Mrs. Takahashi reached out to him. “Koji-chan, don’t be like your okaasan. After your father died, your mother felt as if her life was over; she was filled with anger and couldn’t see beyond it. Is that what you want, to live with this sorrow? Not too late to let it go, eh,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “Life’s too short and too long for anything else.”

She stood and refilled his bowl with the New Year’s soup he hadn’t realized he’d already finished. “Eat,” she said. “A good start to the New Year, yeah. A new beginning.”

Her words soothed, at least on the surface.

* * *

Koji turned back for one last look at the train cottage, his truck packed with all his worldly goods as he drove down the hill and away from the plantation. There was nothing left for him at Puli. He looked at the quiet fields and heard again the faint refrains of the holehole bushi work songs that once rose above the stalks and into the air. Even Razor, his last tie to the cane life, was gone. Koji had spent New Year’s Day at the village catching up with old friends, seeing the wealth of all his years on the plantation. The sugar plantations were what brought them to the islands, but it wasn’t what made them stay. It was the community they’d formed in spite of it, growing friendships and families as well as cane. Even in the hottest, cruelest days, filled with blisters and boils, itching bites and stinging whips, Koji knew, even if he hadn’t fully realized it back then, that fate had brought them all so far from their homelands to their new lives at Puli Plantation. He heard his mother’s voice rise again like on the first day they arrived, asking his father where the beating heart was. “There,” Koji would tell her now, looking back across the fields and beyond to the villages that held the men and women who worked the sugarcane. “There is where the beating heart lies.”

46. January 2, 1936

46

January 2, 1936