Hawaii - James Michener [586]
At the dock she was met by Mr. Sakagawa and his son-in-law Mr. Ishii, with their wives standing stolidly behind the stocky little men, and she thought: "This is the way families used to look in Japan thirty years ago." However, she took an instant liking to bulldog little Sakagawa-san, with his arms hanging out from knees, and thought, as she looked down at him: "He is like my father." But then she saw grim-faced Mrs. Sakagawa, iron-willed and conservative, and she shivered, thinking to herself: "She's the one to fear. She's the kind we had to fight against in Tokyo."
She was right. Mrs. Sakagawa never eased up. Gentle with her husband, she was a terror to her daughter-in-law. Long ago in Hiroshima, when a son brought home a wife to work the rice fields, it was his mother's responsibility to see that the girl was soon and ably whipped into the habits of a good farm wife, and Mrs. Sakagawa proposed to perform this task for Goro. In fact, as soon as she saw Akemi at the railing of the ship she realized that Goro had made a sad choice, for she whispered contemptuously to her daughter Reiko, "She looks like a city girl, and you know what expensive habits they have."
If Goro had had a well-paying job which permitted him to live away from home, things might have settled down to a mutual and smoldering disapproval in which the two women saw each other as little as possible and were then studiously polite for the sake of Goro, but this could not be, for Goro's salary at the union did not permit him to have his own home, so he stayed with his parents. Early in her battle to subdue Akemi, Mrs. Sakagawa established her theme: "When I came to Hawaii life was very difficult, and there is no reason why you should be pampered."
"Does she expect me to go out and chop a few fields of sugar each afternoon?" Akemi asked Goro one night, and in time he began to hate coming home, for each of his women would in turn try to grab him off to some corner to explain the faults of the other and the turmoil of that day.
What angered Akemi most was a little thing, yet so recurrent that it began eroding her happiness with Goro. The Sakagawas had not spoken the best Japanese even while growing up in Hiroshima, and their long imprisonment in Hawaii had positively corrupted their speech, so that they now used many Hawaiian, Chinese, haole and Filipino words, with a lilting melody to the speech borrowed from the Mexican. Much of their phraseology was incomprehensible to Akemi, but she said nothing and would have been, polite enough never to have commented on this to the Sakagawas, for as she told another war bride whom she met at the store, "I find their horrible speech rather amusing," and the two girls had laughed pleasantly together.
The Sakagawas were not so considerate. They found Akemi's precise Japanese, with its careful inflections and pronunciations, infuriating. "She thinks she's better than we are," Mrs. Sakagawa stormed one night at Goro. "Always talking as if her mouth were full of beans which she didn't want to bite." Often when the family was gathered for evening meal, Akemi would make some casual observation and Mrs. Sakagawa would repeat one or two words, pronouncing them in the barbarous Hawaiian manner. Then everyone would laugh at Akemi, and she would blush.
She fell into the habit of waiting at the market till one or another of the war brides came in, and hungrily, like refugees in an alien land, they would talk with each other in fine Japanese without fear of being ridiculed. "It's like living in Japan