Out of politeness Ishy didn’t respond, which gave me cause to reflect. At home in New Zealand, Oriwia was the owner of small businesses which kept her working from early morning until dark, but which I knew would barely be providing a living for the family. I didn’t know how she had afforded to buy the businesses from the Krausses in the first place. If Chappy did return, though he would be able to lessen Oriwia’s workload, it would be unlikely to make a difference to their income, the town being too small for business expansion. Added to that, I had to admit that Chappy would find it difficult to find work of his own. I thought he should have explained all this to Oriwia, but she wouldn’t have listened anyway.

[‘Kore taringa,’ he said on tape, Grandson, about my not listening, implying that I had ‘no ears’, which is insulting. How would he know? And what a cheek to talk about my enterprises in that way. I was doing very well. Anyway, I won’t let myself get sidetracked. I just wanted to express my objections. But since it has come up, I might as well make a confession as to how I afforded to buy the businesses. It was all my own doing, financed by the sale of my mother’s land. Yes, I sold your inheritance, Daniel. Thinking back to what was reported to me when I was a child – that my mother had told my father to sell some of the land to build a store because he was a trader, not a farmer – I felt she would have given me permission. All that’s left now is my sister’s share. But this land given to Chappy and me by Paa, I will never sell, and I’ll never move from here. O.S.]

‘And duty to his country,’ Ishy said. ‘In the work he does here, he’s helping rebuild Japan.’

‘He always said he didn’t have a country,’ I said.

‘This is the new Japan,’ Ishy said. ‘It’s a different story.’

‘And I don’t know why there should be more bad feeling against your race in my own country, which is so far away, than there is here in Hawai‘i whose harbour was blasted to matchsticks, people along with it.’

‘It’s not all peace and love here either,’ he said. ‘Not by a long way. But what you have to remember is that Japan has been paid back by America.’

‘The two bombs?’

‘After that, we all had to start again.’

‘But the little countries of the Pacific?’

‘Their hearts are still burning.’

There was something Oriwia didn’t know about my Lani and her Binnie.

Chapter 22

Oriwia