House of the Red Fish

One Saturday morning in September 1941, three months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the islands lay on the ocean as warm and peaceful as cats sleeping in the sun. Life was still good then, and I’d just started eighth grade at Roosevelt High School.

I woke with a jolt, threw on a pair of shorts and a shirt, and ran out of the house, letting the screen door slap behind me. “You need to eat something!” Mama called, coming up to peer through the screen.

“Later,” I said, turning to jog backwards.

She waved me off and sank back into the darkness of the house.

Papa was coming in today. He and his deckhand, Sanji, had been gone for a week, fishing for tuna somewhere beyond the blue horizon.

I jumped on a city bus and headed down to Kewalo Basin, the harbor where Papa kept his boat. When I got there the
Taiyo Maru
sat motionless alongside the pier, its fish unloaded and Papa and Sanji hosing down a week’s worth of fish slime. She was a beautiful boat, bright white to match her name—the
Sun
—a Japanese-style fishing sampan thirty-eight feet long.

“Heyyy,” Sanji said as I jogged up. “Look who’s here, boss. Better put um to work, ah? Make um more fast for me to get home to see my girls.” He meant Reiko, his wife, and their three-year-old daughter, Mari, the two people he lived for. Sanji was only nineteen, by far the youngest father I knew.

“Tomi,” Papa said, a big grin on his face. “We cleaning up. Come aboard.”

That was exactly what I wanted to do. To work with Papa and Sanji on the
Taiyo Maru
was one of my dreams. That and playing baseball. In all of life, what else was there besides boats and baseball?

Papa stood with his feet spread, coiling a rope. Dark brown from a lifetime on the sea, short haircut, baggy khaki pants. And that grin.

“You catch much?” I asked.

He wagged his eyebrows. “Best haul we ever had.”

“Ho, really?”

“Got lucky, this time. The guy counting us our money right now.”

Sanji tossed me a scrub brush.

An hour later, the boat was squeaky clean. All the equipment was stored in the hold, and the deck was free of fish
slime and smelling good again. Sanji jumped off onto the pier and untied the lines. He tossed them over to me. “You know what to do with this ropes?”

“Pfff,” I said. “As good as you, any day.”

He laughed. “You dreaming, cockaroach.”

He looked up at Papa, still on the boat. “Hey, boss, try go get the small glass ball. I forgot um in the drawer by the deckhouse.”

Papa dug it out and held it up.

“That’s for you,” Sanji said to me. “I foun’ um about ten miles pas’ Kauai. Keep um. I give you.”

Papa handed me the glass ball.

“Ho, thanks, Sanji.” I held the green net float from Japan up to the sun. Every time I touched one I thought of that faraway country my family came from—Japan, trapped inside the glass, its mystery magnified by the sun. Every now and then you could find them in the ocean, or washed up on the beach. If this one had been covered with barnacles like usual, Sanji had cleaned them off. “Like a good-luck charm,” he said.

While Sanji went over to warm up his fish-stinky truck for the ride home, Papa and I walked the boat out into the harbor and tied it to its mooring, a white float chained to a giant block of concrete on the sand below.

Papa untied the small skiff he kept secured upside down on the bow. It made a plopping sound when he dropped it down onto the water. I eased over the side into it and set the glass ball on the floorboards. Papa handed me the wooden pigeon crate. He’d taken six of his pigeons to sea. “They all come home?” he asked.

“Right on time.”

Papa smiled and lowered himself into the skiff, rocking it gently. Every time he went to sea he’d take some of his racing pigeons a few miles out and turn them loose to find their way home. They always did. And fast. Their homing instinct fascinated Papa and me. How they knew just where to go was a mystery, like how some animals get antsy minutes before an earthquake.

I sat in the stern facing Papa as he rowed long, slow strokes back to the pier. He dipped his head. “Look at that boat.”

I turned back to gaze at the
Taiyo Maru.
She had an open deck with a small forward wheelhouse sitting on it like a queen. And a long-armed tiller that Papa often guided with his knee.

“It’s a good one,” I said.

“From way back in my younger days that’s what I dreamed about … right there.”

I studied it closer, this time noticing how it sat on the water, perfectly still and perfectly balanced, not tilting to one side like some boats in that harbor.

“It’s a good boat,” I said, unable to think of anything smarter to say.

Papa smiled and nodded.

Rowed.

Back at the pier Sanji helped us haul the skiff out and carry it over to the palm trees where the fishermen kept their skiffs. We turned it upside down and tucked the oars under it.

A man from the fish shed came out and handed Papa a wad of bills the size of a big fat riceball. “Good catch,
Nakaji,” the guy said. “Do that again and you’ll be a rich man.”

“Already am,” Papa said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

The guy winked at me and left.

Papa counted the money, his lips moving soundlessly. Sanji turned away to give him privacy.

“Unn,” Papa grunted, handing Sanji his pay.

Sanji gaped. “This too much, boss.” He tried to give some of it back.

Papa waved him off. “You worked hard. Buy gas for that rattrap truck. Take home something nice for Reiko and Mari.”

Sanji ducked his head. “You too good to me, boss.”

The three of us squeezed into the small cab of the truck for the ride home, the shiny green glass ball in my hands winking in the sunlight. It was the perfect day—except for the fish stink.

A small price for all we had.

In the before time.

Now it was Wednesday, March 3, 1943, a year and a half later.

My best friend Billy Davis and I had just finished another slow day of school, both of us now in ninth grade. Instead of heading home, I’d talked Billy into coming down to the Ala Wai Canal with me to stare at Papa’s boat.

We hopped on a city bus to Kapiolani and Kamoku Street, then headed through a quiet neighborhood to the bushes and trees that hid the canal from view. From the trees we crossed a wide field of dirt, the afternoon sky blue and silky. Puffy white clouds sat like hats on the green mountaintops behind us.

We eased down at the edge of the Ala Wai, a rainwater drainage canal that wandered from the swampy lowlands out to the ocean, mixing rusty mud-water with the clean blue sea
just past a small-boat harbor. To the right of that harbor, a manmade channel cut into the reef that edged the shore and ran parallel to the beach over to Kewalo Basin, where the
Taiyo Maru
had harbored before the war.

A silvery mullet jumped after some bug, then plopped back down, leaving rings that wobbled toward us, then vanished. Behind us, the muted sounds of Honolulu whispered through thick weeds sagging in the heat of the sun.

Billy tossed a pebble into the water. “This probably wasn’t a great idea.”

“Yeah, prob’ly.”

Going down to the canal only brought back terrible memories of terrible days of just over a year ago. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese slammed down on Hawaii, bombed Pearl Harbor, and plunged us into war. Papa and Sanji were out fishing the day they came.

The next day two U.S. P-40 Tomahawks dropped out of the sky and came down on Papa’s sampan with their machine guns blazing, wounding Papa in the leg and killing Sanji.

Of all that had happened, that was the worst.

Papa wounded and Sanji dead. Only nineteen, with a wife and little girl. I didn’t even know who to blame—Japan or the U.S. Navy.

And then the navy raced a boat out and arrested Papa, threw him into a makeshift prison on Sand Island with blood still leaking into the T-shirt he’d wrapped around his torn-up leg.

The same day the U.S. Army confiscated his boat and towed it up into the Ala Wai Canal to rot.

A few days later, the FBI came up to our house and made
me kill Papa’s pigeons. His beautiful, gentle birds. Then they arrested my Grampa Joji and took him away to who knew where. Just because he was a Japanese citizen.

Those days.

Out fishing, Papa and Sanji hadn’t even known that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, or that they were supposed to have been flying an American flag to identify the boat as friendly when they came in. They had no radio. Who could afford one?