Sujata Massey - Shimura Trouble

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.”