Read Online Shimura Trouble by Sujata Massey - Free Book Online

intelligence, I knew it was probably better to do it later, when fewer people were around.
    Edwin took over again. “You heard the terrible thing that happened to my Dad? Think of how it was for him, when he came home, a free man who served this country in the war. He find his mama gone forever, and all of a sudden Chinese people living on the land who say the Pierces leased it to them.”
    “Ah, yes, Rei told us about that already,” my father said, nodding.
    “Internet search engines are useful, aren’t they?” I said, in response to Edwin’s injured look.
    “The papers don’t tell the real story. My father tried to ask Mrs. Pierce what happened to our house, because the old man was dead. She said there was never a fee-simple sale to my mother—always just leasehold, and that had expired. That Pierce woman said the land couldn’t remain idle, so she rented it to Winston Liang and his wife.”
    “Well, since you don’t have a deed of sale, do you think it’s possible that your mother might have actually had a lease?” I turned to Yoshitsune, because I wanted to hear the story from him directly.
    “I once saw a letter,” Yoshitsune said in a low voice. “I found it sometime, must have been the mid-thirties, in her bedroom dresser. The letter said that Harue Shimura was granted this land in exchange for faithful service. It was signed by Josiah Pierce.”
    “A paper,” I repeated, thinking that it didn’t sound anything like an official, legal deed at all—but who knew how things operated in prewar Hawaii?
    “The paper’s gone,” Yoshitsune said, dashing my hopes. “Everything was gone when I came back from the mainland.”
    As if to put an exclamation mark on the disappointment, there was a bang at the front door, and after a moment, a teenage boy stuck his head around the corner of the dining room. He had the same attractively tilted dark brown eyes as his sister, but wore his black hair shaved close to his head. A Hawaiian skinhead, I thought, taking in the ripped T-shirt with its Quiksilver logo and way-too-long board shorts.
    “Braden, you get your sorry self in here!” Edwin roared. “Where you been so long?”
    “Nowhere you need to know about.” Braden scraped his chair loudly as he sat down with a plate containing nothing but pork.
    “Braden, please. It’s Jii-chan’s belated birthday celebration,” Margaret said. “Your cousins have been waiting to meet you!”
    The boy glanced at each of us as his mother made the introductions. Tom and Hiroshi made slight bows from their positions at the table, but I didn’t bother. I had a feeling that Braden would mock anything Japanese about us. His sister was watching him too, as if she expected something to happen.
    Edwin picked up the conversation we’d been having before the sullen teenager’s arrival. “Now, like I was saying, this land, it was very nice because it’s waterfront. Even on the Leeward Side of Oahu, waterfront property is worth a lot of money. The Japanese developer who built Kainani wants to buy twenty acres, of which our land is a small part—but probably worth five or six million.”
    “Are you talking about the developer called Mitsuo Kikuchi?” I asked, glad for something to distract me from Braden. He was chewing with his mouth slightly open, a disgusting sight.
    “Yes indeed,” Edwin answered me. “Mitsuo Kikuchi wants to buy all that land from the Pierces to make a restaurant development.”
    “That’s a tough situation for you, isn’t it?” My father said. “If you want to get the land back, for nostalgic and emotional reasons.”
    Edwin looked as if he thought my father was deranged. “Of course I want to sell to him. I want to get the property, and then sell it. I mean, that’s what my fadduh wants to do. Right?” He shot a look at Uncle Yoshitsune, who only raised his white eyebrows.
    “It would be good for your whole family, economically,” Uncle Hiroshi pronounced. Money was the one thing he