Hawaii - James Michener [452]
"No!” Yoriko pleaded. "This stupid German would not understand."
"When he stumbles upon my body in the morning, he will understand," Kamejiro replied.
"Oh, no!" Yoriko wept. She had not yet lived with her husband for a year, but she had found him to be one of the finest men she had ever known or heard of. He was kind and jovial. He saved his money and was generous with friends. He got drunk sometimes but fell into laughing fits when he did and had to lean on her to get home. And at all public gatherings of the Japanese, he represented the honor of the homeland. In his uniform of Colonel Ito he was as handsome a man as she had seen, and she did not want him, not even for the honor of his country, to commit hara-kiri before the house of a clod like the German luna.
"Kamejiro," she whispered. "Forget the sword. There is a better way. Wait till you are stronger. I will feed you rice and fish and you will become powerful as before. Then hide along the path, and when the luna comes along, leap at him and knock him down and then kick him with your zori."
"Germans are big men," Kamejiro reflected.
"Then get some of the others to help you," Yoriko plotted.
"I would not hide," Kamejiro replied. "That would offend the honor of Japan."
"Then walk up to him," Yoriko counseled, "and knock him down."
The German luna seemed rather bigger to Kamejiro than he did to Yoriko, so on his feverish bed the little laborer worked out an alternative plot that would both humiliate the luna and restore his own besmirched honor. He waited until his strength returned, bided his time while he spied on the luna, and then laid his trap. Planting himself along a road which the German had to traverse on his way to the overseers' quarters, he trembled with excitement as he saw the towering luna approach. When the German was almost abreast of him, he called sharply, "Mr. Von Schlemm!"
Startled, the luna stopped and drew his fists into a protective position. Then he saw that his accoster was the model workman Kamejiro, and he forgot that he had recently whipped the man. He dropped his guard slightly and asked, "What fo' you call?"
To his amazement, the little Japanese bent down, carefully took off his zori, stood erect like a major in a German play, and tapped the man facing him on the shoulder with the dusty Japanese shoe. At this moment Kamejiro expected to be knocked down by the luna, whereupon his friends hiding in the bushes were supposed to leap out and thrash the luna roundly.
But nothing happened. The big, bewildered German stared at his strange assailant, looked down at the one bare foot, and shrugged his shoulders. "You speak, Kamejiro?" he asked, unable to comprehend what was happening.
In disgust with a man so lacking in honor, Kamejiro turned his back and started hobbling with one shoe and one bare foot back to his quarters. The big luna, more perplexed than ever, watched him disappear, then shrugged his shoulders again and went along to his quarters, but as he walked he thought he heard in the sugar cane beside the road the muffled and derisive laughter of men, but when he turned suddenly to find them, he saw nothing but the waving cane.
That night Sakagawa Kamejiro was a hero among the Japanese of Ishii Camp. "Tell us again how you humiliated the luna!" his admirers 'begged.
"I went up to him just as I told my wife I would and I called, 'Eh, you, Mr. Von Schlemm!' Then I took off my zori and struck him on the head with it."
"On the head?" asked the Japanese who had not been in the cane. "And he did nothing?"
One of the men who had been hiding in the cane explained: "He was astonished! He was afraid! I could see him tremble! What a sorry man he was that moment!"
"I think we had better celebrate with