Shimura Trouble (4 page)

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.

I
T 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.

“Nice place! I been there a few times to visit a friend.” Charisse dimpled at me. “Anyway, welcome to Hawaii.”

Someone behind me was making impatient grunts so I got out of the way with my goods and found a seat at a sugar-dusted table just vacated by a mother and two kids.

The coffee was good, but not quite as full-bodied as I liked. I sipped anyway, and opened the Star-Bulletin. I glanced at a main section full of national wire stories, then started in on the second section devoted to local news. I read about how a private school founded by a Hawaiian princess was struggling to maintain a rule that its students have Hawaiian ancestry. What did that mean, exactly? I wondered, looking around me at the mosaic of mixed features and warm skin tones. Who was Hawaiian here, and hadn’t the Hawaiians themselves emigrated from other Polynesian islands?

Clearly, I knew nothing, I thought as I moved on to a picture of an adorable sea turtle and the accompanying soft-news story about how tourists on North Shore beaches were teasing them. When I turned the page, I finally saw a story that really intrigued me, about the place where we were staying. Kainani’s developer, Mitsuo Kikuchi, sought to develop adjacent lands where existing derelict plantation housing remained. The land was owned by Pierce Holdings, which was considering either a lease or outright sale to Kikuchi’s Tokyo-based company.

Kikuchi had to be owner of the grand house I’d seen, I guessed, reading on. Pierce Holdings’ spokesman said that Kikuchi’s planned new restaurant and amusement park would bring a new road and about seven hundred new jobs for leeward Hawaii residents.

However, a preservation group leader argued that the plantation village should be a registered historic landmark, and a group of Hawaiian activists had already filed papers asserting that the fields contained a sacred worship site.

Suddenly, I had the sensation that I was not reading alone. I looked behind me and, sure enough, someone was standing over my shoulder.

“H
OWZIT?” ASKED THE
spy, who was an undeniable hunk—well over six feet and at least two-fifty, with shoulder-length black hair and skin as brown as cocoa. His sleeveless T-shirt and baggy, knee-length shorts revealed geometric blue-green tattoos on muscular arms and calves.

He laughed slightly, as if noticing my covert inspection. Embarrassed, I tried to remember what he’d asked me about. “Well, I’m used to very strong Tanzanian coffee, so Kona’s a bit mild for my taste.”

He looked at me for a second and I had the sense I’d said something very wrong. Then he burst out laughing—a deep, merry laugh that seemed to boom around the store.

“What’s funny?” I asked cautiously.

“You a tourist, huh? I didn’t realize at first, ’cause when I saw you talking to Charisse, I thought you just another hapa chick.”

“Well, I am hapa,” I said, recalling that this was the common term in Hawaii for a person of mixed ancestry. In Japan, the same expression existed, but it was said slightly differently: hafu. In English, it means half. Half a person, not the real thing. Hapa was better; it almost sounded hip.

The hunk interrupted my linguistic analysis. “Yeah, but I asked you howzit, which means, how are you? I wasn’t asking for an opinion on my coffee.”

“Your coffee?” I asked. He wasn’t wearing an apron at his waist like Charisse had. He certainly didn’t look like an employee.

The man laughed again. “I’m Kainoa Stevens, and yes, that cup you’re drinking comes from my cousin’s coffee plantation on the Big Island. I own this place.”

I shook hands reluctantly, because I expected a man who looked part Samoan to have a crusher grip. But the handshake was just firm enough, and he followed it up by pulling a business card out of his baggy shorts pocket. The card, still warm from his body heat, was decorated with twin palms, his name, and the phrase ‘Coffee and Construction’. At the bottom were four phone numbers. Out of habit, I held the card the way one does in Japan, reading everything before carefully before putting it down. Now, I was obligated to introduce myself: I told him my name.

“Yeah, Charisse said you staying at Kainani. How did you ever find your way here?”

“I chanced upon it, when I was jogging through the wilderness area.”

Kainoa laughed. “Had to be something like that, because the road here is pretty indirect. But you gotta understand that it wasn’t wilderness you crossed. It’s all part of the Pierce Holdings, and if you trespass again, you better watch out that the luna don’t catch you.”

“I had no idea I was trespassing. I didn’t see any keep-out signs.”

“That’s probably because you ran through the middle of the fields. There are warning signs on the fence along Farrington Highway.”

“So, what’s a luna?” I asked.

“In plantation time, it was the guy who oversaw the workers. No sugar workers anymore, so Albert Rivera just oversees the security of the land. People around here call him the luna because that’s the job his father worked, and his grandfather, too.”

“Hmm. I guess I’ll have to put together a nice apology for him in advance, because I don’t know how to return to Kainani any other way.”

“That regular route here is via Farrington Highway, but it’s probably four miles longer than the route you took. I’d say, take a chance if you want run over for coffee again—which I’m not even sure you do.” He smiled at me, but I sensed a challenge behind the straight, shining white teeth.

“It’s good coffee, Kainoa, just not as strong as I normally have it. I probably should just order a double shot in my latte.”

“At my cousin’s plantation, he experiments with new varieties all the time. I think I’m gonna tell him, grow me a super-strong bean for strong mainland chicks.”

“Really, don’t go to the trouble!” I suddenly had a sense he was flirting with me, and I didn’t want to encourage him. Kainoa was not only half a decade younger than me; he was not Michael.

“Or better yet, I could sell this place to Mitsuo Kikuchi and make my own coffee plantation on the Big Island. What you think of that?”

“I was reading about Kikuchi’s plans in the paper, as you probably noticed. Are you actually in favor of the development?”

“Sure.” Kainoa’s tone was casual. “I have a construction sideline business, you know, so I’m for most kinds of development. And as far as this business goes, hell, I’d much rather have two roads that come to my shop than a bunch of old shacks going to waste. When I was a kid growing up, sure I liked to hang out there, smoking pakolo with the mokes. Now that I’m a property owner, I don’t want that kind of stuff over here.”

“But you wouldn’t be a property owner with anything to gain if you sold to Kikuchi.”

Kainoa leaned so close that I edged back slightly. “Hey, I’d love to stay where I am. But when Kikuchi has an idea, he gets what he wants. You know the true reason that he built Kainani?”

“To make money?” I hazarded.

“More than that. He built it to have a hiding place for his lolo son. People in Japan or Honolulu ask what the son’s doing, and he likes to say Jiro’s running the resort. In reality, this do-nothing Jiro lives in a townhouse with a round-the-clock head shrink supposed to keep him out of trouble. I know because I see the two of them together constantly—at the movie theater, the Safeway, in bars. Jiro even comes in here couple of afternoons a week, trying to pick up Charisse, who’s so simple and friendly she don’t understand.”

“What do you mean about Charisse?”

“She’s a great kid, but a chatterbox! She’ll talk to anybody, go with anyone. Even a creep.”

If Jiro was getting around as much as he did, he sounded as if he was doing pretty well. I said, “So you’re telling me that Mitsuo Kikuchi is making sure his son gets good care within the grounds of a beautiful place, and he doesn’t want people to know his son doesn’t have a job? That doesn’t sound so terrible, especially if you look at the norms of Japanese behavior.”

“Well, to build this pretty holding place for his son, he screwed everybody,” Kainoa said fiercely. “There was a local community there, about sixty or seventy homes. I grew up in that place.”

“Is leasehold like renting?”

“Not exactly. It was something the kamaaina landowners use to profit from selling their land repeatedly.”

Kamaaina, I recalled, meant child of the land. It generally meant local and Hawaiian, with the exception of the Hawaii-born descendents of the British and American missionaries, many of whom mixed their bloodlines with daughters of the Hawaiian chief class: strategic marriages that resulted in the acquisition of more land.

“Our parents and grandparents helped each other buy homes as early as they could, and in those days they only had the right to be on the land for a period of time. Usually, the leasehold had a time period that sounded long—sometimes fifty, eighty years, like that.” Kainoa looked down for a minute. “When my daddy turned seventy, he had twenty years left to live on the property. He was anxious about whether anyone would want to buy the place, with twenty years or less left on the lease before re-negotiation. He’d have to sell for almost nothing, to get someone to take it.”

“That’s awful!”

“Yeah. So here comes Kikuchi, and he offers everyone on-the-spot money for their homes, but that’s if they all agree to leave. And at the same time, Pierce Holdings leaks the information that they may be shortening the lifespan of the leaseholds.”

“But how could they back out on a lease, legally?”

“Pierce Holdings is the second largest landholder on the Leeward Side. Its CEO can force the state government to cooperate with them because if they don’t cooperate, the company won’t build a school, or a police station, or a road.”

“You mean the Pierces actually pay for government buildings?”

“Sure. For the tax credit, and the power it gives them. If the government here wants to add a road they have to get permission from the big landholders or the military, who own the land where the road would pass.”

“How did you become owner of this coffee shop, since all the surrounding land belongs to the Pierces?” I asked.

Kainoa gazed around with an almost wistful expression. “I took over this building after my father died. He bought it from the Pierces back when Ewa Sugar shut down. The sale was a kind of favor, because my grandfather ran the general store for over forty years, which is why my family would look like stink at me if I sold it.”

Again, a kind of paternalism from the Pierces, but at least the store had stayed in working people’s hands. I said, “Your store is the last living part of the old plantation village. I understand why you wouldn’t want to sell off part of our heritage.”

“Our heritage? I thought you were a malihini from the mainland.”

Malihini was a pretty-sounding word, but I knew it meant newcomer, which wasn’t the best thing to be in Hawaii. I said, “Actually, my great-great-aunt came here in the twenties.”

“For real? Shimura’s not a common name on this island,” Kainoa said. “The only one I know of is one lolo dude who couldn’t possibly be related to you.”

“I think you’re talking about my cousin Edwin—but what does lolo mean?”

“Crazy. And hey, I’m sorry. But he’s full of it, when he talks about discrimination against the Japanese. After the war, they took over politics, law, and real estate. The real Hawaiians are the only ones with a right to complain about losing land.”

“So, may I ask if you’re a real Hawaiian?”

“A quarter, which was good enough for the Kamehamema Schools. The rest of me is Samoan and Filipino.”

So I’d been right about the Samoan part, although I didn’t yet understand Kainoa’s inner self. I didn’t care for his playful, insulting behavior, a technique that big, good-looking men like him employed a bit too often.

As if sensing my thoughts, Kainoa smiled, his teeth sharp and white. “I’d like to shoot the breeze all morning with you, Rei, but I gotta convince Charisse to stop yapping and make more coffee. You try come back here?”

“Probably,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the counter. There was indeed a long line, but Charisse seemed oblivious, lost in yet another conversation.

“Well, next time you try a cuppa green tea. You might like it better.”