Hawaii - James Michener [587]
One night she said forcefully, "Goro, there's an orchestra concert tonight, and I think we should go." Awkwardly they went, but she did not enjoy it because Goro felt ill at ease, and the entire audience, except for a few students, were haoles. "Don't the Japanese ever go to plays or music?" she asked, but he interpreted this as the beginning edge of the complaint, so he mumbled, "We're busy working." "For what?" she snapped, and he said nothing.
When Akemi next met Fumiko at the market she asked, "What is it they're working for? In Japan, a man and woman will work like idiots to get tickets for the theater or to buy a beautiful ceramic. What do they work for here? I'll tell you what for. So that they can buy a big black automobile, and put the old mama-san in the back, and drive around Honolulu and say, 'Now I am as good as a haole.' I'm ashamed whenever I see Japanese doctors and lawyers in their big black automobiles."
"I am too," Fumiko confessed. "To think that they surrendered everything Japanese for such a set of values."
Things got a little better when Shigeo returned from Harvard with his honors degree in law, for then Akemi had an intelligent person with whom she could talk, and they had long discussions on politics and art. Akemi was astonished to find that Shig had been to visit the museums in Boston, but he explained: "I'd never have gone on my own account, but I was living with Dr. Abernethy and his wife, and they said that any Sunday on which you didn't do something to improve your mind was a Sunday wasted, and I had a great time with them."
"Tell me about the Boston Symphony," Akemi pleaded. "In Japan we think it's one of the best."
At this point shrewd Mrs. Sakagawa took Shigeo aside and said, "You must not talk any more with Akemi-san. She is your brother's wife, and not a good girl at all, and she will try to make you fall in love with her, and then we will have a tragedy in the family. I told both you and Goro that you ought to avoid city girls, but neither of you would listen, and now see what's happened."
"What has happened?" Shigeo asked.
"Goro has been trapped by a vain and silly girl," his mother explained. "Music, books, plays all day long. She wants to talk about politics. She is no good, that one."
The reasons his mother gave did not impress Shigeo, but the fact that Akemi was temptingly beautiful in her soft Japanese way did, and he stopped being alone with her, so that her life became even more desperate than before. It was rescued by the arrival one day of a young sociologist from the University of Hawaii, a Dr. Sumi Yamazaki, whose parents were also from Hiroshima. Dr. Yamazaki was a brilliant girl who was conducting three hundred interviews with Japanese girls married to G.I.'s, and she got to Akemi late in her study, when her findings had begun to crystallize.
Akemi, hoping that her intended visitor might be a woman of sophisticated intelligence, had first dressed in her most modenne Tokyo style, so that she looked almost as if she had come from Paris; but when she saw herself in the mirror she said, "Today I want to be very Japanese," and she had changed into a languorous pale blue and white shantung kimono with silver zori, and when she met Dr.