Hawaii - James Michener [406]
His part of this strange game required that he never speak, that he share his secret with nobody. Her rules were that not once, by even so much as a flicker of an eye, must she indicate that she knew what he was doing. He loomed silently before her, and she passed uncomprehendingly on. Yet obviously, if she was a prudent girl, she had to find some way to encourage his courtship so that ultimately he might send his parents to the matchmakers, who would launch formal conversations with her parents; for a girl in this village could never tell which of the gloomy, intense young men might develop into a serious suitor; so in some mysterious manner wholly understood by nobody she indicated, without seeing him or without ever having spoken to him, that she was ready.
Apart from certain species of the bird kingdom, where courtship was conducted with much the same ritual, this sexual parading was one of the strangest on earth, but in this village of Hiroshima-ken it worked, because it involved one additional step of which I have not yet spoken, and it was this next step that young Sakagawa Kamejiro found himself engaged in.
In 1902 he was twenty years old, a rugged, barrel-chested, bow-legged little bulldog of a man with dark, unblemished skin and jet-black hair. He had powerful arms which hung out from his body, as if their musculature was too great to be compressed, and he gave the appearance of a five-foot, one-inch accumulation of raw power, bursting with vital drives yet confused because he knew no specific target upon which to discharge them. In other words, Kamejiro was in love.
He had fallen in love on the very day that the Sakagawa family council had decided that he should be the one to go on the ship to Hawaii, where jobs in the sugar fields were plentiful. It was not the prospect of leaving home that had aroused his inchoate passions, for he knew that his parents, responsible for eight children and one old woman, could not find enough rice to feed the family. He had observed how infrequently fish got to the Sakagawa table-- and meat not at all--so he was prepared to leave.
It happened late one afternoon when he stood in the tiny Sakagawa paddy field and looked out at the shimmering islands of the Inland Sea, and he understood in that brilliant moment, with the westering sun playing upon the most beautiful of all waters, that he might be leaving Hiroshima-ken forever. "I said I would go for only five years," he muttered stubbornly to himself, "but things can happen. I might never see these islands again. Maybe I won't plough this field . . . ever again." And a consuming sorrow possessed him, for all the lands he could imagine, there could be no other on the face of the earth more exciting than these fields along the coastline of Hiroshima-ken.
Kamejiro was by no charitable interpretation of the word a poet. He was not even literate, nor had he ever looked at picture books. He had never talked much at home, and among the boys of the village he was known to be a stolid fighter rather than a talker. He had always ignored girls and, although he followed his father's advice on most things, had stubbornly refused to think of marriage. But now, as he stood in the faltering twilight and saw the land of his ancestors for the first time--in history and in passion and in love, as men occasionally perceive the land upon which they have been bred --he wanted brutishly to reach out his hand and halt the descending sun. He wanted to continue his spiritual embrace of the niggardly little field of which he was so much a part. "I may never come back!" he thought. "Look at the sun burning its way into the sea. You would think . . ." He did not put his thoughts into words, but stood in the paddy field, mud about ankles, entertaining tremendous surges of longing. How magnificent his land was!
It was in this mood that he started homeward, for in the Japanese custom all rice fields were gathered together while the houses to which they pertained clustered in small villages. Thus arable land was not