A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

different groups anxiously saw to it that there was scarce interaction and no intermarriage.
Protagonist Kiyo and his older brother Toshio have to deal with the conflict of filial duty,
being expected to help pay off the family’s huge debt, but desiring to get out of the
plantation system and establish a life of their own. Toshio rages and fights with his
parents, begging for a chance: “I’d be going to high school and college instead of slaving
in the cane fields. […] Shit, all I asking for is my body.” 306 He is the first in the family to
realize that his generation will have to choose their loyalties: “We have to cut off all our
ties with Japan and become American” (37). But it is quiet Kiyo, the second son, who in
the end manages to break the vicious circle of fatalism and hollow traditions. The war
becomes his liberation. After sons have been told all their lives not to bring shame on the
Japanese race, the attack on Pearl Harbor in turn has Japan bring shame on each of them.
Subsequently, Japanese values can finally be questioned. Kiyo signs up for the army,
postponing his filial duty: “Everybody in Kahana was dying to get out of this icky shit-
hole, and here was his chance delivered on a silver platter. Besides, once you fought, you
earned the right to complain and participate, you earned a right to a future” (98). It may
be called a sleight-of-hand plot device when in the training camp on Oahu, Kiyo wins
enough money to pay off the debt in a single gambling bout: “Go for broke. Have
absolute faith in the odds. I wasn’t fighting myself anymore” (101). Its point though is
that only by leaving the plantation treadmill could Kiyo take the next step towards
personal freedom: refusing plantation feudalism as well as family paternalism, he adopts
Americanism instead. Murayama’s ending implies that the nisei AJA’s had few choices
but to embrace America (skeptics facing exclusion like Okada’s No-No Boy). Their
adoption freed them from the bondage of traditions.
Undoubtedly, World War II changed the world and its setup. Local writers have
explored its impact on Hawaiian society and lives in various ways. Collective phenomena
306 Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body, Honolulu 1988: 42, 48. The author wrote a prequel about
the same Japanese family in 1980, Five Years on a Rock as well as a sequel in 1998, Plantation Boy. These
are well-crafted, but do not reach the intensity of the primary text. Also, Murayama wrote a rather unwieldy
play on the basis of All I Asking for Is My Body (included in Stanton et al. 2000). In a sense, Philipp Ige’s
decidedly Local texts like the short story “The Forgotten Flea Powder,” published as early as 1946 in the
Paradise of the Pacific magazine, have to be seen as precursors of both Murayama’s novel and Darrell
Lum’s short stories. His child narrators and their Pidgin voice foreshadow a Local mode of writing that
would gain momentum in the decades to come. The glossy magazine, long-established and now called
Honolulu, proved prescient in expressing “the hope that a regional literature would sprout from Hawaii’s
grass roots” (Sumida 1991: 98). For an assessment of the various ways of employing Pidgin in Local
writing, please refer to chapters 5.3.2 and 5.3.3.
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