Hawaii - James Michener [621]
The old folks' departure grieved Shigeo, because the more solidly American he became, with a seat in the senate and a canny man like Black Jim McLafferty as his partner, the more he appreciated the virtues old Kamejiro had inculcated in his sons; but Goro felt otherwise, for although he too treasured his father's moral teachings, he was glad to see his stern, unyielding mother go back to Japan, for he felt that this would give him a chance to keep his own wife, Akemi-san, in America. Accordingly, he and Shigeo gave Akemi a comfortable allowance, command of the Sakagawa house, and freedom from the old woman's tyranny. The brothers never laughed at Akemi's precise speech, and they showed her that they wanted her to stay.
But it was too late. One morning, as they were breakfasting, she said, "I am going back to Japan."
"Why?" Goro gasped.
"Where will you get the money?" Shigeo said.
"I've saved it. For a year I've bought nothing for myself and eaten mainly rice. I haven't cheated you," she insisted.
"No one's speaking of cheating, Akemi dear," Goro assured her. "But why are you leaving?"
"Because Hawaii is too dreadfully dull to live in," she replied.
"Akemi!" Goro pleaded.
She pushed back from the table and looked at the hard-working brothers. "In Hawaii I'm intellectually dead . . . decomposing."
"How can you say that?" Shig interrupted.
"Because it's true . . . and pitifully obvious to anyone from Japan."
"But don't you sense the excitement here?" Shig pleaded. "We Japanese are just breaking through to power."
"Do you know what real excitement is?" she asked sorrowfully. "The excitement of ideas? Quests? I'm afraid Hawaii will never begin to understand true intellectual excitement, and I refuse to waste my life here."
"But don't you find our arrival as a group of people exciting?" Shig pressed.
"Yes," she granted, "if you were going to arrive some place important it would be exciting. But do you know what your goal is? A big shiny black automobile. You'll never arrive at music or plays or reading books. You have a cheap scale of values, and I refuse to abide them any longer."
"Akemi!” Goro pleaded in real anguish. "Don't leave. Please."
"What will you do?" Shig asked.
"I'll get a job in a Nishi-Ginza bar where people talk about ideas," she said flatly, and that day she started to pack.
When it became obvious that she was determined to leave Hawaii, Goro disappeared from his labor office for several days, and Shigeo found him sitting dully at home, waiting for Akemi-san to return from the market, where she was informing her envious war-bride friends that she was sailing back to Japan. Goro's eyes were red, and his hands trembled. "Do you think that all we've been working at is useless, Shig?" he pleaded.
"Don't believe what this girl says," Shig replied, sitting with his brother.
"But I love her. I can't let her go!"
"Goro," Shigeo said quietly, "I love Akemi-san almost as much as you do, and if she walks out, I'm broken up, too. But I'm sure of one thing. You and I are working on something so big that she can't even dimly understand it. Give us another twenty years and we'll build here in Hawaii a wonderland."
Goro knew what his brother was speaking of, but he asked, "In the meantime, do you think we're as dull as she says?"
Shig thought several minutes, recalling Boston, on a Friday night, and Harvard Law with its vital discussions, and Sundays at the great museums. "Hawaii's pretty bad," he confessed.
"Then you think Akemi-chan's justified?" Goro asked with a dull ache in his voice.
"She's not big enough to overlook the fact that we're essentially peasants," Shig replied.
"What do you mean?" Goro argued contentiously. "We got good educations."
"But fundamentally we're peasants," Shig reasoned. "Everybody who came to these islands came as illiterate peasants. The Chinese, the Portuguese, the Koreans, and now the Filipinos. We were all honest and hard-working, but, by God, we were a bunch of Hiroshima yokels."
Goro, lacerated