Shimura Trouble Read online

  “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.

  “I haven’t heard of any Kalama Street in Leeward Oahu. Even if it exists, finding records isn’t that straightforward.” He studied me with something of a challenge behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “You see, our records are organized by the date of transaction, not address. Do you have that information?”

  “I don’t know the exact date, but the house I’m interested in may have been sold or rented in the 1930s,” I said.

  “You have nothing more than that?” He sounded incredulous. “I suggest you go ahead and search the ledgers each year, then, looking for that address and the buyer’s name…which is?”

  “Shimura.” I decided not to bring up the Pierce name, lest he ask me more about my interest in them.

  “Ah, that’s your family name?” He looked at me searchingly, and I nodded. “It’s not a common name on the island. That will make it easier for you.”

  A real-estate agent needed assistance, so I moved off and picked out two heavy books, one which included the end of 1929 and part of 1930. It was not going to be remotely easy, especially since I doubted Harue Shimura’s name was going to be found anywhere. The things I do to please my father, I thought as unloaded a heavy book bound in worn green cotton. I scrutinized the old typewritten ledger, trying to see any mention of names like Shimura, Liang and Pierce.

  Pierce came up numerous times, and I made a careful record of each transaction’s date, buyer, price, and address. I had reached the early 1940s, and my eyes were very tired, when my cell phone vibrated. As expected, it was my father. He’d passed his appointment with flying colors, and wanted to hear what I’d learned.

  “Nothing so far,” I said. “It’s a lot of work, going through these boo
ks. Shall I put the search aside and just return to the hospital to take you home?”

  “Actually, I hope to join you.”

  I acquiesced, and a few minutes later my father walked in the door. Surprisingly, with my father around, the clerk became more interested and even went so far as to carry a few books to the table for him. Respect for the aged seemed to be as alive and well in Hawaii as it was in Japan, I thought, nodding my thanks at the clerk. Although my father was a pretty youthful sixty-three; he had sharp eyes, and seemed to be making faster work of the books than I had.

  “Look at this,” my father said to me after forty-five minutes or so.

  I was seated on the opposite side of the table, so I came around to look at the page he was studying. He pointed his finger to a line recording a sale of a building on Smith Street owned by Josiah Pierce to Clara Liang in 1945. It was not a fee-simple sale, but a sale with terms of seventy-five years, the kind of deal that Kainoa’s family and neighbors had received.

  “So now we know that the Liangs have a continuing business relationship with the Pierces,” my father said.

  “I’ve been looking at other Pierce transactions. They sold land to many people.” I pointed my father to the handwritten accounting I’d done of twenty-five transactions, dating from the thirties to the early sixties. I’d come across plenty of names, mostly Anglo-Saxon but also a sprinkling of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino. The amounts paid for properties ranged from figures as low as four thousand dollars to as high as twenty-five thousand, in the early sixties.

  “Ah so desu ka,” my father said after a minute. “There are many names, with many different national origins. It’s like a microcosm of the old plantation populations.”

  I’d been studying the names my father had pulled out, and the ones I’d come across. Then I saw something that made my skin prickle.

  “Otoosan, all the Asian buyers have something in common. Do you see?”

  My father looked at the names, and then at me. “I’m afraid I don’t. What is it?”

  “Look at the names again—the first names. It looks as if all the Asians to whom Josiah Pierce was selling, during this pre-war period, were women.”

  WAS THERE SOME significance in the fact that Josiah Pierce had sold property to women? On the long, traffic-clogged ride home, my father pointed out that perhaps the women were widowed or elderly, and had been sold the houses because they could no longer work the fields and live in free plantation housing. I countered that while this was a definite possibility, we had no information about the ages of the women he’d sold to. I didn’t add the secret thought I had—that perhaps these women had been his mistresses. It was a horrible way to think about women, but the situation of a landowner taking advantage of a worker’s wife or daughter was a sad reality, wherever in the world one looked.

  Now I was wondering about Harue. My father and Uncle Hiroshi didn’t know why she’d been sent away, but Uncle Yosh had hinted that he knew a lot about it. I knew from personal experience that only children were sometimes treated like confidantes by their parents.

  “We didn’t hear much about Harue’s husband Ken from Yosh,” I said. “It’s so unusual that he took her name. We now understand that she was cast out of her own birth family—so why would they allow a laborer to be added to the family registry?”

  My father didn’t answer my question, but said, “Take a look to the right.”

  I followed his line of vision to a tall plume of smoke ahead. A helicopter carrying a water bucket was heading from the ocean toward it. One of the Leeward Side fires. I wondered if this one was accidental or arson. The traffic was slow, and became a crawl as we approached the old sugar mill town of Waipahu, where orange flames blazed across the hills. Not in my backyard, I thought to myself with relief, and the traffic picked up after we passed the scene.

  The security guards at Kainani seemed to know us now, because they waved the car through with a smile and a shaka sign, but there was a short line at the gates to our housing area. As we idled, I noticed that most cars were driven by military, which I deduced from both the drivers’ micro-short haircuts and the Department of Defense stickers on windshields. My attention was distracted briefly by the sight of a chubby young Japanese man walking slowly along the golf course. It was Jiro Kikuchi, and he had something with him—a golf club, which he was dragging along the grass.

  “Where’s Calvin?” I asked aloud.

  “Calvin’s coming tomorrow,” my father said, missing the point.

  “No, I mean that Jiro just walked past and Calvin’s supposed to be monitoring him because of his disorder. Did you see him?”

  “No, I didn’t, but what’s this about a disorder? Did Calvin Morita reveal medical information about his patient?” My father sounded aghast.

  It was my turn at the gate, so I swiped the fob and was admitted to MacCottage Land, as I’d begun to think of our pretty replica plantation village. After doing so, I replied, ‘Calvin said something about schizoaffective disorder when he was attempting to explain what Jiro did in the pool. What do you know about this condition? Is it like Tourette’s Syndrome, where you can’t control what you say?”

  “It’s not remotely like Tourette’s Syndrome, but I don’t care to discuss anything that might seem like a comment on a patient’s condition. And Calvin shouldn’t have done that either.” My father frowned.

  “So I don’t have to be fixed up with him, then?” I asked while pulling into our driveway.

  Uncle Hiroshi and Tsutomu were relaxing at the teak table on the lanai with frosty bottles of Asahi Super-Dry beer before them. The two of them had the unmistakable redness of a long day in the sun. The Hawaiian sun was too much for all of us—even though I’d slathered myself with sunscreen before running, I knew I had acquired a reddish tinge.

  “You two are starting to look Hawaiian Japanese,” I greeted them cheerfully. When they appeared mystified, I added, ‘You’re getting a local person’s tan.”

  “Really?” Tom said, looking pleased. “We were only on the golf course two hours today. The realtor picked us up, and then we were quite busy doing research in Kapolei the rest of the time!”

  “Tell me while I cook,” I said, starting to take the cooler out of the car. Tom gallantly took it from my arms and I followed him into the kitchen, as did Uncle Hiroshi, who gave my father a glass of water and settled down with him in the living room

  “So, I learned about real estate today,” Uncle Hiroshi said. “Prices here are great!”

  “Ah, but you’re biased. This is the first or second highest priced housing market in the US,” I said.

  “Actually, the realtor explained that the Leeward Side is a bargain,” Hiroshi said. “Here there is more sun, and with it dry, good weather, for a better price, because of the distance from Honolulu.”

  “I don’t think this is far at all,” Tom said. “Of course, this area would be more convenient if a train service existed. I wonder about the old days, because I saw old train tracks running through the golf course.”

  “I saw them, too. My guess is they were used by the plantations for moving products rather than people,” I said.

  “This is not about trains!” Uncle Hiroshi said. “I’m teaching you about real estate. Apparently, Kikuchi Mitsuo, the developer of this resort and father of Jiro-san, who we met yesterday, has bought many small packages of land over the last few years.”

  I nodded, thinking this was perhaps a tedious way to put together enough land for a resort, but perhaps the only way. I asked, ‘Why was the realtor so forthcoming with you?”

  “He has a colleague in the office who knows one of the holding-out people, a young Hawaiian who believes some things are worth more than money.”

  “Kainoa!” I said aloud, and everyone looked at me. “Kainoa is the owner of the coffee shop where I go during my morning run.”

  “Ah so desu ka.” Tom looked thoughtful. “Now I finally understand why you enjoy getting up so early in the morning
.”

  “Hey, stop it!” I made a punching gesture in Tom’s direction.

  “Rei can’t seem to be without a boyfriend for even a day,” my father said dryly.

  “It’s a shame, because Calvin Morita seems like he won’t have a chance. He might be…how do you say…Mr. Right?” Uncle Hiroshi asked.

  “Dr Right,” Tom corrected. “Or should I say Dr Muscles? Otoosan and I saw him outside the golf club restaurant at lunchtime. He drives a Mercedes S Class.”

  “I’m interested to hear what you learned from the lawyer.” I looked pointedly at my cousin. “What was his name? Yamaguchi?”

  “Bobby Yamaguchi,” my cousin answered, his lips curling around the incongruous first name. “Our conversation was by telephone, and he didn’t have much time, but Yamaguchi-san told me he was sorry he even agreed to help Edwin.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Was it because he thought Edwin’s case had no merit?”

  “I think so. All he could do was suggest that the letter proving ownership might have been intentionally destroyed, but the judge wasn’t sympathetic. Yamaguchi-san also didn’t care for Edwin’s personality. He found him hard to work with.”

  We all exchanged glances then, but didn’t say anything. I guess family loyalty was silencing us even within our small unit.

  “We have something to report from our own research today,” my father said as I put the fish in the fridge and began unloading the vegetables and fruit on to the kitchen counter. “Things are looking quite interesting.”

  My father explained that while we hadn’t found any record of a sale from the Pierces to Harue Shimura, there had been a sale by the Pierces of a property in Chinatown to Clara Liang during the war years. I added in the bit about Josiah Pierce selling land to various Asian women, who were perhaps former plantation workers.

  “What if…” Tom began, then stopped. We all looked at him expectantly. “What if Josiah Pierce wrote the letter we heard about to Harue and meant to formalize the sale with a regular transaction, but something happened to stop that?”