My tears stain the sugarcane like rain.

Koji’s mother had sung the work songs with the other women, their heartbreaking laments of being far from their homelands and families, tricked into grueling and endless work in the fields by false promises of money and housing as the sun beat down on them, as the wind howled and slapped, as the rain soaked them to the bone, and as steam rose from the muddy ground. The babies strapped to their backs felt like deadweight, a growing burden, another mouth to feed. They were left with thoughts of deepest despair . . . My baby is better off dead.

Koji stopped walking, just as he had always paused from his cane cutting to listen to the songs. He closed his eyes and imagined their voices being carried by the wind all the way to Hilo town, their sad and melodious laments soaring through the air before they disappeared over the ocean and back to Japan.

When the singing finally quieted, Koji opened his eyes. He was standing alone in the field. All the secrets he had kept over the years suddenly nagged at him, like the itch of an old wound. The ghost songs were reminders of all the years gone by, his life spent on what he always considered sacred ground. Leaving the formalities of Japan, he had welcomed the untamed island, the long summers of boyhood, the backbreaking work in the cane fields, the plantation life he had never left because it was all he’d known. When Koji turned to walk back to his house, it was Mariko’s lone voice that stayed with him.

It’s time he knows the truth. You can’t protect him forever.

4. The Okawa Fish Market

4

The Okawa Fish Market

Nori hurried back from the green bungalow to the Okawa Fish Market, across the road from Hilo Bay. One of the two-story clapboard buildings on Kamehameha Avenue, it had formerly been the Hilo Town Bar. She passed the older, two-story S. Hata Building, and the S. H. Kress & Company Building, where all the wealthy haole ladies, whose husbands managed the plantations and ran the banks, came down from their big houses up the hill to have lunch and shop for the latest fashions. The buildings gleamed in their Art Deco newness, both products of the sugar wealth in Hilo town during the past forty years that had kept the town growing, and dimmed all the small family-owned businesses of her childhood. Nori swallowed her rising anxiousness and pushed through the crowded streets. She didn’t want to be late to Daniel’s party.