Sujata Massey - Shimura Trouble

“There will be nine of us, since Hiroshi invited Calvin Morita. I hope that isn’t a bad surprise?” he added, when he saw my face.

“How could you? What’s he going to do, bring along Jiro?”

“No, no, Calvin explained that he expects Jiro’s father to be in town, which means he can come alone.”

“Just my luck,” I said grimly.

“Thank you for understanding, Rei. Also, I wanted to ask if you had time to drive me to my first appointment at the Queen’s Medical Center today?”

“Yes, of course. What time?” I was in the mood to get away from Kainani.

“It’s at two, but I thought we could go in earlier, and I’d take you to lunch at Chinatown first. Then, during my appointment, you could start researching legal documents that pertain to the cottage situation.”

“But we already know there was no real estate transaction. If there was a deed giving the Shimuras claim to the land, Edwin would have been able to use it for his earlier lawsuit.”

“You’ve said from the start that you don’t trust Edwin,” my father said. “So it’s better for us to verify all the facts personally.”

“But you’re supposed to be relaxing, not running around doing research.”

“It won’t be so bad for me, if you help out. Hiroshi and Tsutomu are helping, too.”

“How?”

“My brother agreed to talk to a realtor about land values, and Tsutomu is going to try to reach the lawyer Edwin worked with before.”

I blinked water out of my eyes, thinking that my father had done more groundwork than I thought him capable of. Still, I doubted a land records search would turn up anything more than we had already learned from the appraiser’s report we’d seen the evening before. I said, “We must find a way to speak with Uncle Yosh privately. He probably could tell us some things that would make the situation clear. But do you want to do that, Dad? I mean, you’re closer in age to him, and a man.”

“I don’t think so. Yesterday when we met, he refused to speak Japanese. He’s deeply conflicted about his identity. You have more of a…colloquial way about you than I do. You’re the American. I believe you’ll be more successful.”

“We’ll see,” I said. “But I hardly know how to bring it up, with Edwin always hovering and interrupting.”

“You might ask Great-Uncle Yoshitsune to take you shopping before you prepare the meal. That will give you some privacy.”

As my father and I climbed out of the pool, I shot a glance over my shoulder. Jiro and Calvin were together on lounge chairs on the other side of the pool, far enough that they couldn’t over hear us-or so I hoped.

AFTER PHONING UNCLE Yosh to set up our next-day shopping trip, my father and I set off for Honolulu. It was midday, so there was little traffic, and I had a chance to enjoy the massive mountains on the north side of the highway, and the sparkling sea on the south, although I knew I should ban those words from my vocabulary; in Hawaii, north and south were replaced by mauka, meaning ‘mountainside’, and makai, which meant ‘toward the sea’.

That morning at the coffee shop, I’d learned the terms while reading both the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin newspapers. There had been articles about a series of fires on the Leeward Side. The scrubby, dry fields and mountains were perfect fodder for errant fireworks and sparks coming from electrical lines-and the region was also full of arsonists. Adding to the situation was the scarcity of roads on the Leeward Side, and the challenge of fighting fires that often started high in the mountains. As I drove, I saw the same blackened field that I’d noticed when we’d driven in from the airport. The field had burned all the way up to the edge of Farrington Highway, making me realize that the highway had another role: firebreak.

I was starting to spook myself, so it was a relief to see regular, paved roads spreading out on either side of the freeway as we neared Honolulu. After we passed the exits for Pearl Harbor, it was time to jump on to Nimitz Highway. The route was straightforward but tedious, full of trucks, buses and traffic lights, and it was only when we finally turned right on King Street and began to see shop signs in Chinese that I relaxed. This was Chinatown on a small scale, graceful early twentieth-century buildings with curved facades and faded business names like Liang and Sons and Kowloon Traders. Mahogany-colored ducks hung in windows, and storefronts were cluttered with bins of glorious tropical fruit and vegetables.

I was excited about the shopping, and also wondered if Liang and Sons might be connected to the Liangs who’d taken over the Shimura family house. Perhaps, but I wasn’t about to stop in and ask, as the building appeared vacant.

My father raised a hand in triumph as he spotted Little Village Noodle House, the restaurant. We were seated just before a deluge of office workers snapped up all the remaining tables, and were soon feasting on tofu-scallion potstickers, spicy stir-fried green beans and slow-cooked eggplant. This was the best Chinatown food I’d had since Yokohama.

“How did you ever hear about this place?” I asked my father between bites, as I inspected the packed, clearly local crowd.

“I was given the suggestion by one of the Chinese groundskeepers at Kainani. He also told me where to find property records, in an office called the Bureau of Conveyances, which is on Punchbowl, practically across the street from Queen’s.”

“Judging from this restaurant, your friend is a good source. And speaking of property, I saw the name Liang on a building around the corner from where we parked. I wonder if it’s the same family.”

“I saw it too,” my father said, “but Liang is a common enough name. You need to look for a Winston Liang when you’re checking records at the Bureau of Conveyances.”

My father had a lot of expectations, I thought, watching him pay the bill a few minutes later.

We still had time before my father’s appointment, so we walked a few blocks to Chinatown’s food market area. Unable to resist the boxes piled up outside the stores, I filled a shopping basket with crisp mustard greens, two-foot long scallions, pale pink ginger, and heavenly-smelling golden mangoes. Then my eye was caught by a fish market, and before I knew it I’d purchased a five-pound local ahi tuna. It would make a fantastic dinner for our family tonight. I convinced the fish market to give me a bag of ice, and I bought a cheap Styrofoam cooler from a souvenir shop at the fronted of the shopping plaza.

After I’d loaded the car up, the parking attendant at the municipal garage gave us directions for the short trip to the medical center. There, I parked in the covered hospital garage, deciding it would help keep the food cool. I saw my father to the neurology clinic and left the building to walk along Punchbowl Street, a grand boulevard lined with palm and rainbow shower trees. The buildings I passed were imposing; some made of an older, pale yellow rock, and some in sherbet-colored stucco. The Kalanimoku Building, which housed the Bureau of Conveyances, was right in between eras: the long gray rectangular office building had a mid-century modern sensibility that stood out from the other, mostly twenties and thirties buildings nearby.

Inside, I followed a narrow corridor to a dreary records room packed with industrial gray file cabinets and bookcases. Straight away I went to the clerk’s desk, and asked the fifty-ish Asian man sitting there how I could find records pertaining to the old Shimura address.