Nisei: A Novel

By J.J. White

In this gripping novel, a man in despair stumbles upon the secrets of his Japanese father’s World War II experiences, and the past that shaped his family.
 
Robert Takahashi sits in the empty attic of his mother’s old home in Hawaii, a home he has to sell to cover financial losses from her nursing home care—and his own massive gambling debts. Once his affairs are in order, he can proceed to the next step: suicide. His wife is done with him anyway. His daughters—well, he’s nothing but an embarrassment to them.
 
Robert barely remembers his father and knows little about his parents’ past. But a manuscript he’s just found—left under an eave and contained in a dusty box along with ten medals from the US military—will enlighten him about many things. As he reads his father’s words, he discovers a story of a Japanese boy born in Hawaii, a life uprooted by internment, and a young Nisei’s harrowing quest to prove his patriotism by serving with the renowned 442nd Regimental Combat Team. He also learns about a long-ago forbidden love—and how prejudice can derail a life—in this sweeping tale of family, war, and two generations of men battling powerful forces both externally and within themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781504077927

J.J. White

J.J. White has had articles and stories published in several anthologies and magazines including, Wordsmith, theHomestead Review, the Seven Hills Review, Bacopa Review, and the Grey Sparrow Journal. His story, “The Adventure of the Nine Hole League,” was published in the Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and his story, “Lucky Bastard Club,” was published in the Saturday Evening Post’s 2016 Great American Fiction Contest anthology. His debut novel, Prodigious Savant, was published in 2014, followed by Deviant Acts (2015), and Nisei (2016). He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for his short story “Tour Bus.” He lives in Merritt Island, Florida, with his wife and editor, Pamela.  

Book preview

Chapter 1

January 2000, Pearl City, Oahu, Hawaii

Robert Takahashi stared over the fat head of the realtor and counted the ships in the east loch of the harbor to relieve his boredom. It somehow seemed funny he could be bored, knowing that in a day or two he’d be dead.

He finally paid attention when Ms. Mahelona read the figure off the contract. Three hundred thousand dollars.

That’s it? Three hundred thousand for a four bedroom? Can’t be right.

I’m sorry, Mr. Takahashi. That’s the highest price offered, so far. I think if you wait a year to sell, maybe another hundred thousand, but in today’s market it’s the best we can do.

She was probably buying it herself through a friend to sell later at a profit. Maybe she was so used to dealing with tourists, she forgot her roots. He should have known she’d do a piss-poor job of selling the house when he saw her name on the fax she sent to him in Las Vegas: Lelani Mahelona. Another fat Polynesian realtor. What was it with these local wahines? They were the most beautiful women in the world until they turned twenty and then, like some Hawaiian airbag, they inflated to the size of a walrus.

It’s not enough, he said.

I’m sorry, but—

No. You don’t understand. I have a brother. That’s only sixty thousand apiece after we pay the second mortgage we took out for the nursing home.

You can wait and sell next—

No. I need the money now, not a year from now. I’ll be lucky to clear forty thousand, and with the divorce, maybe half of that. He grabbed her shoulders. I need to clear a hundred thousand, Lelani.

The realtor bent down to escape Robert’s grip. Mr. Takahashi, sixty thousand each is a good profit for a sale in Pearl City. Besides, it’s money you didn’t have yesterday. It’s not my fault. Your mother’s house is old. Built with wood only. Please.

Robert backed away. At six-foot-four, three hundred pounds, he could have accidentally broken her bones. His temper was like a tick dug deep in the skin, impossible to shed. Yeah, wow. Sorry, Lelani. I’m—I’m under a lot of pressure. Of course, you’re right. Let me go to the car for a pen.

I have a pen.

No. I have a favorite. Be right back. Robert walked behind the rental car and unlocked the trunk. He peeked around to make sure Lelani wasn’t looking and reached in for the bottle of Jack Daniels. He took two quick drinks, screwed the cap on, and slid the bottle back into the trunk.

He couldn’t tell her why he needed more money. It was too embarrassing to admit failures. Fifty-six-years-old, nearly divorced, out of work, an embarrassment to his daughters, and up to his ass in gambling debts. Wouldn’t Lelani be surprised if he told her that? Well, maybe not. Maybe nothing surprised her. Nothing he did surprised himself anymore. The suicide would resolve everything, if he could just pull it off.

In some ways, the Japanese had gotten it right. In Japan, one could commit suicide legally and the family would still receive the insurance money. Enough money for the girls to finish college. Enough money for Marie to retire.

His father would be ashamed if he were alive, or perhaps not. Who understood how the Nisei thought? Maybe he’d be proud of his Sansei, taking the honorable route of death by suicide, though Robert had no intention of disemboweling himself in a hari kiri ritual. A simple accidental crash into a bridge abutment on H1 without a seatbelt would be honorable enough for him.

He walked back to Lelani, pen in hand, and burped. The stale smell of undigested whiskey floated on the sea breeze. If he smelled it, so did Lelani. Where do I sign?

She pointed to the bottom of the page. Robert signed three sheets and initialed five others. He felt guilty, expecting his dead mother to run down the driveway and beat him with that damn hibiscus branch. He could almost feel the slap, slap, slap, of the blows, and then the ever-­present berating, first in pidgin then Japanese. He understood little of one and less of the other, but both made the sting worse. He could just hear her, Yeah, wow, you sell, no. Kid no good—wow, sell house no good—no good—no good.

Well, fuck her. He’d see her in hell in a few days and she could lash to her heart’s content. Always him—never his brother. She’d hated him. But why? It would be his first question.

Would you like the check sent to your house in Las Vegas? Lelani asked.

Yeah—sure.

Lelani nodded and wrote some notes. I’ll send your brother his share tomorrow, also. If there’s any problem, just call me at the office.

Thanks for your help, Lelani. Robert’s hand devoured hers. She raised her thin eyebrows. Lelani had probably never felt such a huge hand from someone of Asian descent. Hawaiian maybe, but not Asian. Can I keep the key for a while? I’d like to look around, see if we forgot anything of my mother’s.

Lelani was hesitant, but handed it to him. Drop off later, okay?

Sure. Robert walked to his car as Lelani drove away in her mini-van. Her vehicle leaned significantly on the driver’s side. Too much two p.m. poi. He retrieved the whiskey bottle from the trunk and then tried to hide it in a small paper bag when he saw Mrs. Brennan drive up the road and stop in front of the house. She exited from the car slowly and waved.

Robbie? She leaned unsteadily against the car. He had been friends with her son Paul for as long as he could remember. He walked over to greet her. The Hawaiian sun had weathered her face, but the wrinkles couldn’t hide her beauty. His first crush, though she never knew. A little heavier, some gray, but the eyes alive and blue as Hanauma Bay.

How you, Mrs. Brennan?

That’s what I was going to ask you, Robbie. She gazed at the paper bag. Robert covered the exposed neck of the bottle and forced a smile.

Robbie. No one’s called me that in long time. Only you, Paul, and Pop called me Robbie. He sighed loudly. Not so good, Mrs. Brennan. Things are tough, right now. His eyes welled with tears. It was stupid to pretend. She practically raised him since he was over at her house so much. How’s Paul? he said, hoping to change the subject.

Wonderful. He and Grace are on Maui, relaxing now that he retired early. He talks about you a lot, Robbie. I told him you were coming. He’d like to see you, maybe go surf again.

No, don’t think so. I’m going to look around and see if she left anything. Don’t want to see Paul like—

Mrs. Brennan stepped close and touched his arm.

Robbie, there’s something— She hesitated. —something I want to tell you about.

About what?

She sighed deeply. Nothing, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m keeping you from the house. Please, dear, call Paul before you leave.

I’ll try. He held her hand for a moment and then walked over to the good-and-bad house, as he called it. It was good until his father died, and then it was bad. His mother did everything to destroy him after his pop died. She finally succeeded.

The inside of the house still smelled of furniture oil. Once a week his mother worked the oil into tables, chairs, shelves, and even koa-wood lamps, the palm of her right hand tinted brown from years of use.

All gone, sold off or thrown away, unwanted by the next family.

He walked through each room and closet and, except for pencil marks on the wall chronicling his brother’s height over the years, there was nothing to tie his family to the house.

In the attic, he scanned the emptiness. He was about to close the door when something in the far corner caught his eye. Under a narrow eave were two items: his Joe DiMaggio Louisville slugger, and a dusty, wooden box, about the size of a piece of carry-on luggage.

He crawled to the middle of the attic and set the box down on a sheet of plywood nailed over some joists. The baseball bat was darker than he had remembered. He hadn’t picked it up since the day his father died.

Robert crouched and swung at a Warren Spahn fastball. Pow! Right into the leftfield seats, grand slam. He grabbed his right shoulder. If he wasn’t going to die soon, he might have worried about being out of shape. Could be he just pulled a muscle.

It had been forty-six years since his pop died. He remembered little about him. Robert took a swig of the whiskey and set the bottle next to the mysterious box. It was too heavy to be empty.

It took some effort to slide the cover open. Inside were hundreds of college-ruled papers. Someone’s manuscript? The cover sheet was upside down but had only a name written on it in large letters. Robbie. It was meant for him. His cell phone rang. He flipped it open. Marie.

What, Marie?

Where are you?

I’m at the house. The realtor sold it. I signed the papers. Don’t worry, you’ll get your money.

That’s not why I called, Robert. I was worried about you. There was a long pause. Perhaps you should see someone.

Who’s going to pay for that, Marie? The Tooth Fairy? I owe a hundred and forty thousand. What you want me to do?

I want you to come home.

I gotta go, Marie.

Come home, Robbie.

Gotta go. Robert shut the power off and flipped the phone closed. He grabbed the whiskey and dragged the box of papers over to a small window for more light. The cover page had the edges eaten off by bugs. The rest had been untouched. Maybe it was the ink that fended off the parasites. The first few pages were written in barely legible hand­writing. The rest of the manuscript was in a delicate, fluid penmanship, like Marie’s. He took another swig and tried not to think of his family. The girls wouldn’t take his death as well as Marie.

He pulled the papers out of the box and placed them on the plywood, then removed a few off the top of the pile to read. Maybe a lost novel. He read the heading of the first page, To my son, Robbie. There was a date: 10/5/1953. Three months before Pop died.

Was it purposely left there for him to find or did the realtor’s people just miss it when they emptied the house? Why hadn’t his mother told him about the box? She must have known it was there.

A glint of something shiny poked out of an old rag lying on the bottom of the box. Inside were several Army medals. Pop’s, he guessed, though his father never mentioned earning any medals in the war. For that matter, he hardly ever spoke of his service during World War II at all. Whenever Robert brought up the subject his father would say, Talk about something else, and that would end the discussion.

He knew his pop had been wounded in the war. It was hard to hide six bullet holes in your back while swimming at the beach. Just another taboo subject children didn’t need to hear about. His mother, Chiyoko, refused to speak English, so he never asked her much of anything about anything.

Robert laid the ten medals along the narrow edge of a joist. He recognized the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross, but he didn’t know what the others were. He did remember a teacher mentioning that the Distinguished Service Cross was the second highest medal a soldier could receive, behind only the Medal of Honor.

There was a note taped to the fabric:

Presented to Captain Hideo Bobby Takahashi, for extraordinary bravery and sacrifice during the evacuation of the First Battalion of the 141st Regiment of the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division by the 442nd Regimental Combat Team on October 30, 1944.

Robert’s initial feeling of pride changed to an overwhelming sense of guilt as he wondered how much money he could get for the medals. If he just had an extra ten thousand, he knew he could win back all of his losses from the casinos. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, swallowed some more whiskey, rolled the cloth back over the medals, and placed them back in the box.

He turned on his cell phone to check the time—two-oh-five. Plenty of time to read before the fateful drive on the H1. No hurry. Maybe he’d wait until Sunday. There were six messages on the phone. He shut off the power and read the first page.

Chapter 2

October 5, 1953, Pearl City, Oahu, Hawaii

My son. I am very sick and I just hope I live long enough to tell my story.

I am not so good with English and yet speak just a little of my father and mother’s native tongue. So rather than struggle through bad prose, I have asked my good friend Ayame to transcribe. Ayame means iris flower in Japanese. I gave her that nickname because she is beautiful, but very showy. You cannot see her of course, but she is sitting near and just threw her pad of paper at me, and yet I still say she is showy—though lovely.

Ayame will listen patiently to my short pidgin sentences and transform them into a memoir. I apologize for my poor handwriting, but I am near that point in my sickness where I have trouble holding my hands steady.

I wish to put my thoughts and stories down on paper to honor my friends in the 442nd who fought and died bravely for their country. I also wish to record for posterity, my family’s unfair internment during the war. We were one of only a few Japanese-American families in Hawaii who were unjustly imprisoned. I hope this memoir will clear their names as well as mine, for I was labeled a traitor at the onset of war with Japan.

I would ask that you give every effort to have this published and restore my honor. I was born a loyal American and I die the same.

I love you, Robbie. I know I don’t tell you. It is not in my nature to express my love for you. You are nine as I write this, but I have asked your mother to make these papers available to you when you are eighteen.

Robert stopped reading to remove a small square of yellowish paper, safety-pinned to the document at that spot. He took a quick sip of whiskey and read the note. It was in his mother’s handwriting.

I not let son you read 18. All lies your father. You read when I die. Not worthy son—not!

His mother’s pidgin words and choppy sentences were confusing, but Robert realized now why she had not let him read the memoir when he turned eighteen. It was just one more way for her to mete out punishment. Not worthy son. Did she mean he was not worthy or the memoir was not worthy? Robert continued reading his father’s words.

I am sorry your mother treats you not so good. I hope by the time you finished reading, you will understand why she acts that way with you. Chiyoko was not born in Hawaii, as you know, but in Japan. I never told you, but my parents arranged for me to marry her when we were both still children. This was a tradition and, except for circumstances that you will read about later, I would have married my true love and not Chiyoko. But, as I’m sure you will learn, life does not always end up as you wish it to. I wish to continue living, but have accepted death.

Robbie, I sincerely hope you adjusted well without a father and helped to care for your younger brother.

I wish I could live long and watch as you become big famous baseball player, yeah. And, wow, you will play maybe Mickey Mantle someday or be a great swimmer. I watch you at the beach with your friends, but I don’t let you see me because it would be embarrassing for you, but I do.

Most of what Ayame will write from now on will be of my youth in Hawaii, my time in the internment camp, and my war experiences in Europe. I have enclosed the medals I received from that time in the army. I hope you can put them to good use. Please remember that I did not earn those for being a hero. I earned them because I wanted my friends to live and because I wanted my country to be free, but most of all to prove I was not a traitor.

I am sorry I leave you when you are so young. Forgive me for not telling you how much I love you.

The following memoir will now be transcribed by my dear Ayame.

Chapter 3

Hideo Takahashi Memoir

Transcribed by Ayame

I am Nisei. My father is Issei. My son is Sansei. Ichi-one. Ni-two. San-three. It seems simple, yeah, but haoles never look at the Japanese as simple. A Japanese or a Japanese-American is still a Jap to a white man, even now, eight years after the war. I understand. When one army wages war on another, it is important to hate that enemy and very hard to stop hating when war ends.

But I am an American. My father thought of himself as an American. We were not the enemy. Oh boy, how many fights I was in when someone called me a Jap, I don’t know. I would ask them what their heritage was and they would say Irish, Polish, or maybe German, and I would ask them, Are you proud of your heritage? and they would say, Yes, I am proud to be an Irish, Polish, or German descendant, and then I would ask them, Why is it so different that I am proud of my Japanese heritage? And after that I would kick their haole ass bloody because, chee, I am proud.

As I said, my father, Hideaki Takahashi, and my mother, Asayo Miyagi, were Issei. They, along with thousands of other immigrants from Japan, came to the United States between the last of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. After that, the government passed laws preventing any more Asian immigration. An Issei could not become a United States citizen until just recently. (I know you know this information already, son, but I place it in here for readers who do not, if this is published.)

My father and mother were born in Hiroshima, as were many of the immigrants who settled in Hawaii.

We lived in a very small house in Aiea, Oahu, and, like most Japanese or Filipinos, my father started as a cane planter. He had four acres behind the house and the whole family would work the fields. When the cane was ready to harvest, my father would ask the Oahu Sugar Plantation to harvest the cane, and for the longest time that was how he supported our family.

My older sister, Ishiko, helped my mother raise me until she left to take a job in Hiroshima. She was there during the war, so you bet I worried about her, but later it wasn’t so good near the end of the war. My father became a foreman at the plantation and things were better, but not for long.

Most of my friends, even in the war, were Nisei. We are second-­generation Japanese-Americans and that’s tough because our parents didn’t speak English. We communicated with them through pidgin mostly. Yeah, it was our own language, a combination of Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Chinese, and English.

Most of us Nisei were born between 1915 and 1935. Haoles sometimes call all Japanese-Americans Nisei, but only my generation was.

It’s not too hard to understand pidgin. And without it, my parents would have spent all their time pointing. For example, if you ask someone if they want a drink, you would say normally, Would you like a drink? But that’s too hard for someone born in Asia to say, so they said, You like drink? That made it easier for the Issei to talk to the Nisei, but we sure knew when they were mad at us because Japanese words flowed like raw sewage, a precursor to a good beating.

My father was very proud of Japan, which was good, but he was too proud. Up until the war, he would collect money and metals from the other workers and ship them back to Hiroshima. He only meant well and did not support the generals when they took over Japan, but his loyalty cost him much during the war.

I also collected money and metals for Japan from the time I was a boy. I didn’t know any better and my father told me to do it, so I did. As I got older, I remember many times the Issei would get angry at me when the US and Japan beat their chests at one another.

Why you collect for them? Mr. Watanabe, the pharmacist, would ask me. They just use that to make guns to kill you, you stupid boboda.

"I just do what my pop