fop novelist

Two more from a fop novelist

The Stone of Kannon, and The Water of Kane. By O. A.

Bushnell. Published for The Friends of the Library of Hawaii by the University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii.

SUS 10.95 and SUS 12.95.

ISBN 0 8248 0663 8 and ISBN 0 8248 0714 6.

Hawaii knows two histories.

The first is that of a Pacific Island. Like Fiji, Samoa, and Tahiti, it’s known traders and whalers, beachcombers and missionaries, a native royalty and the decimation of its native population through disease.

But its history as a Pacific Island drew to a close in the last decade of the nineteenth cen tury. Westerners found in its soil and abundant supplies of water the prerequisites for the production of sugar. As the demand for whale oil disap peared and the mammals them

selves grew more scarce, sugar took whaling’s place as Hawaii’s principal industry.

And Hawaii’s American-born sugar planters drew the islands towards union with the United States.

The need for markets and the national origins of Hawaii’s sugar planters were not the only elements which formed Hawaii’s history on the American model. Those same planters needed labour. Their world-wide search for agricul tural workers launched an im migration to Hawaii which closely paralleled, both in chronology and motivation, that which deluged the mainland United States in the last dec ades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th.

In The Stone of Kannon and The Water of Kane O. A.

Bushnell focuses on the early immigration of Japanese to

Hawaii. Their reasons for coming were strikingly similar to those of the 28 million who deserted Europe for America’s shores in the same period: greater economic opportunity and freedom from the hierarchical social and political systems which frustrated the dissenter.

Bushnell s hero, Ishi, is just such a malcontent. He seeks an atmosphere free of the arbitrary justice of the samurai’s sword, In 1868, when Hawaii’s labour recruiters first attempted to tap Japan’s surplus labour supply, he joins 150 of his countrymen in signing contracts to work in Hawaii’s fields for room, board. and $9 per month.

In The Stone of Kannon Bushnell follows Ishi s preparations for departure, his adjustment to life on the plantations, and his meeting and bedding with a Hawaiian girl, The gannen-mono. first-year men, were smuggled out of Japan, contrary to the wishes of Japan’s new Meiji government, The tales of maltreatment of the Japanese on Hawaii’s plantations soon persuaded Meiji

leaders to halt further immi gration to Hawaii. They would allow no further emigration until 1885.

The Water of Kane finds Ishi marrie d to his Hawaiian lover the father of two children? and beset by conflicts between his o wn cultural background and those of his wife, his mother-in iaw, and the Caucasian men upo n whom he depends for his livelihood.

One of them, Maui’s Henry A. Baldwin, lures him into his o wn dream: the construction of an irrigation ditch to bring the waters of Maui’s Mt Haleakala t o the drought-stricken sugar fie ds bdow Xoiling beside Yankee metal workers and Hawaiian diggers, Ishi and his Japanese friends do the mason WO rk the ditch requires, The task was enormous. It re quired clearing virgin forest and blasting through solid rock. The effort would take two years, $BO 000, and try the patience of the ditch’s principal architects, Baldwin and Alexander, l n the process Ishi and his friends know physical dis

comfort, tragedy, and the psychological pain of living in a multi-cultural society wherein challenges to one’s most cher ished values are an everyday experience.

Bushnell handles the story of Hawaii’s first Japanese immi grants with humour and under standing. We laugh at the hapless Ishi, home from long weeks in the masculine society of the labour-gang and ravenous for his wife’s body. She sits at one end of a couch fending him off with an arm and a seemingly endless recitation of a domestic problem which has developed in his absence. And we sympathise

with his attempts to reconcile his admiration for Western in dustry and ambition with his Eastern resignation to fate.

The Stone of Kannon and The Water of Kane are Bushnell’s fourth and fifth novels based on Hawaii’s past.

His first The Return of Lono , dealt with the last days of Captain Cook. Molokai told the story of Hawaii’s famed leper colony at Kalaupapa.

Ka’a’awa chronicled the 19th century development of Oahu.

With each new book Bushnell has secured more firmly a claim as Hawaii’s master story-teller.

Dan Boy lan.