Those who still had the energy after a day in the fields might tend to their own small gardens, or go down to the river to bathe, talk stories among their own, and drink moonshine made from ti root. By four the next morning, they would be up and starting the day all over again. Koji had lived the same routine for so many years he could do it in his sleep. Hadn’t he survived a lifetime at the Puli Plantation through hard work, keeping to himself, and staying out of trouble? He’d spent his life surviving, and in the end, the lingering guilt still pulled at him, still laid blame. Koji looked out toward the overworked cane fields, knowing the earth needed to be turned over every so often to be renewed. He felt the same. This plantation and these fields had been his life, punctuated by trips down to Hilo town as a boy, and later, to see Mariko and Daniel. After Franklin left, he vowed to take care of them. They were all that ever mattered to him.
The day was turning to dusk—gray and grainy—neither day nor night. What did he see? Koji always felt it was the most revealing moment of each day—the flickering candle just before it fluttered out, leaving everything in darkness. “Last chance daylight,” his father used to call it, “just before the spirits come out.” He only hoped the spirits would come out to guide him now, just as they always had. Koji walked deeper into the field, the trade winds blowing wildly, the swishing, rustling cane frantic all around him. It didn’t take long before he heard their singing again, their ghost voices rising softly at first, and then louder. The songs sung by the Japanese women workers rose upward and were carried above the tall stalks, while the singers themselves remained hidden among the cane. They sang the holehole bushi work songs filled with all the small joys and great sorrows they’d suffered, deceived into leaving their homeland for a better life, fueled by empty promises as they stripped the dried cane leaves from the stalks ten hours a day. It was during the days before the fields were burned, and all the clearing was done by hand. It was what Koji loved most—what drew him back to the cane—the beauty and the sadness of those singing voices and the stories they told.
Where do I belong? Where is my home?
Is it in America, or should I return to Japan?—
I thought Hawai’i would be my home.
Hawai’i, Hawai’i the place of my dreams—
But what a nightmare—
My tears stain the sugarcane like rain.
Koji’s mother had sung the work songs with the other women, their heartbreaking laments of being far from their homelands and families, tricked into grueling and endless work in the fields by false promises of money and housing as the sun beat down on them, as the wind howled and slapped, as the rain soaked them to the bone, and as steam rose from the muddy ground. The babies strapped to their backs felt like deadweight, a growing burden, another mouth to feed. They were left with thoughts of deepest despair . . . My baby is better off dead.
Koji stopped walking, just as he had always paused from his cane cutting to listen to the songs. He closed his eyes and imagined their voices being carried by the wind all the way to Hilo town, their sad and melodious laments soaring through the air before they disappeared over the ocean and back to Japan.
When the singing finally quieted, Koji opened his eyes. He was standing alone in the field. All the secrets he had kept over the years suddenly nagged at him, like the itch of an old wound. The ghost songs were reminders of all the years gone by, his life spent on what he always considered sacred ground. Leaving the formalities of Japan, he had welcomed the untamed island, the long summers of boyhood, the backbreaking work in the cane fields, the plantation life he had never left because it was all he’d known. When Koji turned to walk back to his house, it was Mariko’s lone voice that stayed with him.
It’s time he knows the truth. You can’t protect him forever.
4
The Okawa Fish Market
Nori hurried back from the green bungalow to the Okawa Fish Market, across the road from Hilo Bay. One of the two-story clapboard buildings on Kamehameha Avenue, it had formerly been the Hilo Town Bar. She passed the older, two-story S. Hata Building, and the S. H. Kress & Company Building, where all the wealthy haole ladies, whose husbands managed the plantations and ran the banks, came down from their big houses up the hill to have lunch and shop for the latest fashions. The buildings gleamed in their Art Deco newness, both products of the sugar wealth in Hilo town during the past forty years that had kept the town growing, and dimmed all the small family-owned businesses of her childhood. Nori swallowed her rising anxiousness and pushed through the crowded streets. She didn’t want to be late to Daniel’s party.
Since the stock market crash six years ago, there had been other changes. The once-quiet downtown streets were noisy and restless, teeming with agitated Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Portuguese men waiting desperately for work on the docks. Nori heard that thousands of Filipino workers had already been sent back to the Philippines by the plantation owners, but it was hard to tell as she slipped by so many sour, unwashed bodies, avoiding eye contact as she picked up her pace and clutched her basket close.