Shimura Trouble

27

THE ROYAL HAWAIIAN was almost as pink as my dress, and pleasingly old. We ate outdoors on the lanai-grilled tuna for Hugh and a small green salad for me. I wasn’t hungry; it was too distracting, being outdoors in Waikiki, sitting with Hugh while Michael was somewhere nearby. When twilight fell and Hugh started yawning, I pressed upon him our house phone number, as well as Tom’s mobile, in the event that a golf date could be arranged between the two of them the next day.

I asked Hugh’s driver to stop at the edge of the green parkland of Fort DeRussey, the military-owned land that surrounded the Hale Koa. But as I began walking to the hotel, I noticed a significant number of people heading toward the Alai Wai Canal. Michael still wasn’t answering his phone, so I decided to follow the crowd.

“Is there a festival?” I asked a local woman at the edge of the crosswalk, before I made the commitment to crossing Kuhio Avenue.

“It’s the end of o-bon season. People start at a Buddhist temple, where they light candles and send them down their canal in memory of their ancestors. The tradition stopped for some years, but it’s come back.”

The green banks of the Alai Wai were lined several people thick, but so many of them were short that it was easy for me to get a good view. The lights blinked and bobbed and slowly traveled along with the current; as I squinted westward down the canal, I could see no end to the lights. If I’d known about this earlier, I would have found my way to the temple to light candles for Harue and Ken Shimura. Instead, I selected two of the most brilliant lights and pretended these belonged to them.

Someone brushed against my back, and I took an extra step to regain my balance. The local crowd was starting to evaporate, and tourists from the bars, having gotten a glimpse of the lights, were pressing in. Drunken-sounding laughter made me realize that it was time to return to the brighter lights along Kalakaua Avenue.

Ten minutes later I walked the curving steps up to the Hale Koa, thinking about the rest of my night. My father, Uncle Hiroshi and Tom were at home; I’d confirmed this with a quick phone call after I’d parted with Hugh. But I’d refused to let Tom pick me up right away as he’d suggested. It was still early in the evening, and I was dead set on finding Michael.

I walked through the Hale Koa’s wide, open-air lobby toward the elevators. I remembered Michael and Kurt’s room number, and knew that the two rooms to the left of it had been reserved by Parker Drummond and Eric Levine. I tried Michael’s door first, with no luck, then tried the other two. The last door was opened by Karen Drummond, wearing a short silk bathrobe.

“Oh, I’m sorry to catch you dressing.” At least, that’s all that I hoped was happening. “I was wondering if you knew where Michael was?”

“It’s no problem.” Karen opened the door wider, and ushered me in. “How wonderful to see you! We were all so worried when we heard you were in the hospital. I’m sorry but we’re getting dressed to go out. We’ve got a dinner reservation in, what, an hour?”

“Forty-five minutes!” came an answering call from behind the bathroom door.

I dutifully followed Karen inside, but felt too uncomfortable to sit down on the corner of the rumpled bed she offered, while she in turn went to a sink in a galley that was a twin to the one in Michael’s room and started brushing her teeth.

“He should be back from sailing any time now. He’s been out for hours,” Parker said from behind the bathroom door.

“Did he take your boat?” I asked.

“No, no, no-it takes at least two to handle her. He went out on a little catamaran,” Parker added as he emerged from the bathroom, buttoning the top few buttons of a mauve and turquoise print aloha shirt. When I looked uncomprehending, he said, “It’s a small sailboat. He checked it out at the yacht club a few hours ago.”

“Well, he hasn’t been answering his phone.”

“He may not have taken his phone on the water because of the risk of capsizing. Those little boats go over easy.”

“Really?” I said, feeling a prickle of unease. “Do you think he wore a life jacket?”

“So you do care about him.” Karen gave me a speculative look, then passed her husband in the narrow area outside the bathroom where there was a sink and mirror. She opened a make-up bag, and began extracting a top-quality arsenal that put my collection to shame.

“He’s an excellent swimmer and seaman, Rei,” Parker said, coming over to sit down next to me. “Don’t worry. If the two of you had plans tonight, I’m sure he’ll make it back.”

“We didn’t have plans. I mean, we had them and then he cancelled.”

“No date with you on a Friday night, when he’s flying out on Sunday?” Parker’s forehead wrinkled. “What is with that boy?”

“Maybe he’s just trying to be on the careful side and give Rei time to rest,” Karen said. “After all, she was just released from the hospital.”

“I’m sure that it’s something I said.” I was regretting what I’d blurted out to Michael about Hugh arriving on the island. I’d thought it was important to be honest, but what I’d said had clearly dashed what faint progress the two of us had made.

I wrote a short note telling Michael that I wanted to talk to him, and slipped it under his door before I took the elevator downstairs again. Against my better judgment, I checked my phone for any voice messages, and came up with zip. Sickened by the prospect of paying over $100 for a cab ride back to our house, I asked the bell captain if there was a cheaper way to get to the Leeward Side.

I was pondering a sheaf of bus schedules when I caught a glimpse of a bedraggled lean man in wet shorts, T-shirt and Topsiders walking purposefully toward the elevator. I paused, wondering if I should wait to let him read the note. No, I decided, there was too high a risk he’d avoid me. I hadn’t come all this way to be meek.

I took off after him, and as my heels clattered against the granite floor, he turned abruptly. His voice was guarded. “How did you get here? This is a surprise.”

“If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain…” I shrugged.

“You look good, Rei. I know I’m a mess.” He ran a hand through his hair.

“With sailing, that’s par for the course, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly.” Michael smiled. “You’re mixing your sports metaphors, but yes, people do get messed up when they’re out in a catamaran by themselves and are distracted enough to capsize.”

“I knew it!” I exclaimed. “I had a bad feeling about you going sailing at night.”

“You worried about me tipping over in a catamaran?” Michael shook his head. “Well, you shouldn’t. It’s the easiest kind of vessel to right; kids do it all the time. Why are you even here?”

“Unfinished business.”

“OK then. I’ll just clean up first,” Michael said easily, as if our heated argument of a few hours earlier had never happened.

“Good!” I moved to follow him toward the elevator.

“You’d be better off waiting down here.”

“If you prefer.” I watched the elevator doors close after him and a half-dozen other hotel guests.

As the lights on the band above the elevators showed the car traveling upward, I tried to think of why he didn’t want me in the room. Maybe he feared I’d once again be moved by his semi-clothed body and attack. How ironic that the undergarment that I was wearing underneath my dress was sometimes referred to as a merry widow, because Michael was the opposite: an unhappy widower.

After about ten minutes in the lobby, watching children skip about, my cell phone vibrated, surprising me. Here comes the brush off from Michael, I bet. I answered it in a sober voice.

“Miss Shimura, this is Josiah Pierce.”

“Oh, hello.” Even though it was an open area lobby, I felt pinpoints of moisture form on my face.

“I heard you became violently ill the day after our meeting. Are you still in the hospital?”

“No, I was released this morning. Thanks for your concern.” My mind raced. How much did he know about my poisoning, and had the Navy reached him yet to tell him about the land?

“I apologize if something in the meal may have sickened you. Have you learned what kind of food poisoning it was?” Mr. Pierce continued in his well-bred tones. “Midori and I are equally mortified that anything she served might have ailed you.”

“The verdict’s still out on what made me sick. That’s the reason the authorities are visiting everyone I ate with that day, plus examining our own refrigerator’s contents.”

“Well, no doubt they’re operating on Hawaii time, which will mean you’ll find out later rather than sooner. I was wondering if you could stop by again, because I have something to discuss with you, and as you mentioned, these things are sometimes better done in person.”

Now my heart was thudding. The man who might have poisoned me, inviting me to return to his house? ‘I’m without a car at the moment, but I can’t stand suspense. Can you please tell me over the phone what you know?”

“Very well then.” Josiah Pierce’s voice sounded stiff. “Actually, the chief reason I’m telephoning is that I did the research, as I promised you I would, on Harue Shimura’s situation.”

“Did you find out something about ownership of the cottage?” I could barely breathe, I was so excited.

“As you know, I inherited my father’s house, and I use his old office as my own,” JP began, as if he was intent on telling the story his way. “He had two file cabinets relating to the plantation, which Midori’s been after me to dump for years, but I haven’t. I guess I had it in my mind that someday a historian might be interested in an account of this long-ago time. Anyway, once I opened the files, I found hundreds of papers relating to the plantation. It was just a matter of looking through folders until I found the employment records for Keijin Watanabe, who later became Ken Shimura.”

“Do you have the originals?”

“Yes, and I’ll have my lawyers send you copies, if you’d like. But to summarize, Keijin came to us from Okinawa in 1910, having signed a contract promising a minimum of five years’ employment. He started at one of our sugar plantations on the Big Island. He was described as an average worker-which meant a very hard worker, in terms of how we look at productivity in retrospect. However, he had a number of citations for drunkenness and fighting with other workers. There was a particularly bad fight with another worker, a well-liked Filipino boy, who wound up losing his sight in one eye. The solution the plantation manager came up with was to move Keijin from that plantation, get him married, and convince him to change his name to avoid having his reputation follow him.”

“So he came to Oahu,” I said.

“Yes, and within the same month of his arrival, Harue Shimura came to Hawaii. My father spotted Harue when she arrived at the docks in Honolulu by herself, without a sponsoring fiancé to meet her. She asked him for a job, in good English. In his diary for that day, he had a notation: “Hired Harue Shimura, well-bred young lady originating from Yokohama, near-fluent in English, both spoken and written. Agreed to salary of $10 per month and marriage to another worker.””

“It sounds almost like a slave being sold at auction block, doesn’t it?” I thought aloud.

“I’m sure my father thought she was a willing participant because, after all, she’d traveled here alone, and there were plenty of women emigrating in search of husbands that for one reason or other they couldn’t find in Japan. After the wedding-at which Keijin changed his first and last names-an employment record was also opened for Harue. She began work shucking cane in the fields, but her production was lower than other women’s; she was weaker, not coming from peasant stock, the luna noted numerous times. The camp medical record notes that she miscarried her first pregnancy. After she became pregnant again, she was reassigned from the field to teach in the plantation school. Her baby was born full-term, a boy named Yoshitsune. A few months after the birth, she resumed work as a teacher.”

“So she never had to carry her baby to the fields,” I said.

“Yes. This was the 1920s, and we’d made significant improvements to the conditions for families, which meant more jobs for women in places other than the fields. You already know what the housing of this period was like, and there were schools at our plantations and most others. Before long, those schools became obsolete as the plantation children began attending regular public schools in Honolulu.”

“Steps toward a normal life?”

“And with that, trouble for your family. The Japanese workers, I’m not proud to admit, were paid less than the other ethnic groups, and Ken Shimura was among the chief agitators for wage parity. There was a strike and, when it finally settled, Ken was reassigned to Maui. Harue and Yoshitsune did not go with him. I can only imagine that my father’s managers didn’t want her to leave the school. Thus the offer of the house, which was recorded in my father’s diary as, “Harue Shimura agrees to remain teaching, and will pay $10 for house on Kalama.”

“It made sense for her to take the house,” I said, thinking about how she must have thought here was a home that would be her property, no longer subject to the whims of management.

“What happened next is unclear,” JP said. “I’m guessing that neither side recorded the transaction with the state, which left nothing for our company to use as evidence to handle both Yoshitsune Shimura’s complaint, and the Liangs’ request for a lease. At this point, there’s little that can be done; obviously, my father’s intent was to give the land to Harue Shimura, but it doesn’t make sense to give that portion to Yoshitsune Shimura, because Masuhiro Kikuchi will do more with that land, for the people of the Leeward Side, than Edwin could.”

“But you can’t give him the land, even if you wanted to.” There, I’d said it; Michael had thought I should wait for the lawyers, but the level of frankness that JP had employed with me made me feel he deserved the truth too. As carefully as I could explain without having the pictures and maps in hand, I explained about the evidence of the military’s takeover of the land by the water. At the end, I said, “You can, of course, sue the military for taking your land, but then you’d be in the same position you deplored Edwin for, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t doubt your story,” Josiah Pierce said, after a short silence. “It was the war, and we’d been bombed-the military had good reason to have such powers. And we were willing to give them concessions, too, because they left us the means to stay financially solvent. Because the government gave us a break, though, we never protested when the military ran roughshod over Oahu, seizing whatever land they wanted in the name of defense.”

“As you said, the island had been bombed. There was a reason for securing areas.”

“Just as there is now,” Josiah Pierce said. “I’m torn, because I know that on the Leeward Side, in the areas where I and other people have granted thousands of acres to Hawaiians, the people aren’t doing well, in terms of employment. The restaurant complex made sense to me-both from a financial and social viewpoint.”

“There are two sides to every problem, aren’t there?”

“I hope you don’t mind that I end our conversation now, Rei.”

“No, not at all.” Had I said too much?

“This is a shock to me; there’s no doubt about it. And you too will need to think over the information that you now possess.”