Hawaii - James Michener [567]
At the Swamp his mother Malama sang in the late afternoons with her Hawaiian friends: Mrs. Choy, Mrs. Fukuda, Mrs. Mendonca and Mrs. Rodriques, and they were never again bothered by Kelolo and his haole girls. For the most part he kept strictly to the Lagoon, where he sang a little, played some slack-key, and got a lot of cables. In time he found great consolation in Johnny Pupali's summary of sex: "It's the greatest thing in the world. You never get enough until you've just had some."
Once Florsheim remarked: "Kelly blalah, I t'ink dis one t'ing berry punny."
"Wha' dat?" Kelly asked.
"Allatime New York dey got pitchas wid' colors 'Come to Hawaii!' An' dey show dis rock wid wahines, grass skirts, flowahs in de hair, wigglin' de hips like to speak, 'You come to Hawaii, mister, we gonna screw till you dizzy.' "
"Ain" nuttin' wrong wid dat," Kelly reflected.
"But de punny t'ing, Kelly blalah, it ain' so easy to ketch a wahine on dis rock. It ain' dem mainland kanakas has de good time ovah heah, it's de wahines. You know what I fink, blalah?"
"You speak."
"I t'ink mo bettah dey get you 'n' me on de pitchas." And he fell into an exaggerated pose, his muscles flexed, his dark eyes staring out to sea past Diamond Head, and he made an ideal travel poster. Relaxing with laughter he yelled, "Kelly blalah, we de real attraction."
Later when Kelly was locked in a room with a red-hot divorcee from Los Angeles her father arrived unexpectedly and banged on the door, shouting, "Betty! I don't want you wrecking your life with any beachboy bum." But Kelly slipped out through a side hallway, so no real damage was done.
WHEN Shig Sakagawa landed at Yokohama in early 1946, he studied his ancestral homeland with care, and when he saw the starving people, the bombed-out cities and the pathetic material base from which the Japanese had aspired to conquer the world, he thought: "Maybe Pop's right, and this is the greatest country on earth, but it sure don't look it." In his first letter home he tried to report faithfully what he was seeing, but when Kamejiro heard it read, he sent his son a stern reply which said: "Remember that you are a good Japanese, Shigeo, and do not say such things about your homeland." After that Shig wrote mostly generalities.
His first days in Japan were tremendously exciting, for the bustle of Tokyo was reviving, and hordes of little workmen, each of whom looked like his father, scrambled over the bombed ruins, cleaning up as they went. Shig had never before seen such national vitality, and in time he became impressed with Japan's unconquerable resilience. Along the streets he saw innumerable elderly women like his own mother, wearing baggy canvas pants, and they worked harder than, the men, lugging away big baskets of rubble. Almost while he watched, Tokyo was cleaned up and prepared for a new cycle of life. "I have to admire such people," he wrote to his father, and old Kamejiro liked this letter better than the disloyal one that had reflected upon Japan's defeat.
Shig took great interest in his work as a translator for the Harvard professor whom General MacArthur had brought over to advise the Occupation on land reform. Dr. Abernethy was a curious, lanky man of most acute insights, and although he had to depend upon Captain Sakagawa for actual translations of what the Japanese farmers told him, he relied ultimately upon his own perceptions, and for the first time in his life Shig was able to study at close hand a refined human mind at work. A rice farmer would tell Shig, "I have two hundred and forty tsubo for paddy," and Shig would translate this for Dr. Abernethy, but the latter seemed hardly to be listening, for he was surveying the land himself and judging its productive quotient; so that almost before either Shig or the farmer spoke, Dr. Abernethy