“Wouldn’t that be just our luck?” Hiroshi said-in English-to break that long silence. “We spend our whole lives trying to turn into Americans, and just when we start to get good at it it turns out not to be worth anything.”
“Funny,” Kenzo said. “Funny like a crutch.”
“You think I was kidding?” his brother asked.
“No.” Kenzo left it at that. Would he have to spend the rest of his life trying to make himself Japanese? The New York Yankees meant more to him than the Emperor did. On the mainland, spring training would be starting soon. The closest that came to Hawaii was the Cubs’ springtime home on Catalina Island near Los Angeles.
He and Hiroshi brought the Oshima Maru into Kewalo Basin. Their father watched everything they did, but said not a word. That had to mean they’d done it right. If they’d messed up, they would have heard about it.
As usual these days, Japanese soldiers took charge of the catch. Onto the scales it went, and the Takahashis got paid by weight. Also as usual, nobody fussed when they took some fish for themselves and for Eizo Doi. “Personal use?” a noncom asked Kenzo.
“Hai. Personal use,” he answered. The formula kept the soldiers happy. Kenzo saw speaking fluent Japanese was especially useful just now. He would sooner have slammed the sampan into a pier than admitted that to his father.
It was late in the afternoon, but not too late. They’d brought in as much fish as the Oshima Maru would hold. People hurried here and there, trying to get on with their lives as best they could. More than a few of them sent jealous glances toward Kenzo and his brother and father. If they hadn’t been three stalwart men walking together, they might have had trouble.
A girl coming out of a side street waved and called, “Ken!”
“Hi, Elsie,” he answered, not sorry to see her without her stuck-up friends. “How are you doing?”
The haole girl shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I’m looking for a job. Nobody has enough these days, but there isn’t much out there.” She shrugged again. “Everything’s gone to pot since… since the surrender.”
What had she almost said? Since the Japs took over? Something like that, Kenzo supposed. Well, she hadn’t said it. He asked, “Are you getting enough to eat?”
“Nobody’s getting enough to eat these days except people like you who catch your own,” Elsie said. “It’s not too bad. We’re not starving or anything.” Not yet hung in the air. “But we’re hungry some of the time.” By the way she said it, she’d never gone hungry before.
Neither had Kenzo. Elsie was right about that. A fisherman’s family might not have much money, but the Takahashis had always had food on the table. Impulsively, Kenzo held out a nice aku. The striped tuna was as long as his forearm. “Here. Take this back to your folks.”
She didn’t say, Oh, you shouldn’t, or anything like that. She reached out and took the fish by the tail. What she did say was, “Thank you very much, Ken. This means a lot to me.”
“Be careful with it. Don’t let anybody get it,” he told her. She nodded, then hurried away with the prize.
“What did you go and do that for?” his father said. “Now we have to tell Doi we’re short this time.”
“So we give him some extra next time,” Kenzo answered. “He knows we’re good for it. He’d better, everything we’ve brought him so far.”
“You’re sweet on this girl, neh? ” his father said.
How am I supposed to answer that? Kenzo wondered. If he said he wasn’t, his old man would know he was lying. If he said he was, his father might pitch a fit. He might have pitched a fit any old time. With Japanese soldiers on the streets of Honolulu, with civilians of all colors scrambling out of their way and bowing as they went by… “Maybe some,” Kenzo said cautiously.
“Foolishness. Nothing but foolishness.” But his father left it there.
Hiroshi was the one who spoke up, and he did it in English: “Dad may be right. Is this a smart time to show you like a haole girl?”
“Jesus Christ! Not you, too!” Kenzo said.
His brother flushed. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a smart time to like her. I know you like Elsie, for crying out loud. I said it wasn’t a smart time to show you like her-and you know why as well as I do.”
As if to make his point for him, four or five more Japanese Army men turned the corner and came up the street toward the Takahashis. Kenzo had taken men in U.S. uniforms for granted. Getting used to the new occupiers was harder. Bowing didn’t grate on him the way it had to on haoles, though. He’d grown up with it, and took it for granted.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” Kenzo said.
“Good. Make sure you don’t,” Hiroshi told him.
Since it was still daytime, they went to Eizo Doi’s shop instead of his home. The place was tiny; if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t find it. A sign over the door said HANDYMAN in English in small letters. The hiragana characters for the same thing were twice as tall.
Doi was tinkering with a bicycle’s chain and sprocket when Kenzo and his brother and father came in. “You have an icebox here?” Jiro Takahashi asked.
“Hai,” Doi answered. “Come on in back. So you make me lug the fish home, do you?”
“We didn’t want to knock on your door when you weren’t home-might scare your wife,” Kenzo’s father said. The handyman nodded. Kenzo grimaced. Nobody would have said that before the Japanese took Hawaii. Times had changed, and not for the better. Kenzo kept that to himself. He didn’t know who all of Eizo Doi’s friends were. Being wrong about such things could cost much more now than it had when the Stars and Stripes flew over Iolani Palace.
The handyman’s back room was even more crowded than the part of the shop where he worked: a dark jumble of handmade shelves full of a ridiculous variety of spare parts and odd tools and stuff that looked like junk to Kenzo but presumably was or might prove useful to Doi. Kenzo knew a couple of other handymen. They accumulated odds and ends the same way. If you weren’t part pack rat, you were in the wrong line of work.
Hiroshi pointed to the icebox-no, it was a refrigerator, for a plug snaked out of it. “Did you make that yourself, Doi-san?” he asked. Kenzo couldn’t tell whether his tone was meant to be admiring or appalled.
“Hai,” the handyman said again, looking pleased. “It’s not that hard. I got the motor from a drill press, the compressor from… I don’t remember where I got the compressor. But I put everything together, and it works.”
“That’s what counts,” Kenzo’s father said.
When Doi opened the refrigerator door, Kenzo saw a couple of bottles of beer and other things he had more trouble identifying. By the way some of those looked, he didn’t want to know what they’d been once upon a time. They’d been in there much too long. Doi happily piled fish on the shelves, which might have started their careers as oven racks. If he wasn’t going to worry about it, Kenzo wouldn’t, either.
After the Takahashis left the place, Kenzo said, “See? He didn’t care about that aku. I bet he didn’t even notice.”
His father shook his head. “He noticed. Or if he didn’t, his wife will when he takes the fish home. But you were right-they know we’re good for it sooner or later.”
Sooner or later. The phrase made Kenzo look to the northeast, toward the American mainland. Sooner or later, the USA would try to take Hawaii back. He was sure of that. When, though? And how? And what were the odds the Americans would succeed? Kenzo had no answers for any of those questions. He was sure of one thing, though: it wouldn’t be easy.