Hawaii - James Michener [440]
He entered into a period of terrible depression, and a vision came to him which he could not expel: he saw Yoko waiting in Hiroshima, beside the rice fields, and birds were flying past her, too, and she held out her hands, and mists came from the Inland Sea and obliterated her pleading. For the first time he did not rise at three-thirty, and he failed to tend his hot baths, throwing the job onto a friend. He wandered about, gnawed at by an insatiable hunger, and he contemplated going to Kapaa and the brothels, but he rejected the idea, and at last he worked himself toward the decision that hundreds had made before him: "For a little while I shall forget about returning to Japan, but I will use my money to send for Yoko."
He was hoeing pineapple when he made this decision, and it was only two o'clock in the afternoon, but he dropped his hoe and walked in a kind of glorious daze out to the main highway and on into Kapaa, where the ostracized Hashimoto had a photograph shop and an agency for ships traveling to Japan. Smothering his pride and approaching the renegade, Kamejiro said, "I want to get my picture taken to send to Japan."
"Go home and shave," Hashimoto said bluntly. "And wear the dark suit."
"I have no suit."
"Ishii Camp has one. All the men use it."
"I don't want to wear a borrowed suit."
"What girl will want to marry you if you send a photograph without a dark suit?"
"Who said anything about girls?"
"Obviously, you want to get married. I'm glad for you and will take a fine picture. But shave first and wear the dark suit."
"How much will it all cost?" Kamejiro asked.
"Photograph three dollars. Boat fare for the girl seventy. Her train expenses and dresses and the feast back home, maybe seventy. Total one hundred forty-three dollars."
Such an amount would delay the accumulation of $400 by another three or four years at least, and Kamejiro hesitated. "I don't know about that," he said. "Please don't tell anybody."
"I take pictures. I talk to nobody."
"I may be back," Kamejiro said.
"You will be," Hashimoto predicted. Then, as he did with all the Japanese who had ostracized him, he added brutally, "You will marry the girl and you will never return to Japan. Make up your mind about that."
Kamejiro swallowed hard and avoided looking at the photographer. "I am going back to Japan," he said. "You have done me a favor, Hashimoto-san. For a moment I was hungry for a wife and thought: 'I will spend my money that way.' But you have shown me what that means. Good night. I won't be back."
But as he left the photographer's store, a brood of children, half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian, swept past him shouting in a language that no man living could understand--the wild, sweet pidgin of childhood, composed of all languages--and they bumped into him, and a little girl, her hair cut square in the Japanese fashion, cried, "Gomennasai!" and on the impulse of the moment Kamejiro stooped and caught the child, bringing her face to his, and for an instant she remained limp in his arms. Then she kicked free and cried in Hawaiian and Portuguese, "I must go with the others!" And from the doorway, Hashimoto, still hating the men who had driven him out, laughed and said, "It was my daughter you were holding. I have six children, four of them boys."
In great agitation Kamejiro walked home, and the smell of the little girl's hair burned his nostrils so that when he reached the camp and saw the long, bleak, womanless barracks in which he had been living for thirteen years,