“Uncle Yosh, I’m sorry. I must not have driven quickly enough.” I glanced at my watch, which read five to six.
“I mean that I made eighty-eight last year! Why you not come then?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shooting a significant look at my father. “I believe our families found each other a month ago.”
“Yes, Oji-sama, I regret we have come a year late to supper!” my father valiantly chimed in. “We feel so lucky to finally meet you and to learn about the life of your mother, who must have been a very brave, strong, character.”
“My kaa-san?” Yoshitsune asked. I almost didn’t understand him, because he was using the word for mother without the honorific ‘o’ in front that was customary in Japan.
“Your okaasan, Shimura Harue-sama,” my father answered politely, still in Japanese. “She apparently left our family when she was quite young. We are eager to learn about her.”
“Surprise to hear that. She didn’t choose to leave Japan.” Yoshitsune’s voice was cool, and as he evaluated us, I felt a rush of shame, followed by curiosity that got the better of me.
“We want to know why,” I said. “My father said he heard whisperings there had been a sister to his grandfather, but nothing more than that.”
“She didn’t want to get married to some old fool they picked for her husband,” Yosh said, grinning slightly. “So they said you don’t want to marry, you gotta leave the house. She was thinking that meant she’d find a job somewhere in Tokyo, but she had no clue about the real, hard world!”
“This is fascinating,” my father said. “What happened next?”
“Your great-grandpa bought her a one-way ticket to Honolulu and also some false papers saying that she had relatives sponsoring her. She told me she thought it was going to be a great adventure. She only got scared once she was on the boat, when the other passengers, all of them rough, poor people from the countryside, insisted she would have to be married for anyone to hire her or give her housing. And that’s how she came to meet and marry my fadduh, a few days after she arrived…”
“Good, you found us!” Edwin said as he opened the front door and broke into the story. “But, Dad, look at yourself! I told you to get dressed hours ago; this is your birthday party!”
Yoshitsune waggled the hose at him. “The koi need something to swim in. I gotta fill the pool again, there must be a leak.”
“Do you keep koi?” I asked, looking around the garden. Then I saw it, a small ornamental fishpond occupying pride of place in the center of a dry-grass yard. I followed Yoshitsune over to the pond and stayed, looking at the fish, as he stuck the hose in the pool, then ambled back over to the side of the house to turn on the water. I’d assumed only specially treated water went into these ponds, but the half-dozen long gold, orange and cream fish looked healthy. Whatever Uncle Yosh was doing, it worked.
“Come in, come in,” Edwin urged, and obediently, I followed everyone up a cracked cement path and left my sandals at the doorway. The shoes-off tradition was part of Japanese culture that had endured.
Inside, I was zealously hugged by Edwin, and then by a small, sun-browned woman with short black hair attractively streaked with silver.
“When we learned about you and your family, we were so excited.” Auntie Margaret spoke with a melodious lilt that so many people in Hawaii had, to some degree-perhaps vestiges of their grandparents’ home languages. “But you came by yourself! Where’s your husband?”
“I don’t know. I’m not married yet.” I smiled at her, thinking again that Hawaii wasn’t so different from Japan, if a thirty-year-old was automatically expected to be married.
“Oh, still not yet!” Margaret laughed. “We heard about your big-shot lawyer fiance. He won a class action suit, yah?”
Now I flushed red and understand who the ‘son’ was that Edwin had referred to in his letter to my father. “It’s true that Hugh Glendenning did work with many other lawyers on a class action suit representing comfort women and forced laborers who suffered during World War Two. We’re really not in contact with each other anymore, though.”
“What do you mean?” Edwin asked. “I can help you find him; I’m good at tracking people down…”
“No. I mean, I don’t want to find him. We’re not engaged anymore.”
“Oh, sorry to hear that!” Edwin said, and Margaret looked at me with sympathy.
“Please take this small, unworthy token. It’s not very good, but all we could find.” Tom blessedly interrupted the situation by offering Edwin a gift bag containing a bottle of California chardonnay we’d chosen at the Safeway.
“Very kind. Thank you!” Edwin waved us all to follow him into the tidy living room, which looked as if it had been decorated in the early eighties, with floral-chintz sofas, and lots of rattan. A young girl, her face hidden in a thick copy of Modern Bride, was lying on the carpet close to the air-conditioner. I sat down on a floral-patterned sofa with my father. Edwin put the bottle of wine into a cabinet which I saw already held many bottles of wine and hard liquor, some still in the boxes. So it seemed he rarely drank.
“Courtney!” Edwin called to the girl on the floor. “I told you before, when the guests come in, serve the pupus.”
Before I could greet her, Courtney had shot up and gone through the kitchen door. Moments later, she returned precariously carrying a tray of deep-fried hors d’oeuvres. While everyone oohed and ahhed over the golden brown minced shrimp balls and oversized potato and eggplant tempura, I looked anxiously at my father. Fried foods were highest on his list of banned foods. Now temptation was staring at him from a blue and white platter, and he was stretching out a hand.
“Otoosan!” I whispered loudly.
“I cannot refuse. That would be rude,” my father said in a low voice before popping a shrimp ball in his mouth.
Tentatively I took a shrimp ball, biting through the crisp, golden brown crust to taste the freshest, sweetest shrimp I’d ever eaten, finely minced and exuberantly seasoned with biting, fresh scallions and cilantro leaves.
“This is delicious!” I said after I’d swallowed it. “Who made them?”
“It’s from a little okazu-ya in Waipahu. If you like okazu snack foods, I can tell you all the best places,” Margaret said.
“Please do,” I said, wondering how, if the food was take-out, it was so very hot and crisp. The answer came when I glanced at the stove and saw a deep pan of oil. The snacks had been refried at home, making them even unhealthier.
“Eat more!” Margaret urged. “I’m sorry to say that I don’t do much around the house, ever since the kids got big and I started working.”
“Ah! Do you work nearby?” Uncle Hiroshi asked, smiling.
“Quite near. I’m director of housekeeping at the hotel.”
The smile on Uncle Hiroshi’s face froze, and I imagined the calculator in his banker’s brain had made a judgment on the family. And I too was recalling all the Japanese maids in the old novels I was reading about Hawaii, and how in the newspaper article I’d read, activists had rued that the proposed new jobs in the area would be mostly in the service industry.
“I’m too tired after work to do much cleaning around here-and I have to admit that I’m not much of a cook, especially of complicated Japanese dishes. I’m not full Japanese like you; I’m hapa, mixed with Hawaiian. Edwin calls me mixed plate.”
“I guess Rei is mixed plate, too. Her mother is American,” Tom volunteered.
“Never would have guessed it! Toshiro, did you marry a haole girl?” Uncle Edwin asked in a tone that I wasn’t entirely sure was friendly teasing.
My father looked blank, and I quietly said that yes, my mother was Caucasian. Haole was a Hawaiian term that originally referred to anything foreign, one example being a tree, the koa haole, which resembled a native koa, but was widely regarded as an invasive pest.
Great-Uncle Yoshitsune joined us wearing a short-sleeved blue aloha shirt, his face and hands freshly scrubbed. Even in proper dress, he still resembled a garden gnome.
“Oto-chan used to do a lot of cooking when he was a young man,” Margaret said, nodding her head at Uncle Yosh. “For a while he lived in Honolulu, so he knew the best butchers and fishmongers. He used to take my mother-
