Hawaii - James Michener [451]
He had struck Kamejiro some dozen blows, none of them very effective because of the crowded nature of the cabin, when he realized from Mrs. Sakagawa's behavior and the flushed appearance of her husband that perhaps the man really was sick. But he had launched a specific course of action and found himself incapable of turning back. "Get dressed," he growled, and as bewildered Kamejiro, sick for the first time in Hawaii, climbed into his clothes, the luna stood over him, flexing the whip. He drove Kamejiro out of the cabin and into the pineapple fields, announcing to 'the others: "Soy-sauce pilikia pau! Plenty pau!”
Kamejiro, with a high fever, worked till noon and then staggered to one knee. "He's fainting!" the Japanese cried, and work stopped while they hauled him back to his cabin. The German luna, frightened by this twist of events, hurried for the plantation doctor and said, "You've got to say it was soy-sauce fever. We've got to stick together."
The doctor, an old hack who had proved himself unable to hold down any other job, understood, but he was nevertheless appalled at the high fever in the Japanese, and before he publicly announced that the man had been malingering, he dosed him well. Then he supported the luna and gave a stormy lecture in pidgin against the evils of drinking soy sauce. But when he rode back with the luna he warned: "The little bastard won't die this time, but sometimes they really are sick."
"How can you tell?" the German asked, and so far as he was concerned the incident was closed.
But not for Kamejiro Sakagawa. For fourteen years he had given his employer the kind of loyalty that all Japanese are expected to give their superiors. Every monologue delivered by the frenetic, baldheaded reciter dealt with the loyalty that an inferior owed his master. The suicides, the immolations and the feat of Colonel Ito at Port Arthur had all stemmed from this sense of obedience, and the reason that reciters came from Tokyo to such remote areas as Kauai was that the Imperial government wanted to remind all Japanese of their undying loyalty to superiors, in this case the emperor and his army. None had mastered the lesson more firmly than Kamejiro; to him loyalty and rectitude were inborn nature, and the high point of his life continued to be the moment when he dressed in Colonel Ito's uniform to stand at attention while the chanters screamed the story: "Colonel Ito and the Russian Guns at Port Arthur." In his dream life, Kamejiro was that colonel.
But what had happened to him now? When the fever abated he mumbled to his closest friends, "The worst part was not the whip, although it stung. But when I had fallen on the floor, he kicked me! With his shoe!”
If the German luna had been asked by a judge if this had truly happened, he would not have known, for to him the kick was of no significance. But to a Japanese it was an insult past enduring. It was no use to argue with Kamejiro that a kick was no worse than a thrashing from a whip. He knew that in Japanese recitations the most terrifying scene came when the villain, having knocked the hero down, takes off his zori and ceremoniously strikes the fallen hero, for then men like Kamejiro gasped, knowing that only death could avenge this ultimate insult.
"He kicked you?" one of the older men asked in a whisper.
"Yes."
"An ignorant, uneducated German kicked a Japanese?"
“Yes."
"All Japan will be ashamed of this day," the visitor mumbled and sharing this shame, departed.
When the Sakagawas were left alone, Kamejiro turned his face to the wall and began to sob. He could not understand what had happened, but he knew that revenge of some kind was imperative. As his visitor had clearly said, "All Japan will be ashamed."
His lumpy, square-faced wife understood the agony he felt and tried by various gentle means to placate him and poultice