Hawaii - James Michener [442]
In late 1915 Ishii-san and Kamejiro received notice that their brides were arriving at Honolulu on the old Japanese freighter Kyoto-maru. The news did not occasion the joy that might have been expected, because it had been hoped at the camp that the two girls might arrive by separate ships, for then each husband, when he went to get his wife, could have worn the black suit, thus corresponding to the photographs sent to Japan. As things now stood, one man would wear the suit and not disappoint his bride, but the other would clearly have to wear his laboring clothes and stand before his bride as he really was. It was the character of Kamejiro to say quickly to his friend, "Since you can read and write, it is proper for you to wear the suit." And the camp agreed that this was the only logical solution.
The lovers, alternately ardent and afraid, left Lihue by the small ship Kilauea and went to Honolulu, where they took one room in a dingy Japanese inn on Hotel Street. Since they arrived on the evening before the Kyoto-maru was expected, they ate a meager supper of rice and fish, then hiked up Nuuanu and bowed low before the symbol of their emperor. As they were doing so an official in black cutaway hustled out on some important meeting and snapped: "Don't stand around here like peasants. Go about your work." Obediently the men left.
They were impressed by the big homes on Beretania Street but were shocked by the dirty alleys of Chinatown, where one miserable hovel leaned against the next. Ishii-san said, "They told me that fifteen years ago this whole neighborhood was burned down and the Chinese wanted to rebuild it like a proper city without alleys and mean houses, but the white people wanted it the way it was before, so it was built that way again." The two men, recalling the clean roads and immaculate homes of their childhood, shook their heads at the white man's ways.
Before they went to sleep that night Ishii-san spread before him the two photographs, and he spent a long time comparing them, and his disappointment at the tricks of fate became apparent in his features. "My mother didn't choose very well, I'm afraid," he said. "Isn't it strange, Kamejiro, to think that a great ship out there is bringing a woman with whom you will spend the rest of your life?"
"I'm nervous," Kamejiro confessed, but his nervousness that night was nothing to what he would experience during the next days; for when the Kyoto-maru docked, the seven Japanese men who had come to meet their picture brides were told, "We never let the women out of quarantine for three days."
"Can't we even see them?" Ishii-san implored.
"No contact of any kind," the immigration man warned.
Later, the ardent grooms found that if they bribed one of the attendants, they could press their faces against a hole the size of a half-dollar that had been bored into the door behind which the incoming brides were imprisoned, and the third man in line was Kamejiro. Squinting so as to make his eye smaller, he peered through the miserable peephole and saw seven women idly sitting and standing in groups. He looked from one to the other and was unable to detect which was Sumiko, and he looked back beseechingly at the guard who spoke no Japanese. Applying his eye once more to the circle, he looked avidly at the seven women, but again he could not isolate his intended wife, and in some confusion he turned the peephole over to his successor.
"Is she beautiful?" Ishii-san asked.
"Very," Kamejiro assured him.
"Did you see Yoriko?"
"I think so."
"Does she look pretty good?"
"She looks very healthy," Kamejiro said.
When Ishii-san left the peephole he was trembling. "She's