Hawaii

by James Michener

  A haze came over his eyes and he imagined that the mask was once more upon his face while he prepared to slip into her sleeping room. He could feel her arms about him and hear her voice in his ear. The crowd pressed in upon him but he was not part of it; he was in Hiroshima in the spring when the rice fields were a soft green, and a horrible thought took possession of him: "I shall never leave Kauai! I shall die here and never see Japan again! I shall live all my life without a woman!"

  And he began, in his agony, to walk among the crowd and place himself so that he might touch this Japanese wife or that. He did not grab at them or embarrass them; he wanted merely to see them and to feel their reality; and his glazed eyes stared at them. "I am so hungry," he muttered to himself as he moved so as to intercept a woman at least twenty years older than he. She shuffled along with her feet never leaving the ground, Japanese style, and the soft rustle of her passing seemed to him one of the sweetest sounds he had ever heard. Instinctively he reached out his hand and clutched at her arm, and the shuffling stopped. The housewife looked at him in amazement, pushed his hand down, and muttered, "You are a Japanese! Behave yourself! Especially when you wear such a uniform!"

  Mortified, he fled the crowd and found Hashimoto, who said abruptly, "Those damned geisha girls are driving me loony. Let's find a good whorehouse."

  The two Kauai laborers started probing the Aala region, but a stranger told them, "The houses you want are all in Iwilei," so they hurried to that quarter of the city, but the houses were filled with richer patrons and the two could gain no entrance.

  "I'm going to grab any woman I see," Hashimoto said.

  "No!" Kamejiro warned, remembering the admonition of the woman he had touched.

  "To hell with you!" the other shouted. "Girl! Girls!" he shouted in Japanese. "Here I come to find you!" And he dashed down one of the Iwilei alleys. Kamejiro, now ashamed to be in such a place while dressed as Colonel Ito, who had sacrificed his life at Port Arthur, fled the area and returned to the park, where he sat for hours staring at the dancers. This time he kept away from women, and after a long time an old Japanese man came up to him with a bottle of sake and said, "Oh, Colonel! What a glorious war this was! And did you notice one thing tonight? Not one damned Chinese had the courage to appear on the streets while our army was marching! I tell you, Colonel! In 1895 we defeated the Chinese. And in 1905 we defeated the Russians. Two of the finest nations on earth. Who will we fight ten years from now? England? Germany?"

  "All the world can be proud of Japan," Kamejiro agreed.

  "What is more important, Colonel," the drunk continued, "is that here in Hawaii people have now got to respect us. The German lunas who beat us with whips. The Norwegian lunas who treat us with contempt. They have got to respect us Japanese! We are a great people! Therefore, Colonel, promise me one thing, and I will give you more sake. The next time a European luna dares to strike you in the cane fields, kill him! We Japanese will show the world."

  It was a tremendous celebration, worthy of the impressive victory gained by the homeland, and even though it used up much of Kamejiro's savings and reminded him of how lonely he was, he felt it had been worth while; but it had one unfortunate repercussion which no one could have foreseen, and long after the celebration itself had faded into memory, this one dreadful result lived on in Kamejiro's mind.

  It started in the whorehouses of Iwilei, after Kamejiro had abandoned his lusty friend Hashimoto to the alleys, for that young man had forced his way into one of the houses and had been soundly thrashed by half a dozen Germans who resented his intrusion. Thrown into one of the gutters, he had been found by a Hawaiian boy who did pimping for a group of girls, and this boy, in the custom of the islands, had lugged the bewildered Japanese home, where his sister had washed his bruises. They had been able to converse only in pidgin, but apparently enough 'had been said, for when Hashimoto returned to the Kauai ship, he had the sister in tow. She was a big, amiable, wide-eyed Hawaiian who carried with her only one bundle tied with string, but she seemed to like wiry, tough-minded Hashimoto and apparently intended to stay with him.

  "I am going to marry her," Hashimoto stoutly informed Kamejiro, who still wore his colonel's uniform, and something about either the victory celebration or the uniform made Kamejiro especially patriotic that day, for as soon as his friend said the fatal words, "I am going to marry her," he sprang into action as if he were in charge of troops. Grabbing Hashimoto by the arm he warned, "If you do such a thing, all Japan will be ashamed."

  "I may not ever go back to Japan," Hashimoto said.

  Impulsively, like a true colonel, Kamejiro struck Hashimoto across the face, shouting, "Don't ever speak like that! Japan is your home!"

  Hashimoto was astonished at Colonel Sakagawa's unexpected behavior but he recognized that he deserved the rebuke, so he mumbled, "I'm tired of living without a woman."

  This introduced a less military note into the discussion, and Kamejiro quit being an Imperial colonel and became once more a friend. "Hashimoto-san, it was bad enough to go to such a house, but to bring home one of the girls, and to marry her! You must put strength in your stomach and be a decent Japanese."

  "She isn't from one of the houses," Hashimoto explained. "She's a good girl from a good hard-working family."

  "But she's not Japanese!” Kamejiro argued.

  He made no progress with Hashimoto, who was determined not to live alone any longer. Since there were no Japanese girls available on Kauai, he would live with his Hawaiian and marry her. But in his ardor for feminine companionship he had failed to consider the even greater ardor of the Japanese community, and when it was noised abroad what he had done, he experienced the full, terrible power of the sacred Japanese spirit.

  "You have sullied the name of Japan," warned the older men, who had learned to live without women.

  "You have disgraced the blood of Japan," others mourned.

  "Have you no pride, no Yamato spirit?" younger men asked.

  "Don't you realize that you bring disgrace upon us all?" his friends pleaded.

  Hashimoto proved himself to be a man of fortitude. "I will not live alone any longer," he repeated stubbornly. "I am going to live with my wife, the way a man should."

  "Then you will live forever apart from the Japanese community," a stern old man cried. He had been in Kauai for many years, also longing for a woman, but he had behaved himself as a decent Japanese should, and now on behalf of all the emperor's subjects he pronounced the ostracism: "Because you have been shameless, and because you have not protected the sacred blood of Japan, you must live apart. We don't want a man like you to work with us or to eat with us or to live with us. Get out."

  Hashimoto began to feel the awful force of this sentence, and pleaded, "But a man needs a woman! What do you expect me to do?"

  A fiery younger man replaced the one who had delivered the ostracism, and this one shouted belligerently, "We don't expect you to marry other women! You're no Chinese who is willing to marry anybody he can get his hands on. You're a Japanese!”

  "What am I to do?" Hashimoto screamed. "Live alone all my life?"

  "Use the prostitutes each month, like we do," the fiery young man cried, referring to the girls which the plantation bosses provided on paydays, moving them from camp to camp according to schedule.

  "But the time comes when a man doesn't want prostitutes any longer," Hashimoto pleaded.

  "Then live without them," an older man snapped. "Like Akagi-san. Eh, you Akagi-san? How many years you live without a woman?"

  "Nineteen," a wiry veteran of the cane fields replied.

  "And you, Yamasaki-san?"

  "Seventeen," a sunburned Hiroshima man replied.

  "They're decent, honest Japanese!" the younger man shouted. "They will wait here till they die, hoping for a Japanese wife, but if none arrives they would not think of marrying anyone else. In them the Japanese spirit is high. In you, Hashimoto, there is no honor. Now get out!"

  So Hashimoto left
Ishii Camp and lived with his Hawaiian wife in the town of Kapaa. He had to be fired by Hanakai Plantation, for other Japanese refused to work with an outcast who had sullied the blood of Japan. Sometimes when men from the camp went into Kapaa to play a little pool or get drunk on okolehau, a potent illegal brew made from the root of the ti plant, they would meet their former friend Hashimoto, but they never spoke. He could not attend the Japanese church, nor any of the socials, nor play in Japanese games, nor listen to the heroic reciters who came from time to time from Tokyo, spending days among the camps, reciting the glories of Japanese history.

  From all such normal intercourse Hashimoto was excluded, and although the dreadful example of his banishment was frequently recalled by other young men who may have wanted women and who were certainly tempted to marry Hawaiian or Chinese or drifting white girls, his proscribed name was never mentioned. Men hungry for girls did not warn each other: "Remember what happened to Hashimoto!" Instinctively they remembered, for of him it had once been said: "All Japan will be ashamed of what you have done." And the young men were convinced that throughout every village of Japan the evil word had been passed: "Hashimoto Sutekichi married a Hawaiian woman and all Japan is ashamed of him." What Honolulu thought of the marriage was unimportant, for Honolulu did not matter, but what Japan thought was of towering concern, for every man in Ishii Camp intended one day to return to Japan; and to take back with him any wife other than a decent Japanese was unthinkable.

  THE YEARS following annexation had not been kind to Wild Whip Hoxworth. In business the more stodgy members of Hoxworth & Hale had kept him from assuming any position of leadership within the company, so that even though his sugar lands irrigated by artesian wells flourished and made him a millionaire several times over, he was denied for moral reasons the command of H & H to which his talents entitled him. So he had come to Kauai.

  With driving energy he had imported hundreds of Japanese laborers and had built irrigation ditches, cleared land, and shown Kauai how to grow sugar by the most improved methods. He had erected his own mill and ground his own cane, filling the stubby cargo ships of the H & H line with his product.

  With equal energy he had built the mansion at Hanakai, personally placing the croton bushes and the hibiscus. When the cut timbers arrived from China he supervised their erection, and it was he who added the idea of a broad area covered by flagstone through whose chinks grass grew, so that one walked both on the firmness of stone and the softness of grass. When he finished he had a magnificent house, perched on the edge of a precipice at whose feet the ocean thundered, but it was a house that knew no happiness, for shortly after Whip had moved in with his third wife, the Hawaiian-Chinese beauty Ching-ching, who was pregnant at the time, she had caught him fooling around with the brothel girls that flourished in the town of Kapaa. Without even a scene of recrimination, Ching-ching had simply ordered a carriage and driven back to the capital town of Lihue, where she boarded an H & H steamer for Honolulu. She divorced Whip but kept both his daughter Iliki and his yet-unborn son John. Now there were two Mrs. Whipple Hoxworths in Honolulu and they caused some embarrassment to the more staid community. There was his first wife, Iliki Janders Hoxworth, who moved in only the best missionary circles, and there was Ching-ching Hoxworth, who lived within the Chinese community. The two never met, but Hoxworth & Hale saw to it that each received a monthly allowance. The sums were generous, but not so much so as those sent periodically to Wild Whip's second wife, the fiery Spanish girl Aloma Duarte Hoxworth, whose name frequently appeared in New York and London newspapers.

  During these early years of the twentieth century, Wild Whip lived alone at Hanakai, a driven, miserable man. Periodically he spent lost days in some back room of the Kapaa brothels, competing with his field hands for the favors of Oriental prostitutes. At other times he would pull himself together and organize the dreamlike sporting events that were a feature of Kauai. For example, he kept a large stable of quarter horses and a fine grassy oval on which to race them at meetings where Chinese and Hawaiian betters went wild and lost a year's wages on one race. Part of Whip's distrust of the Japanese stemmed from the fact that they did not bet madly on his horse races, for he said, "A man who can't get excited about a horse race is really no man at all, and you can have the little yellow bastards." But when it was pointed out that the Japanese enabled him to grow more cane than any other plantation in the islands, he always acknowledged that fact: "Work is their god and I respect them for it. But my love I reserve for men who like horses."

  The highlight of any season came when Wild Whip organized one of his polo tournaments, for this was the conspicuous game of the islands, and he maintained a line of thirty-seven choice ponies. The games took place on a lovely grassy field edging the wild cliffs of Hanakai, but the high moment of any game occurred when a sudden shower would toss a rainbow above the players so that two riders fighting for the ball could pass mysteriously from shower into sunlight and back into the soft, misty rain. A polo game at Hanakai was one of the most beautiful sports a man could witness, and islanders often walked for miles to sit along the croton bushes.

  Wild Whip played a fine game, and in order to maintain the quality of his team, always hired his lunas personally. Sitting carelessly in a deep chair, he watched the man approach down the long lanai and studied his gait. "Limber, supple, nice walk that one," he would muse. His first question was invariable: "Young man, have you a good seat?" If the man stuttered or failed to understand what a good seat implied, Whip courteously excused him from further consideration. But if the man said, "I've been riding since I was three," Whip proceeded with the interview. Traditionally, on Kauai, lunas were either German immigrants or Norwegians, and among themselves they circulated the warning: "Don't apply at Hanakai unless you're good at polo."

  When he hired a man Whip laid down three requirements: "Polished boots that come to the knee, and I want them polished till they gleam. White riding breeches, and I want them white. And finally, lunas at Hanakai never strike the workmen.."

  Actually, few of the Germans and Norwegians were good at polo when they first started work, but Whip gave lessons every afternoon at four, and in time even the Japanese became proud when their boss and their lunas defended Hanakai's championship against all comers from Kauai.

  But major excitement occurred periodically when a picked team from Honolulu, consisting mostly of Janderses and Whipples and Hewletts who had perfected their game at Yale--for many years in a row the stars of the Yale four came from Hawaii--chartered a boat to bring their ponies and their cheering section on an invasion of Kauai. Then haoles from all the local plantations moved out to Hanakai; enormous beds ten feet square were thrown along the lanai, with eight or ten haphazard people to the bed, and kitchens were set up behind the casuarina trees. In the evening gala dances were held with men in formal dress and women brilliant in gowns from Paris and Canton. Frequently, tournaments were staged with four or five competing teams, and all lived at Hanakai for a week. Then life was glorious, with champagne and flirtations, and often Wild Whip succeeded in sequestering one of the visitors' wives in some darkened bedroom, so that over the polo games at Hanakai there hung always the ominous shadow of potential scandal.

  There was another shadow, too, for if the polo field and the croton bushes were made possible only by the protecting rim of silent casuarina trees which kept away the storms and the killing salt, so the life of the haoles was protected by the rim of silent Japanese laborers who lived in the womanless huts and who kept away the sweat, the toil and the work of building the future.

  It was curious that when the men of Hawaii returned to Yale for alumni celebrations, and when their former classmates who now lived in respectable centers like Boston and Philadelphia asked, "What holds a brilliant man like you in Hawaii?" the Janderses and the Hales and the Whipples usually replied longingly, "Have you ever seen a polo game at Hanakai? The ocean at your feet. The storms sweeping in with rainbows. When your pony slips, he lea
ves a bright red scar across the turf. You could live a hundred years in Philadelphia and never see anything like the polo season at Hanakai." The Yale men who had gone to live in Philadelphia never understood, but their former classmates who had played polo along the Hawaii circuit never forgot that Hawaii in those years provided one of the best societies on earth.

  When the polo players had departed, when the field kitchens were taken down, and when the patient little Japanese gardeners were tending each cut in the polo turf as if it were a personal wound, Wild Whip would retire to his sprawling mansion overlooking the sea and get drunk. He was never offensive and never beat anyone while intoxicated. At such times he stayed away from the brothels in Kapaa and away from the broad lanai from which he could see the ocean. In a small, darkened room he drank, and as he did so he often recalled his grandfather's words: "Girls are like stars, and you could reach up and pinch each one on the points. And then in the east the moon rises, enormous and perfect. And that's something else, entirely different." It was now apparent to Whip, in his forty-fifth year, that for him the moon did not intend to rise. Somehow he had missed encountering the woman whom he could love as his grandfather had loved the Hawaiian princess Noelani. He had known hundreds of women, but he had found none that a man could permanently want or respect. Those who were desirable were mean in. spirit and those who were loyal were sure to be tedious. It was probably best, he thought at such times, to do as he did: know a couple of the better girls at Kapaa, wait for some friend's wife who was bored with her husband, or trust that a casual trip through the more settled camps might turn up some workman's wife who wanted a little excitement. It wasn't a bad life and was certainly less expensive in the long run than trying to marry and divorce a succession of giddy women; but often when he had reached this conclusion, through the bamboo shades of the darkened room in which he huddled a light would penetrate, and it would be the great moon risen from the waters to the east and now passing majestically high above the Pacific. It was an all-seeing beacon, brilliant enough to make the grassy lawns of Hanakai a sheet of silver, probing enough to find any mansion tucked away beneath the casuarina trees. When this moon sought out Wild Whip he would first draw in his feet, trying like a child to evade it, but when it persisted he often rose, threw open the lanai screens, and went forth to meet it. He would stand in the shimmering brilliance for a long time, listening to the surf pound in below, and in its appointed course the moon would disappear behind the jagged hills to the west.