Sixteen years ago, when Koji retired from cutting cane and began running the sugar train, he was given the sugar train cottage to live in. The house on the hill, Razor had always called it. One of the few things Koji had taken from the old house was his mother’s small Buddhist shrine, which now sat on his kitchen shelf above the coffeepot. Koji lit a thin stick of incense, watching the dark curl of smoke rise into the air, bringing with it the welcoming scent of agarwood and sandalwood, a reminder of his childhood in Japan, and growing up on the plantation. His mother used to light a stick of incense every morning, praying for the health of her family. The small bundle of incense she bought weekly at the plantation store had been her one extravagance. Once a year, when they were still young, she took Koji and his sister down to Hilo town, where they visited a Buddhist temple and lit incense in memory of their ancestors. “Never forget,” his mother said, bowing low, “we are here because of them.” Even as a boy, Koji remembered thinking, No, I’m here because of you and Father.

His mother had stopped lighting incense after his father’s death. Her shrine sat empty and scentless in the corner of their bedroom for years. Koji wondered if his father had been embraced by their ancestors after he died, or did they feel cheated, too, just like his mother did? His father’s death came quietly one morning, two years after he’d lost his hand. When they returned home one afternoon from working in the fields, his mother thought his father was napping, only to discover his body stiff and lifeless. It was the first and only time he heard his mother scream, high-pitched and feral. All that had mattered to Koji back then was earning a man’s wage to help take care of his family. He wanted to make his father proud, but day after day, the more cane Koji cut, the farther his father drifted, cold and distant, sitting outside their cottage every morning as he watched them leave him behind.

In her grief and shame, his mother hid his father’s suicide, and told everyone at Kazoku Village that he had died of a heart attack in his sleep. Koji knew his father’s death had been fueled by his own demons, along with a fistful of sleeping pills he’d gathered over the year, but he told no one, not even Razor. Afterward, his mother never honored his father’s memory at the temple, and never forgave him for leaving her alone among the endless fields of sugarcane, so far from Japan and her ancestors.

* * *