The Color of Air Read online

  His family had remained quiet and apprehensive, while Koji could hardly contain his excitement. He wanted to jump down from the wagon and run the rest of the way, but he felt his father’s tight grip on his shoulder and knew to stay put. His mother held on to his younger sister in the back of the wagon, her face pale and thin from weeks of seasickness. They were surrounded by the sticky buzzing heat, the low, dark sky threatening rain, and the endless sea of cane. He remembered that his mother had leaned toward his father and whispered in Japanese, “So big and endless, but where is the beating heart?”

  They were one of many Japanese families squeezed into the cane grass huts, huddled together at the northern end of Puli Plantation. There was no running water or electricity, and the outhouse was in the yard. His mother and father were put to work cutting cane and clearing away the cane trash, while ten-year-old Koji and his sister went to the one-room plantation school. He was a restless and distracted student until he began working as a “hoe hana,” weeding and loosening the endless rows of dirt to plant cane under the hot sun, watching the cane cutters along with Razor and other boys his age whose families had also emigrated from Japan. Through good times and bad they all lived together in a cluster of similar grass houses that comprised the Japanese village. While their tightly knit Japanese enclave continued to grow, and was aptly named Kazoku, or Family Village, Koji noticed that they were also kept separated by acres of cane fields from Chinese and Filipino and Portuguese workers and their villages on the plantation.

  * * *

  Koji kept moving between the rows of waving cane, known to grow as tall as twenty feet high before flowering. Most of the cane workers had already come in from the fields for dinner, walking back to their separate villages scattered around the plantation. Those who still had the energy after a day in the fields might tend to their own small gardens, or go down to the river to bathe, talk stories among their own, and drink moonshine made from ti root. By four the next morning, they would be up and starting the day all over again. Koji had lived the same routine for so many years he could do it in his sleep. Hadn’t he survived a lifetime at the Puli Plantation through hard work, keeping to himself, and staying out of trouble? He’d spent his life surviving, and in the end, the lingering guilt still pulled at him, still laid blame. Koji looked out toward the overworked cane fields, knowing the earth needed to be turned over every so often to be renewed. He felt the same. This plantation and these fields had been his life, punctuated by trips down to Hilo town as a boy, and later, to see Mariko and Daniel. After Franklin left, he vowed to take care of them. They were all that ever mattered to him.

  The day was turning to dusk—gray and grainy—neither day nor night. What did he see? Koji always felt it was the most revealing moment of each day—the flickering candle just before it fluttered out, leaving everything in darkness. “Last chance daylight,” his father used to call it, “just before the spirits come out.” He only hoped the spirits would come out to guide him now, just as they always had. Koji walked deeper into the field, the trade winds blowing wildly, the swishing, rustling cane frantic all around him. It didn’t take long before he heard their singing again, their ghost voices rising softly at first, and then louder. The songs sung by the Japanese women workers rose upward and were carried above the tall stalks, while the singers themselves remained hidden among the cane. They sang the holehole bushi work songs filled with all the small joys and great sorrows they’d suffered, deceived into leaving their homeland for a better life, fueled by empty promises as they stripped the dried cane leaves from the stalks ten hours a day. It was during the days before the fields were burned, and all the clearing was done by hand. It was what Koji loved most—what drew him back to the cane—the beauty and the sadness of those singing voices and the stories they told.

  Where do I belong? Where is my home?

  Is it in America, or should I return to Japan?—

  I thought Hawai’i would be my home.

  Hawai’i, Hawai’i the place of my dreams—

  But what a nightmare—

  My tears stain the sugarcane like rain.

  Koji’s mother had sung the work songs with the other women, their heartbreaking laments of being far from their homelands and families, tricked into grueling and endless work in the fields by false promises of money and housing as the sun beat down on them, as the wind howled and slapped, as the rain soaked them to the bone, and as steam rose from the muddy ground. The babies strapped to their backs felt like deadweight, a growing burden, another mouth to feed. They were left with thoughts of deepest despair . . . My baby is better off dead.

  Koji stopped walking, just as he had always paused from his cane cutting to listen to the songs. He closed his eyes and imagined their voices being carried by the wind all the way to Hilo town, their sad and melodious laments soaring through the air before they disappeared over the ocean and back to Japan.

  When the singing finally quieted, Koji opened his eyes. He was standing alone in the field. All the secrets he had kept over the years suddenly nagged at him, like the itch of an old wound. The ghost songs were reminders of all the years gone by, his life spent on what he always considered sacred ground. Leaving the formalities of Japan, he had welcomed the untamed island, the long summers of boyhood, the backbreaking work in the cane fields, the plantation life he had never left because it was all he’d known. When Koji turned to walk back to his house, it was Mariko’s lone voice that stayed with him.

  It’s time he knows the truth. You can’t protect him forever.

  4

  The Okawa Fish Market

  Nori hurried back from the green bungalow to the Okawa Fish Market, across the road from Hilo Bay. One of the two-story clapboard buildings on Kamehameha Avenue, it had formerly been the Hilo Town Bar. She passed the older, two-story S. Hata Building, and the S. H. Kress & Company Building, where all the wealthy haole ladies, whose husbands managed the plantations and ran the banks, came down from their big houses up the hill to have lunch and shop for the latest fashions. The buildings gleamed in their Art Deco newness, both products of the sugar wealth in Hilo town during the past forty years that had kept the town growing, and dimmed all the small family-owned businesses of her childhood. Nori swallowed her rising anxiousness and pushed through the crowded streets. She didn’t want to be late to Daniel’s party.

  Since the stock market crash six years ago, there had been other changes. The once-quiet downtown streets were noisy and restless, teeming with agitated Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Portuguese men waiting desperately for work on the docks. Nori heard that thousands of Filipino workers had already been sent back to the Philippines by the plantation owners, but it was hard to tell as she slipped by so many sour, unwashed bodies, avoiding eye contact as she picked up her pace and clutched her basket close.

  “Lady! Lady,” someone called out to her, but she kept moving.

  In the past few months there’d been countless drunken fights, a stabbing down on the docks outside of Hoku’s Bar, and the window of Ching’s Laundry had been smashed by a brick in the middle of the night. Nori remembered a time when it never crossed her mind to lock the market’s door after dark. Closed meant closed. Now things were different.

  Still, as Hilo town continued to grow around her, the one thing that hadn’t changed for three generations was the Okawa Fish Market. Every morning, varieties of succulent tuna and snapper, moonfish and swordfish had been caught and brought in, still thrashing, by the Okawa fishermen, first by her father-in-law, and her husband, Samuel, and then, as soon as they graduated from high school, her sons Wilson and Mano. Even now, when Nori stepped into the cool, dark market, the heavy sea salt fish pineapple mildew odor sent her right back to the first day its doors opened twenty-five years ago.

  * * *

  Nori had married Samuel Okawa right after they graduated from high school in 1904. They were both seventeen, and she became pregnant with Wilson almost immediately after they moved into his family
’s house close to the wharf, staying in Samuel’s boyhood room. He began working full-time with his father as a fisherman, while she helped his mother at the family fish stand. Nori worried about Samuel going out to sea, taking the boat out in rough waters, confronting unexpected storms or unforeseen injuries. She nourished her courage with old deities and all the fishing lore passed down through generations, but her heart raced with every month’s full moon, which carried another meaning: the currents would be rough in the morning. Unrelenting, unpredictable, unforgiving, the sea was governed by Kanaloa, the god of the ocean. Samuel lived by reading the weather signs, watching the currents and the cloud formations, a language Nori learned to decipher during her first year of marriage. It was a skill that was as suffocating and illuminating as it was frightening and life-saving.

  Six years later she opened the fish market. Nori had just turned twenty-three in 1910 when she urged her husband’s family to expand the simple lean-to that sold the freshest fish in Hilo down by the wharf into a larger market. Samuel and her in-laws resisted. “We’re fishermen, why make more trouble, eh?” her husband had argued. Nori simply smiled and remained insistent. She’d given him two sons in the past five years, and was ready for something more than just changing diapers and waiting for her husband to return home each day bringing the rank smells of fish and sweat. No matter how much her husband protested, she knew he would eventually relent. Samuel was a good, hardworking man, whom she’d known and trusted since he was a boy sitting next to her at Queen Lili’uokalani High School, but Nori had all the business acumen in the family. Hadn’t she been the one to put away enough money to buy the building and start the market in the first place?

  The new Okawa Fish Market opened two months later. Nori, Samuel, and the boys moved into the upstairs apartment, away from her in-laws for the first time. Nori loved Samuel, and marrying him young was a way to escape the memory of her own uncaring parents. But another weight had been lifted when she had a place of her own, away from the watchful eyes of her mother-in-law, a good woman who expected things done her way. “Do like this, yeah,” or “No, no, not that way.” For the first time in her life, Nori felt like a bird released from its cage. She bought two large iceboxes and used the long, whiskey-stained koa wood bar as a counter where customers could sit and eat. She had shelves built that lined the walls and stocked essential grocery items—canned foods, sacks of rice, beans, sugar, salt, and flour. “Survivor foods,” she called them, along with boxes of matches, cigarettes, sweet and salty dried plums, and candies at the front checkout counter, just in case a customer had forgotten to pick up something at Oshima’s grocery store, or worse yet, a natural disaster had rumbled through the island, leaving them completely cut off from the rest of the world.

  Soon, besides selling the famous Okawa fresh fish, Nori cooked and baked in the small kitchen in back—relatives coming in and out to help—and also sold hot coffee, soda pop, sushi, sweetbread, coconut tarts, red bean buns, and whatever else could be quickly downed while working on a boat or sitting at the counter. She began serving breakfast and lunch when she saw how the locals liked to linger at the market every day, as did a pack of homeless, mostly congenial dogs waiting for daily scraps. Tables and chairs were set up not only in the market, but also out back in the yard for those who wanted to sit and linger longer. All considered the market an extension of their own homes. It was ohana, family run and founded by one of their own, and it quickly became the main gathering place in Hilo for island news and gossip.

  And business promised to become even brighter in the months ahead. The railway station just down the street was expanding service to sugar mills north of Hilo along the Hamakua coast, which would soon bring in more customers as the sugar and shipping industries continued to grow. Nori was overwhelmed. She’d never expected the market to succeed so quickly, consuming all her time and energy. Every evening she put her boys to bed and headed straight for her own. Before dawn every morning Nori was downstairs at the market mixing, rolling, and baking loaves of sweetbread, breaking eggs, and frying Portuguese sausage and bacon for the dockworkers and hungry fishermen who flocked there for breakfast before they returned home to sleep. While Nori was grateful for the Okawa Fish Market’s popularity, she was unprepared for all the work it involved. By her second month in business, she hired her cousin, Jelly, to work the counter full-time, and Jelly’s fourteen-year-old son, Nobu, to do the stocking and heavy work, while other relatives took turns watching the boys upstairs as the market continued to grow.

  * * *

  By the time Nori reached the market all the locals had already gathered for Daniel’s welcome home party. She sent her sons, Wilson and Mano, down to the docks to wait for Daniel to arrive, while her childhood friend Leia Natua, along with her sister Noelani, Jelly, and Samuel had laid out platters of food on the koa bar. Beer and soda pop were flowing freely. Nori was especially happy to see the jar of mango jam she’d made from Mariko’s mangoes on the bar. She and Leia had gone over to the house and picked most of the mangoes in early August, the last of them used in the jam now waiting for Daniel. But the biggest surprise was that the famous Okawa Fish Market bulletin board, which hung across the entire back wall and which was usually covered with ads and announcements, was now also decorated with a banner of big block letters across it that spelled out WELCOME HOME, DANIEL!

  The hum of voices grew and laughter filled the air. Nori looked around the room at faces she’d known for most of her life, all the while missing Mariko, the one person who should have been there for her son’s homecoming. When the floorboards quivered beneath her feet, Nori imagined it was Mariko trying to return again. She paused, waiting for the tremors to end, but instead of slowing, they grew in intensity. All the voices hushed as a rumbling, quaking movement took possession of the building. In the next moment, the entire building seemed to be rocking, ceiling fans swaying from side to side, cans and bottles toppling from the shelves in small explosions of shattering glass.

  “Everyone outside!” Samuel yelled.

  Suddenly Nori realized that she hadn’t seen Koji in the crowd. He was always the one they turned to in emergencies. In her panic, Nori couldn’t think of what to grab, and reached for the jar of mango jam, just as Samuel grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the front door.

  5

  Beauty and the Beast

  Koji had just finished changing his clothes when the tremors resumed. He waited for them to pass but they only grew stronger, so he ran to his truck and headed back down the mountain to Hilo town. What he had been dreading had finally arrived. Like all the locals, he understood that living on an island created by volcanoes meant accepting both the beauty and the beast. You couldn’t have one without the other. Koji bumped along the unpaved roads, passing fields of sugarcane, descending through huge stands of koa and hala trees with their thick, monstrous aerial roots, wondering which of the island’s beasts was rearing its ugly head this time. Suddenly his truck swerved as if he had a flat tire. Koji braked and stopped in the middle of a red dirt road, only to realize that it was the ground shifting his truck from side to side. He watched the ohi’a tree branches swaying, leaves falling to the ground in defeat. Koji was helpless to do anything but wait it out. Time slowed. Was it a minute or two or three before the quaking eased and the ground stilled? He waited a moment longer before he started up the truck and kept driving.

  Hilo was a good forty miles away from the foothills of Mauna Loa, but they lived under the threat of the volcano while it slept—mostly forgotten—until something deep down ignited and the fire goddess Pele rose and roared to life. It must have been the tenth time Mauna Loa had erupted since Koji first set foot in Hawai’i. Some eruptions were barely a whimper, while others demanded attention. Given the months of tremors preceding it, this looked to be one of the big ones. If Mariko were still alive, he would have gone to the green bungalow first. While her spirit never physically returned to him, he often closed his eyes and felt her there, even heard
her voice, but he never saw her. Instead, he headed directly to the fish market. Koji was running on adrenaline. Twenty minutes later, when he reached Kamehameha Avenue and turned the corner toward the market, a crowd had already collected in front. He was relieved to see that the downtown area looked almost undamaged. Koji parked and ran toward the crowd, wondering if Daniel had arrived yet. He stopped when someone yelled, “Mauna Loa! Long Mountain’s smoking like a chimney!” Koji watched with the crowd as great plumes of billowing white smoke surged into the sky.

  He remembered seven-year-old Daniel once pointing up at a cluster of cumulus clouds with great excitement. “There’s Aopua’a,” he’d told Koji gleefully, “right there, you see, that’s the mama pig with all her piglets huddled around her. Uncle Samuel says it means a quiet day of good fishing with no storms.”

  But Mauna Loa was not about to remain quiet today. In the next moment, Koji watched the piglets scatter as the bloated white cloud soundlessly spread across the sky. A sudden shifting underfoot shook the ground again, and the nervous onlookers stared at one another and then back up at Mauna Loa. Even the air seemed to pulsate with their helplessness. The great white plumes of smoke turned an ash-filled dusty brown before emerging white again, only to be chased away by a spewing red-hot curtain of lava that blew from the fissures hundreds of feet into the air.