Shimura Trouble

by Sujata Massey

  “Thank you so much, Cousin Edwin, but the non-refundable deposit has been made,” I said firmly. “And we’re renting a whole house that we selected because it’s just a mile from your home!”

  “Call me Uncle, and it’s closer than this.” Edwin pinched his left thumb and middle finger together. “I can lead you out there. The problem is, it’s a gated resort. They might not let a local guy like me drive on the premises.”

  “Oh, dear. If you could lead us out to the freeway, that would be very nice,” I said, thinking that while Edwin was no doubt exaggerating, if we got off on the wrong foot with him, the whole month would be spoiled. And if things were spoiled, my father would be anxious—and that anxiety could lead to a stroke.

  “OK then. Follow me.” Edwin slammed the minivan’s door closed and then climbed into a silver Toyota Tacoma truck streaked with red mud, parked a few spaces away. He pulled out into the parking lot aisle, and I hurried to keep up.

  “Well done, Rei-chan,” Uncle Hiroshi said from the backseat.

  “Don’t say that until Rei’s gotten us there safely,” my father cautioned from his perch beside me.

  “I’m referring to the way your daughter handled Edwin-san,” Hiroshi said. “It’s a good thing she stopped him from taking us to the other house.”

  “What do you think of Edwin?” I asked the rear-seat passengers.

  “What do you think?” Hiroshi turned the question round with perfect Japanese etiquette that made me want to shriek.

  “He wants to organize everything for us,” my father murmured. “It’s quite natural, I suppose, since we’ve come from far away.”

  “I’m so glad you didn’t agree to change resorts,” I said to my father. We’d stopped at the parking attendant’s booth, and I suddenly realized I needed to pay. I turned to my cousin and Uncle Hiroshi in the rear passenger seats and asked for a parking ticket.

  “Oh, no! Edwin has the ticket,” Tom said.

  My heart sunk. There was no way I’d be able to flag down Edwin, since his vehicle had already cleared the traffic gate.

  “No need pay,” said the parking lot attendant, a middle-aged Hawaiian woman with a small white flower tucked behind one ear; a blossom that looked like one of the flowers in my lei.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have a ticket.”

  “No, no. The guy in the truck before you, he pay for everything. He say tell you aloha and welcome to Hawaii.”

  After we passed through the gate and on to the freeway, following Edwin’s silver truck, I thought about things. Maybe I’d judged my new uncle too quickly. Paying for our parking had been a kind thing to do. My father said as much as we rode along past a landscape that no longer seemed tropical; dry hills scattered with housing estates and big box stores like Old Navy and OfficeMax. H-1 suddenly seemed like a typical traffic-choked freeway in Southern California. Only the shifting gray and white clouds overhead, the soaring mountains and occasional flashes of blue ocean gave me hope that something different might be ahead.

  By the time we’d passed the exit for Pearl City, Edwin’s silver truck was three cars ahead of us, and I tried to keep it in sight, but there were plenty of distractions: vans decorated with Japanese company names, city buses, and cars towing other vehicles with only a few feet of rope connecting them. My father tutted in disapproval at the sight of young men sitting atop steel trunks in the open backs of pick-up trucks.

  “Get around that truck before someone flies off and lands in front of our van,” my father advised. “Can we get into the HOV lane?”

  Yes we can, I decided after reading a sign that defined a high occupancy vehicle as one containing two people. Now that was different from California—not to mention the fact that the other cars here easily made way for us to merge into the diamond-marked lane. I was almost shocked by the courtesy. Perhaps this was an example of ‘Drive with Aloha’, a message I had seen on an electronic traffic message board a few miles back.

  After passing the town of Waipahu, speed picked up. Most of the cars had defected to a north-bound freeway. The traffic jam was over, and there were fewer stores and houses along the freeway, just dry brown land marked with sparse trees, rocks, and the occasional large burnt-black expanse. There must have been some brush fires here, I thought, and then yearned a bit for the lush green north-east section of Oahu where most of my botany course had taken place. Uncle Hiroshi had been kind enough to undertake the search for our housing, but obviously he didn’t know that he was booking on the non-tropical side.

  H-1 West ended, and I was now driving a one-lane road called Farrington Highway. Farrington was a big name on the island, that of one of the most influential governors of Oahu, and founder of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper. My reverie was broken by a hand-lettered sign propped on the right side of the road. It read, FRESH COLD LYCHEE. Twenty feet later, a second sign entreated, YOU WANT? followed by the final enticement: SO SWEET! I slowed slightly to get a look at a man hunched in the payload of a dusty truck sorting fruit.

  The next signs I saw were official ones: Kainani, 7 miles. And on the left, there was a sign for Laaloa Street, and a postage-stamp-sized neighborhood of older, unmatched houses, the antithesis of the large, sterile housing developments we’d passed between Honolulu and Waipahu. As Edwin turned off to his neighborhood he stuck a fist out the window and wagged it, his pinkie and thumb skyward.

  “What does he mean?” Hiroshi wondered aloud. “Are we doing something wrong?”

  “No, no, Ojisan!” I explained to him that the shaka sign was a greeting that supposedly originated with a plantation laborer who’d lost some fingers in the line of work. People waved back to him making their own hand signals two-fingered ones, as a show of respect. Now the shaka sign was the standard wave used everywhere in Hawaii.

  The exit to Kainani was hard to miss: a hibiscus-edged, Japanese-style arched bridge. As I slowly took the exit, which crossed back over the highway to the ocean, the yellow-brown landscape dissolved into a Technicolor golf course. To my left was a large pond where lazy black swans pecked around the edge; to the right was a gated community of grand, 1920s-modeled villas the color of orange sherbet.

  We’d all rolled down our windows long ago, a reaction to the car’s non-functioning air-conditioning, and now trade winds gently rippled through the minivan. Trade winds, one of the prettiest phrases I knew.

  “This place was built by a Japanese developer,” Uncle Hiroshi said. “It’s as pretty as in the Internet photographs, I think. Is it all right for you?”

  “It’s lovely,” I said. Despite my belief in supporting native plant landscaping, I was secretly relieved that we wouldn’t be staying in the middle of a brown field. “You can’t always believe what you see or read on the Internet, but this looks postcard perfect.”

  “Check out the golf course,” Tom said. “Eighteen holes, and the golf club is supposed to have one of the island’s top Japanese restaurants.”

  “Top Japanese restaurants are expensive,” my father said. “Rei will be happy to cook; why, she’s been cooking for me this last month and I’ve lost five pounds.”

  “That’s not much of an argument for my cooking,” I said, thinking that what had seemed like an act of love, feeding my father, might feel a little different if I was doing it non-stop for three men. “I just hope the kitchen has some pots and pans.”

  “The kitchen is quite luxurious, I think. Would you care to see the photographs?” Tom started rummaging in his carry-on bag.

  “Not now, thanks. Security’s ready to talk to us,” I said, because the cars ahead of us had all been cleared and now it was my turn to introduce myself at Kainani’s gatehouse.

  After I’d given our name and the street address of the house we were renting, a handsome young man in a green-and-gold aloha shirt and trim khaki shorts handed me directions and an envelope with keys to our house on Plumeria Place. Plumeria was the name of the particular flower in the parking attendant’s hair, I remembered.
Hawaii was coming back to me, fast.

  I drove a half-mile farther, passing the Kainani Inn, a sprawling modern hotel on the beach side of the road. On the left was the fabled golf course, where a cluster of golfers had gathered to watch someone swing.

  “Michelle Wie!” Uncle Hiroshi started thumping on his window, as if the star teenage golfer might wave. She didn’t notice, so I was forced to stop the car in order that Tom and Uncle Hiroshi could run to the golf course with a digital camera.

  After ten minutes Hiroshi and Tom returned to the minivan, full of bubbly excitement over the young star. Finally we turned left at the small road cutting through the golf course that led to an elaborate iron gate with fancy pineapple designs and the name of the housing area, Pineapple Plantation. As the Aloha team member who’d given me the key had instructed, I waved the house key over a sensor and the gates parted to reveal a neighborhood of simple gray clapboard houses, each with a wraparound white wooden porch called a lanai. Another gorgeous word that had returned to my memory. Despite my intentions, I was really getting excited about being in Hawaii.

  “Well done, Rei-chan!” Tom said, practically jumping out of the car when I’d pulled into the driveway. I slowly got out of the car, still studying the house. It was clearly part of a mass development, but its simple, well-balanced design was architecturally pleasing, albeit American. The only factor that made these homes feel Polynesian was the landscaping: vigorous shrubs like ginger, breadfruit trees, and several species of palm. Thick banks of orange-spotted lauae ferns lined the walkway to the house, not quite covering the sprinkler heads set into the ground. I smelled plumeria everywhere, its dainty white blooms on small trees that looked as if they’d been planted only recently.

  Inside, the house plan was modern. The heart of the home was a high-ceilinged kitchen with granite counters and stainless appliances including a professional-looking juicer. As my father exclaimed over it, I looked past the pot rack hanging with anodized aluminum pans and across the neutrally furnished living room to huge windows showing views of the beautiful green lawns. So this is what you could get on the Leeward Side of Oahu for four thousand dollars a month—not bad, if you compared it to the cost of a Waikiki double.

  Two bedrooms and baths were upstairs, one of which would be for Hiroshi and my father, and the other for Tom. I would sleep downstairs in my own bedroom, which was delightful because the room had its own lanai. Instead of using the downstairs air-conditioner, I could turn on the fan over my bed and open the sliding lanai door to the trade winds.

  I lay down on my bed, intending to close my eyes only briefly. The ceiling fan whirred lazily overhead, and trade winds came through the sliding doors I’d opened to the garden. I heard the sound of a strange bird singing its evening song, and the laughter of children somewhere farther away.

  Through my slightly opened bedroom door, I overheard my father speaking Japanese on the telephone, probably to someone at the hotel’s Japanese restaurant. Yes, he was ordering sashimi, rice, and of course, miso soup. In some corner of my consciousness, I remembered that my father shouldn’t eat miso because of the sodium levels. But I was too tired to intervene, too tired to do anything but lose myself in the soft purple twilight.

  IT WAS FIVE-THIRTY when I woke—eight-thirty in the morning, California time—and I felt marvelous. I’d slept through dinner, and apparently everything else. And now, as soon as it was light, I would get to run.

  I pulled on melon-colored shorts and a red running tank and my socks, and walked out to the empty, dark kitchen. After swigging two glasses of water and brushing my teeth, I went through my running stretches. I tucked a house key and a ten-dollar bill into the ankle-strap wallet I used for running, and then I was off.

  The sun was rising, and already the pretty boulevards of Kainani were filling up. Elderly couples power-walked, young singles jogged, and fathers and mothers pushed strollers. Asian and Caucasian golfers cruised along in their carts; the resort’s gardeners, their faces hidden by cloth-draped hats, were just getting set up to work.

  I ran south along Kainani Boulevard, passing the timeshare high-rise Edwin had decried, then condominiums, and a series of swimming lagoons. Toward the ocean loomed a large white house, about a story higher than the others, and set apart from them by tall green conifers clipped to perfect uniformity, like hedges were in Japan. I ran a little closer and looked through the copper gate decorated with jumping dolphins. A rock column was inset with the blinking eye of a security camera, an electric doorbell, and a name in copper kanji characters. I took me a minute to read the Japanese name, Kikuchi, but no extra time to understand the English underneath. PRIVATE PROPERTY—TRESPASSERS FORBIDDEN.

  I jogged off, thinking about how the security camera must have caught me studying the house. Well, I thought defensively to myself, there had to be a lot of tourists staying at Kainani who would gawk at such a large place, especially since it had the water right behind it—unlike the townhouses, which all backed on to pleasant shared gardens. Only the Kainani Inn, the timeshare tower and the Kikuchi house had direct beach access.

  Because of the pleasant breeze, I decided to run farther, even as I approached a wire fence marking the resort’s border. A person-sized gap in the tall wire fence separated the green resort from a dry, rocky brown field that stretched to infinity. Obviously, this was an informal network of paths for workers coming and going from Kainani.

  I squeezed through the gap and ran on, enjoying the feeling of being almost off the beaten track. It was an interesting place, with the sparkling ocean and a small industrial harbor on one side, and the towering mountains on the other. In the field, small herds of horses had their heads down, eating up seed pods that had dropped from the lacy kiawe trees growing profusely through the landscape. Kiawe was the same as mesquite; it had been introduced to the island to feed horses brought by settlers. Now I imagined that animal grazing was one of the few things that could be done with fallow land that had once held fields of sugar cane.

  Two more miles, and the dirt path ran straight into a cluster of small weathered cottages. Each one had a tiny lanai, and while the white paint had almost completely worn off the houses, a few rusty mailboxes still had painted names on them: Fuji, Narita, Ota. All around me, short paths stretched out with vacant cottages that looked identical. I was probably standing on the grounds of the old plantation laborers’ village, perhaps where my great-great-aunt had lived.

  I walked through the village, my pulse slowing as I searched for our family name. I didn’t see anything, but all of a sudden there she was in my mind, a woman barely out of her teens, rising to prepare breakfast and lunch for a husband and the single male laborers in the community. She would have barely enough time to wash the dishes in the cold water she’d carried herself from a well, and then she’d be hurrying off behind the men to work stripping the husks of the cane in the fields. She’d work all day with barely a break, and when she came home after ten hours’ work, she’d take her bath along with other women in the communal furo, which would be dirty and lukewarm after the men had done with it. She’d quickly ready dinner, clean up the dishes, and then involve herself with laundry and mending.

  I would ask Yoshitsune Shimura about this place, I thought as I picked up my pace at the end of the village. I’d spotted a pitted asphalt road and, alongside it, a long barn-like wooden structure with a lanai running around three sides. The building was definitely of the same vintage as the houses I’d seen, but unlike them this was freshly painted bright green with rainbow-colored letters above the lanai that read ALOHA MORNING. Even better was the neon sign in the window: OPEN.

  The old plantation store—which is what I guessed it had been—was now a coffee shop, judging from the looks of a small crowd of locals sitting on the lanai with paper cups in hand. The array of trucks and vans parked alongside probably meant the coffee was good.

  I opened the screen door to the coffee house, which seemed very dark after the brightness of the morning
sun. I stepped on to a rough, wide-planked wooden floor and made out glass-fronted wooden cases holding breads, buns and fruit preserves. The store seemed all-purpose, I realized as my eyes continued to adjust. Now I saw racks holding fishing supplies, beach toys and swimwear, and some tables and chairs sat across from a coffee-service counter.

  I waited my turn at the counter, where a pretty girl in her twenties with long black pigtails was drawing coffee from gleaming brass and stainless steel machinery.

  “I’m getting this newspaper, and I’d also like a large bottled water and a small skinny latte, please,” I said when it was my turn.

  “Water’s in the fridge case, over by the door.” As the girl spoke she smiled, revealing a cute gap between her teeth. “What kind of latte did you say again?”

  “Skinny. With skim milk,” I clarified, just in case the coffee shop lingo was different on Oahu.

  “Can’t do that. Two per cent okay?” She leaned down to open a small refrigerator, her low-cut T-shirt gaping to reveal a healthy bosom.

  “Fine.” I politely looked away, aware that the workmen behind me were taking advantage of the view. I wondered about her—did she really not mind being ogled, or was she actually clueless about what she seemed to be offering? It was a relief when she stood up and moved away to draw the espresso and heat the milk for my drink. She took a while doing it, but returned with a perfect cup.

  I commented on the foam, and she beamed and extended a hand with chipped pink polish on the nails. “I haven’t seen you in here before. I’m Charisse.”

  “My name is Rei,” I said, trying to remember the last time anyone in a coffee shop had taken the time to introduce herself. “I’m staying at Kainani, so I’m sure I’ll be seeing a lot of you in the next month.”

  There were some chuckles from behind me, and I guessed that I’d provided the guys with an unintended double-entendre to brighten their wait.