Lava
By Pamela Ball
Norton, 192 pages, $21
Comfort Woman
By Nora Okja Keller
Viking, 213 pages, $21.95
Blu’s Hanging
By Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 262 pages, $22
It’s frightening that people think telephoning Hawaii is an international call; after all, they do have area codes and Coco Puffs cereal there. And while McDonald’s serves rice and saiman (think ramen) noodles, Spam is a culinary favorite in Hawaii, as it is in any outpost of the U.S. military.
Hawaii is America.
Yet the islands are infused with something deeper and darker than can be found in the contiguous states. There is a visceral rawness to the place, a primal quality that stems in part from its ongoing, violent growth–with land being formed as quickly as volcanic lava lays it down.
The land can be lush with queer, gargantuan vegetation, or steaming and post-apocalyptic in the wake of a volcanic eruption. Layer on the “exotic” cultures of native Hawaiians and the Asians who were brought for plantation work, and the result is strange alchemy.
Three new books by and about women in Hawaii approach the islands in a manner seldom encountered by sybaritic-minded visitors. While different, all illuminate the country’s 50th state, perhaps more grimly than a mainland reader would expect.
Pamela Ball’s “Lava” is a sleek work centered on two catastrophes that spark personal tragedies for the narrator, Kinau, who seems in great measure to be defined by them.
She is a capable woman who runs a greenhouse and can fish and shoot, yet she remains emotionally fragile, missing the father she never knew and the husband who left her.
In the first, historically true event, a tidal wave sweeps into Hilo on the big island of Hawaii. Kinau’s mother is swept to sea, but Kinau is saved by the man she will marry, Ivan. In the second event, after the marriage fails and Ivan moves to the mainland and remarries, his stepson comes to visit Kinau; he is killed by a shark in a bizarre swimming accident.
Ivan returns to Hawaii and tells some fishermen he will pay for every dead shark they haul in. Eventually, the beach front resembles a perverse carnival, strung with lights and rubbery shark carcasses.
Soon Ivan has moved out of a Hilo hotel room and into Kinau’s house; they become lovers and, because of Ivan’s presence, Kinau revisits her memories of childhood and sadness.
“Lava” is a compact, assured work, offering a view into ordinary Hawaii. When a tsunami, or tidal wave, strikes and the power goes out, neighbors cooperate. As everyone mops up and sets up hibachis to grill dinner, the atmosphere turns almost gala. “Growing up in Hawaii,” Pamela Ball writes, “it takes time to learn to separate disaster from pleasure.”
While a lovely and poetic writer, Ball overuses her shark motif. The appearance of the fearsome creature in myths, dreams and on the beach front becomes predictable. Metaphors can be bold in short stories because there is less time to get the point across, but this approach can be heavy-handed in the long form. Readers want to feel as though they happened upon another reference building toward a whole, not as though they must dodge giant rubber fish like so many rampant deer on a freeway.
Still, “Lava” is a generally graceful, pleasing effort and a fine introduction to the islands beyond Waikiki.
“Blu’s Hanging,” by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, is a more complex story of a Japanese-American family on the island of Molokai that struggles to hold itself together following the death of the mother and the acknowledgment of a shameful family secret.
The fallout is varied and devastating. The youngest child, a 6-year-old girl named Maisie, stops speaking. The eldest, Ivah, is thrust at age 13 into the too-common role of child-mother.
The father plummets into depression and can barely keep the family from financial ruin. The book is heartbreaking when it details their attempts to subsist with meager provisions (Ivah regularly fashions meals out of white bread topped with mayonnaise and paprika; another staple is cooked rice with a raw egg).
Ironically, the middle child, Blu, becomes obese; his desolation moves him to eat loaves of mayonnaise bread after school.
Deprivation makes the children easy prey for neighborhood perverts, one of whom lures Blu into performing sexual acts in exchange for chocolate.
Salvation finally appears in the form of Maisie’s special-education teacher, Miss Ito, who encourages Ivah to attend an elite boarding school in Honolulu.
“Blu’s Hanging” is a bleak story told partly (like Yamanaka’s first novel, “Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers”) in the pidgin English spoken by many local islanders. Language and culture often divide the community, and Yamanaka capably illustrates the antagonism between classes, races and nationalities (white, Chinese, Japanese, native Hawaiian, Filipinos, Samoan and Portuguese).
Subtle translations of pidgin–or perhaps even a glossary–would have been helpful because few mainland readers will know pau hana, haole and ono (“finished work,” “Caucasian,” “good”). The use of foreign or esoteric language can be a powerful and lyrical way to imbue a work with culture and authority, but the tool loses its effectiveness if readers are left scratching their heads.
The many (perhaps too many) gruesome passages describing how neighborhood children amuse themselves by maiming and killing cats will dispel any illusions of a sunny paradise.
But this is not a world without kindness. A cousin, for example, tells Ivah that a black cat will remove misfortune: “. . . Nancy’s fadda tell me, thass the one for help you. And you put that black cat on your stomach and the bugga pull all your sadness into herself.”
The family’s secret does not hold the specter of suspense as it’s intended, however, and the plot becomes predictable. Yet “Blu’s Hanging” is a welcome addition to the growing body of work by and about Asians in America and should help extend mainstream consciousness beyond Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club.”
The most ambitious of these three novels, Nora Okja Keller’s “Comfort Woman,” seeks to tell an anguishing story in two voices, countries and cultures. It is successful on all these levels.
Told in passages that alternate between mother and daughter, it’s the tale of a young Korean girl forced into prostitution–a “comfort woman”–for the Japanese soldiers in Korea during World War II. The girl, Kim Soon Hyo, initially works as a servant in a recreation camp, caring for the comfort women who are housed like animals in small, enclosed cubicles.
When one of the women, Induk (who has been assigned the name Akiko), suffers a breakdown, the soldiers kill her. Induk is skewered on a metal spike and paraded past the others, a scene that both haunts and guides Soon Hyo for life.
Soon Hyo is made the new “Akiko” and forced to begin servicing the soldiers. Stripped of all dignity and even her name, the young girl begins a slide toward madness from which she never fully emerges.
Akiko discovers she’s pregnant and undergoes a brutal abortion; she escapes and is eventually taken in by American missionaries. When the war ends, an American minister marries Akiko and takes her to Honolulu.
Although doctors had thought Akiko too injured to have children, she nevertheless gives birth to a daughter, Beccah, 20 years into her marriage. The couple’s joy turns to anger as they feud over whether to raise the girl in a common-sense American way or in a more Korean (i.e., “superstitious”) mode.
Beccah’s narrative takes up half the book, deftly detailing a child’s view of a poor household with a mother who suddenly would be possessed as though by spirits, either falling into long silences or spinning off into manic speech and dance. An acquaintance, Auntie Reno, realizes Akiko’s talent for communicating with the dead and sets her up in business as a spiritual medium. As Beccah grows up, she learns of her mother’s past and the circumstance of her father’s death.
This is a beautifully rendered book. “(Induk) chose her own death,” Keller writes. “Using the Japanese as her dagger, she taunted them with the language and truths they perceived as insults. She sharpened their anger to the point where it equaled and fused with their black hungers. She used them to end her life, to find release.”
But one of the work’s strengths–Akiko’s graphic and shocking details about the incidents that happened to her at the camp and their subsequent effects on Beccah’s bizarre and painful childhood–could be a downfall. This book, while elegant, is not for the faint of heart; it will take a courageous reader to make it to the end. One wishes that Keller would have occasionally used subtlety rather than constantly appealing to relentless horror on the war and home fronts.
Ultimately, however, the reader who perseveres will find “Comfort Woman” illuminating, if disturbing.
