Hawaii - James Michener [438]
Some of the Japanese men had begun to bring brides in from Japan, and this was always costly, throwing unusual burdens upon the whole community. There were photographs to be taken in Kapaa, fares to be paid, travel to Honolulu to complete the paper work, and store-bought black suits in which to be married. The amount of connubial bliss underwritten by stalwart Kamejiro was considerable; and this was a self-defeating game, because he found that as soon as a man and woman got together, there were apt to be babies which caused further financial crises. There was thus a constant drain upon his resources and at times it seemed as if he were paying for the family happiness of everyone but himself.
His biggest expenditures, however, arose from patriotism. If a priest came through Kauai telling of a new war memorial, Kamejiro was the man who contributed most heavily. When consular officials from Honolulu appeared to explain the great events transpiring in the homeland, Kamejiro paid their hotel bills. He contributed to the Japanese school, to the Japanese church, and above all to the Japanese reciters who passed through the islands periodically.
These men were the joy of Kamejiro's life, and whenever one was announced he worked with greater speed, impatient for the Sunday afternoon when the entire Japanese community would gather in some park of casuarina trees, sitting on beds of dried needles to wait for the appearance of the reciter. At one-thirty, after the Japanese had enjoyed their lunch of sushi and sashimi, a movable platform of boards, covered by a traditional cloth, was put into position, with a low lectern bearing a closed fan. A hush fell over the crowd, and the visitor from Japan, usually an elderly man with bald head and wide-shouldered starched uniform whose points swept out like butterfly wings, stepped onto the platform in white tabi, bowed many times, and sat on his haunches before the lectern. For some moments he seemed to pray that his voice would be strong, and then, as his audience waited breathless in the sunlight, he picked up the folded fan and began chanting.
"I ... shall . . . speak ... of ... the ... Battle ... of ... Ichi-no-tani," he cried in mournful voice, singing each pregnant word and holding on to it. In those first moments he seemed like an imprisoned volcano, about to burst into wild fury, and as the events of that battle, which had taken place more than seven hundred years before, began to unfold, the man's voice began to acquire new force. He projected himself into each of the characters in turn; he was the brave warrior Kumagai; he was the handsome youth Atsumori; he was the horse, the cliff, the flute; he was the brilliant hero Yoshitsune; and all the women. As his excitement grew, the veins of his head stood out as if they might burst and his neck muscles could be seen like pencils under the skin. At the various crises of the ancient battle, he roared and whispered, sobbed and screamed with joy; but when it came time for Atsumori to die-- this bewitching young warrior playing a flute--the man reported grief as if it were a tangible thing, and the entire audience wept.
How terribly real was the heroism of Japan, there under the casuarina trees. How fair and loyal the women were, how brave the men. And as the battle drew to its tragic conclusion, with the plantation, hands sobbing for the lost dead, the reciter added lines that were not originally part of the epic, but which he had been told were especially appropriate for distant colonies like this one on Kauai: "And ... as ...