Aloha, Toshiro!
Let me introduce myself. I am the son of Yoshitsune Shimura, who was born 88 years ago and is blessed to be celebrating beiju on July 6 of this year. Our families are linked because my father’s mother was the late Harue Shimura, who arrived in Oahu in 1918 to marry.
After almost a century apart, it’s time for our families to get acquainted. And most folks are happy to learn they have kin in Hawaii! If you like, I will help you find suitable accommodations. I recommend you stay at least a month for the birthday celebration, because there will be lots of family events to fill up your time. Please bring your eldest son, if he can make it too, and call me as soon as you get this letter so we can make arrangements.
Your cousin,
Edwin Shimura.
I raised my eyebrows at my father when I’d finished reading. “This is a big surprise.”
“What wonderful news that we have more family. Thank goodness I lived for this news.”
“Yes, but…” I paused, not knowing how to express what had dogged me when I’d tried to fall asleep a few hours earlier. “When I traced our family history a couple of years ago, I didn’t recall your grandfather having any siblings other than his brother Koizumi-the one who moved to Kyoto and entered a monastery.”
“Actually, there always were some whisperings about a younger sister in my grandfather’s family, who was no longer part of the family, when my father was a child.”
“Whisperings?” Now this was something I was interested in.
“I once asked my grandfather, but he became upset with me, so I never dared speak of it again.”
“So if this lost great-aunt of yours existed, why would she go to Hawaii?” I thought my father was too quickly jumping to conclusions.
“I imagine she was a picture bride. Thousands of Japanese women were exported to marry Japanese expatriates working on sugar plantations. It was a social phenomenon in the first quarter of the twentieth century. I believe there were Korean picture brides as well…”
“Oh, right. I saw a movie about that years ago.”
“Harue Shimura-my great aunt, now deceased.” My father’s voice was sober. “And now we have learned that another branch of our small family exists, in Hawaii.”
“But then, why-if Harue Shimura married and had a son-why would their name still be Shimura?”
“As you know, Japanese men do take women’s names in marriage, if it’s the only way to keep a clan name alive.”
“But there were two brothers to carry on the family name-your grandfather and your great-uncle Koizumi, although he of course had no children. Maybe Harue remained a Shimura because she didn’t actually get married. Did you think of that?”
“Why be so negative? I’ll find out the facts when we arrive there, I’m certain.”
“You can’t seriously be planning to go.” I caught my breath. “This is the first we’ve ever heard of these people, and you’re still in recovery.” I didn’t add that his chances of suffering a stroke within the month were about thirty per cent.
“But it’s for beiju. A very important birthday. Do you know its meaning?”
“Double luck,” I said dully. “If one turns the kanji character for the number eight upside down, it looks just like the kanji for luck. So if two eights are rotated, it’s twice as lucky.”
My father nodded. “Eighty-eight is a marvelous birthday-I can’t wait to celebrate mine-and Hawaii is a lovely destination. I see you shaking your head, but please remember how Dr Chin told you I needed time to relax.”
The neurologist had spoken about relaxation when we were reviewing my father’s release. But as I’d understood it, relaxation meant eating right, walking, and mild weight-bearing exercise. “It’s a six-hour flight. What if you have medical trouble on the plane?”
“Usually there’s a physician on the plane who can help with those matters.”
“You’re the one who always helps. Remember?” Even though my father’s medical specialty was psychiatry, he was often the only physician aboard when the occasional in-flight emergency occurred. At least, the only one who volunteered.
“Very well. I shall ask Dr Chin his advice before deciding when to go.”
2
MY PARENTS HAD no idea that I had spy training, which at this moment seemed advantageous. I intended to start simply, but would go to whatever lengths were needed to trace the backgrounds of Yoshitsune and Edwin Shimura, to make sure this letter that had fallen into our house came from true relatives, and not hucksters.
That evening, after delivering a steaming cup of chamomile tea to my father’s bedside, I made a second cup for myself and went online.
Yoshitsune Shimura’s name didn’t surface anywhere in my preliminary search, although it didn’t surprise me that a man of eighty-eight wasn’t a blogger or MySpace member. But Edwin Shimura, the cousin who’d written the letter, was a quick and plentiful hit on Google. Once I’d screened out a seven-year-old chess whiz at the Mid-Pacific Institute and a twenty-five-year-old Nickelback fan, I located our very own Edwin Shimura, a fifty-five-year-old man with a residence on Laaloa Street.
So this is my second cousin, I thought, studying a picture of a man holding a sign over his head that read RETURN OUR LAND! He looked a little like my father around the eyes; but the face was longer, no doubt the influence of whatever other genes had entered our family during the course of almost one hundred years in Hawaii.
I marveled at another picture of Edwin Shimura marching with Polynesian-looking men, holding a sign declaring MY LAND STOLEN TOO.
So Edwin was an activist for Hawaiian land rights. I’d taken a history elective during my long-ago botany program, and I’d learned that foreign missionaries and their descendents living in Hawaii had pressured King Kamehameha III into dividing up land that had previously been held by the crown. The Great Mahele allegedly led to the American overturn of the Hawaiian monarchy and the establishment of Hawaii as a US territory.
As I read on, however, I discovered that Edwin’s interest in gaining land was not an issue of righting past wrongs. I followed a trail of articles in the two Honolulu papers, the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser, describing how Edwin Shimura was going to court over rights to a prime parcel of waterfront property on the Leeward Side of Oahu. The land was owned by Pierce Holdings, a company founded by early sugar planters who came to Hawaii from New England in the mid-nineteenth century. Edwin argued that his grandmother, who had once worked on a sugar plantation owned by Pierce Holdings, had been given the property by the Pierce Estate’s patriarch, Josiah Pierce, shortly before World War II. But no legal record of such a sale existed, and in the end, Judge David Namioka had ordered Edwin to pay court costs of $20,000 to Pierce Holdings.
In the late 1990s, Edwin was in the news again. He had declared his travel agency bankrupt, which he blamed on decreased Japanese tourism. Eighty-five Hawaii and mainland clients who had bought air and hotel packages had lost their money.
By 2005, Edwin had reinvented himself. He was running a telesales company offering green-tea-based cleaning products. No news stories covered this venture, but he had various sales pages sprinkled throughout the Internet that led to the same, zero-security payment page.
As bad as this all looked, I craved more. And I’d stayed up long enough for it to be early morning in Northern Virginia, prime time for reaching Michael Hendricks, my good friend-boss-whatever, at home.
“Sis,” Michael said, picking up after the second ring. He didn’t need to use my telephone code name at this point, but old habits died hard. “So, how’s your father doing?”
As Michael spoke, I could picture him rubbing his ice-blue eyes to clear the remnants of sleep. Then I imagined the rest of him: the square jaw and prematurely silvering dark brown hair cut short with a razor, even though he’d been out of the Navy for years. He had a lean body that was more like that of a man in his early twenties than thirty-nine, something I knew from a few platonic-and frustrating-evenings we’d spent together.