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Plantation Boy

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This book is nowhere near as great as Murayama's classic 'All I Asking For is My Body.' but the underlying power is still there. This book continues the story of Tosh Oyama, the boxing-loving, fiercely independent first son who works himself out of the sugar plantations to become one of the rising tide of Japanese Americans who change the face of Hawaii's social and political landscape during the 50's and 60'. The story is almost a documentary, but if you were taken in by the families beginning story in 'All I Asking,' it's easy to find the human thread beneath the fast moving historical events that Murayama describes. As a 'hapa haole' (half caucasian, half Japanese) from Hawaii, I can easily find my father's own story in these pages -- so I'm biased. But beyond that, Murakama is a great writer. He doesn't bog down, he knows the human dimension, got the gifted ear for the pidgin dialect, and always keeps with him the sweat and hardships of the plantation fields in his work. Read this. But if you haven't read 'All I Asking...', read that first.

Toshio Oyama is the "Plantation Boy," and he hates it.

This is the third of a projected four novels by Milton Murayama about the Oyama family of Kahana, Maui. It carries eldest son Tosh into the 1960s, battling all the way, hardheaded, angry and stiffnecked.

We first met the Oyamas in "All I Asking for is My Body," the first novel to use pidgen in a natural way. Murayama is acknowledged by other writers as the man who opened the gates for a local literature of Hawaii.

In his first novel, Murayama made no compromises. The pidgen words, the Japanese phrases were left unexplained.

If you didn't know what they meant, you could still follow the story. If you knew, the story was richer.

Like Tosh, Murayama appears to have softened a little -- a very little. There is still plenty of pidgen -- real pidgen, not the slangy American that current usage is rapidly evolving toward -- plus phrases in Japanese, both kanji and katakana.

Most are unexplained, but either because it is important to the development of the characters or because Murayama is relenting a little, some are elucidated.

By giving Tosh a wife, Carol, who is better educated, Murayama is able to have her explain to him (and to English-only readers like me) a pun a Japanese. And a central image throughout is Tosh's correction of his friends, who call Hawaii Japanese "Buddhaheads," contrasted to Mainland Japanese "kotonks."

Not Buddhaheads, Tosh repeatedly tells his drinking buddies, it has nothing to do with religion. Bulaheads, from bobora, Japanese for yokel.

It may seem a little thing, but these details define Murayama's style, which is extremely compressed.

Family sagas in other hands tend to run 500 pages per volume. Murayama's lapidary efforts are fewer than 200 pages. Yet they contain as much story.

Tosh reflects on this when he compares his rapid-fire, compact pidgen repartee with the slow speech of a haole (white) co-worker. He decides the haole talks slow because he thinks slow.

But to scrabble off the plantation, you have to have your wits about you.

Boxing (as we learned in "All I Asking") was his first choice out, and it took quick wits to succeed.

By the time of "Plantation Boy," boxing is no longer an option. Tosh is on the way to becoming Steve Oyama, A.I.A.

It's good story. To Maui readers, either born-and-raised or malihini, it has extra zest.

Real Maui people appear, like Tosh Ansai, a well-remembered politician. And also Maui men who have been forgotten by all except family and friends: the men killed in World War II.

As Tosh relates his activities during the war, he talks about the jeep that brought the bad news. The names of the casualties are real: Albert Neizman, killed in the Gilbert Islands; Kosei Nakamura, killed in Italy; Warren Prescott, killed in France.

Murayama's novels have a sense of immediacy. The real names contribute to that. A nearly complete absence of abstract adjectives contributes as well.

Life was dog-eat-dog in Kahana and "Pepelau," his name for Lahaina (and meaning, apparently, "flat leaf" for reasons unexplained). Actions, not words, describe feelings.

In one of his first jobs, Tosh is assigned by a Japanese shopkeeper to fill rice bags for delivery to the plantation camps (the villages, which were mostly assigned each to one ethnic the group, the better to prevent the workers from organizing). The bags for the Filipinos are shorted.

Murayama is a social novelist, like Zola or Sinclair Lewis. He observes everybody, critiques everybody and has no heroes other than the men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (the Japanese-Americans who fought, sometimes volunteering out of internment camps on the Mainland, against the Nazis).

It is always a question whether an imaginative novelist should be identified with the opinions of his main character. I conclude, without certainty, that Tosh represents Murayama's own interpretation of events. The novel seems clearly, if cleverly, didactic.

Either way, Murayama is a writer of unusual power. When Tosh's friend Froggy comes home from the war, he tells Tosh he cannot stay. "I feel bad. All the guys who make [pronounced mah-kee, pidgen for dead, from Hawaiian]. I come back and they look at me like I one hero. The mothers, they come see me. It's like they asking me, how come their sons make and I alive? I don't know what to say."