Jane picked what looked like the biggest and best turnips. Then she discovered that carrying a dozen of them was no easier than carrying a dozen softballs. She thought about making two trips, but doubted whether Nakayama would put up with such inefficiency. Instead, she tucked her blouse into her dungarees and dumped the turnips down her front. She looked ridiculously lumpy, but so what?
When she got to the apartment, she hid the turnips in as many different places as she could find. Even if someone broke in, he might not steal them all. And she locked the door behind her when she went out again. She hadn’t bothered lately, but now she had valuables in there again.
Valuables! Before the invasion, she would have turned up her nose at turnips; she’d thought of turnip greens as nigger food, if she’d thought of them at all. No more. Before the invasion, she’d been worried about the beginnings of a double chin. Where so many fears had grown, that one had shriveled and blown away. Nowadays, her jawline was as sharp as anyone could want. Her cheekbones stood out in sharp relief under her skin. She didn’t know anyone in Wahiawa who wasn’t skinnier than before the war began. From what doctors said, that would add years to people’s lives. Some of the days Jane put in felt like years.
To give Yosh Nakayama his due, he was skinnier than he had been before the war started, too. He wasn’t living off the fat of the land for helping the Japs. In his weathered face, the prominent cheekbones put Jane in mind of the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire. Nothing else in Hawaii reminded her of New England.
“Thank you for keeping an eye on things,” she told him.
He nodded gravely. “You’re welcome. I do it for everybody, you understand, not just for you.”
“Of course.” She was glad he wasn’t interested in her in particular. That could have got awkward. If she said no and he didn’t like it, would he make sure she didn’t eat? Would he get her in trouble with the occupiers? The nasty possibilities were endless.
Three men with wheelbarrows came up and started loading her turnips into them. When the wheelbarrows were full, they wheeled them off in the direction of the community kitchen. A few turnips were left. Jane wondered what would become of them. She needn’t have. One of the men, a Filipino, came back and loaded in those last few. Sweat ran down his face as he said, “Hard work!” Away he went, panting a little.
Nakayama looked after him, an odd expression on his face-so odd that Jane asked, “What is it?”
“We say, ‘Hard work!’ in Japanese, too. I wonder if Carlos knows that. With us, it can mean the work really is hard, or it can mean you complain about what you have to do, or it can mean you are sorry about what someone else has to do.”
Jane hadn’t expected a Japanese lesson. She also hadn’t had the faintest idea what the Filipino’s name was. To her, he was only a face in the crowd, and not a handsome face, either. But Nakayama knew. He knew who she was, too. He probably knew who everybody in and around Wahiawa was. That had to make him all the more valuable for Major Horikawa and the rest of the Japs.
“Your potatoes, I think, do well, too,” he said. Touching the broad brim of his straw hat, he went off to talk with another cultivator.
How do I cook those turnips? Jane wondered over and over. Only two answers came to her. She could build a fire in the open-and risk having more company than she wanted. Or she could build one in the oven of her gas stove. It might make a fair imitation of the coal-burner her family had had when she was a little girl.
She tried that. It worked, though the kitchen got smoky and she wouldn’t have wanted to do it every day. Boiled turnips, even with salt, were uninspiring. But they were better than nothing, and a welcome addition to the slop from the community kitchen. When you got right down to it, what counted for more than a belly that didn’t rumble? Not much. No, not much.
X
JIRO TAKAHASHI WANTED to spend as much time out on the ocean as he could. When he was on the Pacific, he wasn’t in that miserable tent in the botanical garden. When he was out there, he didn’t quarrel so much with his sons, either. They talked about things that had to do with the Oshima Maru, not so much about politics and what it meant to be a Japanese or an American. That was all to the good, because he didn’t see eye to eye with Hiroshi and Kenzo.
And he found he liked sailing the sampan. He’d put to sea with her with the diesel for so long, he’d come to take it for granted. You pointed her bow in the direction you wanted to go, started the engine, and away you went. It took about as much skill as drawing a straight line with a pencil. (Knowing where you wanted to go was a different story. That took skill.)
When you sailed, though, every move you made depended on something outside the sampan. If the breeze shifted and you wanted to keep going in the same direction, you had to shift the sails to account for the change. If the wind died, you couldn’t go anywhere. If you were running against it, you had to go like a drunken crab, zigzagging now one way, now the other, traveling ever so much farther-and slower-than you would in a straight line.
His sons had got the hang of handling the sails as fast as he could have wanted. He remained better at it than they did, though. He knew it, and so did they. After one long tack closer to the wind than the beamy sampan had any business getting, Kenzo said, “That was very pretty, Father.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” Jiro found himself smiling. He called back to Hiroshi at the rudder: “We’re going to come about. Are you ready?”
His older son nodded. “Hai, Father.”
“All right then-now!” Jiro swung the sails from one side of the mast to the other. He and his sons ducked as the boom slid by, then quickly straightened again. Hiroshi shifted the rudder to help guide the Oshima Maru onto her new course. The sails filled with wind. They were off on the other tack. Jiro’s smile got broader.
“You couldn’t have done that better if you tried for a week,” Kenzo said admiringly. Jiro bowed slightly at the praise. It warmed and embarrassed him at the same time. He knew he’d done well, too. But a proper Japanese would have said something more on the order of, Not bad. Kenzo’s extravagant compliment was much more American.
One bad thing about even the most perfect tack: it brought the sampan closer to Kewalo Basin. However crabwise she traveled, the Oshima Maru neared land each passing minute. Jiro didn’t want to come ashore. But there wasn’t much point to fishing if you didn’t bring the catch home.
He cut another strip of dark pink meat from the fat belly of an ahi. He and his sons ate better on the Pacific than they did on land-one more reason to want to stay at sea. The tuna’s flesh was almost as rich as beef.
Kenzo also cut himself some ahi. As he chewed, he said, “We’ll have Doi paid off before too long.”
“Well, yes.” Jiro nodded. “The way things are now, though, it doesn’t matter that much. So we get a little more money. So what? What can we buy with money these days?”
“Not much.” But Kenzo couldn’t help adding, “That’s because we’re cut off from the mainland-the mainland of the United States. That’s where we got everything we needed, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.”
“Before long, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere will make up for the things we can’t get from the USA,” Jiro said stubbornly.
His younger son rolled his eyes. “Don’t hold your breath.”
Even on the Pacific, politics reared its ugly head. “We’ll see,” was all Jiro said; he didn’t feel like fighting. For a wonder, Kenzo took it no further, either. But the silence as they glided into the basin had the charged quality of the air just before a thunderstorm.