Shark Dialogues
Page 60
I would like to thank the staff of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum Library, the staff of the Hawaiian State Archives and staff members of the Hawaiian Historical Society Library for allowing me to pore over old documents and photographs. Thanks, too, to Beverly Fujita and Janice Otaguro for supplying back issues of Honolulu magazine. And thanks to the staff of the New York State Archives at Albany.
Many books were important to me in my research. Some of them are: Kumulipo, the Hawaiian Hymn of Creation, reinterpreted by Rubellite Kawena Johnson; Hawai‘i’s Story by Hawai‘i’s Queen, by Queen Lili‘uokalani; The Betrayal of Lili‘uokalani, by Helena G. Allen, back copies of Bamboo Ridge, the Hawai‘i Writer’s Quarterly, edited by Eric Chock and Darrell Lum, All I Asking for Is My Body, by Milton Murayama, Na Paniolo o Hawai‘i, edited by Lynn Martin, ma‘i Ho’oka’Awale, the Separating Sickness, edited by Ted Gugelyk and Milton Bloombaum, and “Moolelo Hawai‘i” (Hawaiian Antiquities), by David Malo, translated by Nathaniel Emerson.
Waimea Summer, by John Dominis Holt, is a beautiful novel dealing with the problem of ethnic identity, the importance of our cultural and spiritual heritage. Mahele O Maui, a novel by Lynn Kalama Nakkim, investigates the old Hawaiian agricultural way of life and its threatened extinction.
Other books that influenced me are: the writings of Lu Hsun, especially Na Han, (Call to Arms), A Dream of Red Mansions, by Tsao Hsuehchin and Kao Ngo, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, The Life of an Amorous Woman, by Ihara Saikaku, the writings of Kenzaburo Oe, especially A Personal Matter. Also Masks, by Fumiko Enchi, Silence, by Shusaku Endo, Memoirs of Hadrian, and The Dark Brain of Piranesi by Marguerite Yourcenar, whose meditations on the life of the mind, the imagination, continue to influence me.
For the scene where Pono is first transformed into a shark I am indebted to Kobo Abe’s short excerpt, “Then I dozed Off a Number of Times,” from his novel The Box Man.
The scene where different types of water in the Gobi are discussed, though not direct quotes, echoes a journal entry in the book Emperor of China, Self-Portrait of Kang-Hsi, translated and edited by Jonathan D. Spence.
Acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
The Richmond Organization: Excerpt from “Brain Damage,” by Roger Waters. TRO Copyright © 1973 by Hampshire House Publishing Corp., New York, NY. Used by permission.
Excerpt from “The Sheik of Araby,” by Ted Snyder, used by permission of the Jerry Vogel Music Co., Inc.
*Haole—meaning white, Caucasian, which is used throughout the novel, is pronounced “how-lee.” A Hawaiian-English glossary is provided on pages 481-87.