A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

into a complex and unfair world is bloody: he has to kill his father’s cherished racing
pigeons because a neighbor has falsely reported them as messenger birds.
Without a word, Grampa and I reached in and removed the pigeons one by one
and silently bled them to death with quick, clean slits across the throat. […] The
memory of the gentle cooing of thirty-five silky-feathered pigeons slowly died
away, faded away, bled away… and, finally, in silence, flowed down into the earth
forever (127).
Though the boy has to experience that everything Japanese is now under suspicion,
Salisbury endows his Local kids with more integrity and common sense than the general
American public had: “For a moment I forgot about the war. It was me and Billy again…
like it used to be. Only now we shared a sadness” (150). Ultimately, this is a book about
‘growing up Local,’ about coming of age at a crucial and confusing time in history. While
the Japanese are caught between a host country that doubts their integrity, and an
ancestral country that has turned into an enemy, the old native Hawaiian gardener knows
their only avenue: “‘This island,’ Charlie said to Grampa, his voice kind. ‘This territory,
Joji-san, this is your country now’” (163). Still, abandoning Japan is of no avail: Both
Tomi’s father and grandfather are interned at Sand Island, later on the mainland. “If we
ever needed baseball, it’s right now…” (189). In the cosmos of the game, there is order,
there are rules and clear sides, everything the world outside the diamond can no longer
offer.
The war, however, brought worse things than shame and confusion to some. Nora
Okja Keller’s 1997 novel Comfort Woman tackles the long-silenced story of the forced
prostitution of Korean women by the Japanese army. The ordeal of these women as well
as the psychological effects that continue to overshadow the lives of “recreation camp”
survivors are imagined in a fractured narrative that is set in contemporary Honolulu but
reaches back in time and place: After her parents have died, a twelve-year-old Korean girl
is sold to the Japanese army by her older sister. In her two years at camp, her initial duties
include tending to the other women and cleaning up. Thus, she becomes their means of
communication:
We were taught only whatever was necessary to service the soldiers. Other than
that, we were not expected to understand and forbidden to speak, any language at
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