Kira-Kira

“We were poor, but in the way Japanese are poor, meaning we never borrowed money from anyone, period. Meaning once a year we bought as many 50-pound bags of rice as we could afford, and we didn’t get nervous again about the money until we reached our last bag. Nothing went to waste in our house.”

Katie’s comments demonstrate the way a lower-class, Japanese immigrant family approached survival in the US in the decades following World War II. Using credit or borrowing from others was typically considered anathema. Also, regardless of the meagerness of their income, families of Japanese origin tended to save part of their funds for large purchases or emergencies. Thus, when the Takeshimas seek a mortgage loan to buy “Lynn’s house,” the author implies a great sacrifice they make on behalf of a dying child.

“We pretended to smoke cigarettes like the floozies. But we got back in the car before our mother returned, because if she saw us looking like floozies, it might make her so upset that she would need to take an aspirin. Then our father would worry and he might not drive as well and they would get in an accident and get killed. That’s why, even though I liked being bad all the time, I tried hard to be good.”

The sisters largely maintain a bond marked by full acceptance and honesty. Lynn is a creative dreamer who is also a keen observer of human nature. Though comparatively innocent and not as worldly as her sister, Katie has a mischievous bent that she works to keep under control primarily because her family wants her to act properly.

“Several times we drove by an antebellum mansion. ‘Antebellum’ means ‘before the Civil War.’ Lynn taught me that. She had tried to read the whole dictionary once, so she knew the definitions of a lot of words that started with ‘a.’ An antebellum mansion was not as beautiful say as a mountain or the sky, but for a house it was pretty darn nice. Before the civil war really rich white people lived in the mansions and own slaves. I didn’t know who lived in them now.”

This passage reveals the innocence of the sisters and also is ironic. It is sweetly childlike of Lynn to decide to read through the dictionary but stop by the time she finished the first letter. Katie sounds guileless in her description of the Southern mansions she sees for the first time. When she ironically wonders who lives in these mansions after the Civil War, the author foreshadows Katie’s two personal dealings with an antebellum site. Of course, these estates are still owned and populated by “really rich white people.”

“Later, when all the Japanese families arrived, we ate all night long: salted rice balls, fish cakes, rice crackers, rice candies, and barbecue chicken. Rice balls are called onigiri, and they were the only thing I knew how to make. To make onigiri, you wash your hands and cover your palms with salt. Then you grab a handful of rice and shape it into a lump. My mother made fancy triangle shaped onigiri, with seaweed and pickled plums, but I just made the basic kind. Someday when I got older, I would have to learn to make fancy onigiri too, or no one would marry me.”

Though exposed for the first time to the culture of Georgia, which she quickly internalizes, Katie still practices Japanese traditions. Apart from her brief foray into tacos after Lynn’s death, every dish Katie refers to in the book is part of Japanese cuisine. Since she is still a kid, Katie unquestioningly accepts the notion that she must learn new ways of preparing onigiri if she is ever going to marry. Ironically, it is to care for her grieving family that Katie acquires a much greater cooking repertoire.

“‘Well, some of the kids at school may not say hello to you either.’

‘You mean because they don’t know me?’

‘No, I mean because they don’t want to know you.’

‘Why wouldn’t they want to know me?’ Who wouldn’t want to know me? This was a new idea for me. […]

‘Because, there’s only 31 Japanese people in the whole town, and there’s more than 4,000 people in the town, and 4,000 divided by 31 is... a lot more of them than of us. Do you understand?’

‘No.’”

Kadohata elucidates the experience of one child attempting to explain racial prejudice to another in this passage. Lynn’s frustration and her desire to spare her sister the bias she has already faced shows clearly. Being convinced from her earliest childhood that Lynn is exceptional and “maybe even perfect” (50), Katie is mystified by the notion that others might not recognize Lynn as deserving of attention and praise.

“At dinner that night my father said he thought maybe Lynn just took after our mother, who also used to get tired a lot. […] So I figured Lynn was just going through a phase, the same as my mother had.

One night, though, she woke up crying. I couldn’t remember Lynn crying since the day we left Iowa. When she woke up, she said she dreamed that she was swimming happily in the ocean.

She sobbed. ‘The sun was shining. Everything was beautiful.’

‘Why did that dream make you cry?’

Because it was only my spirit swimming in the ocean, and not really me.’”

This is the first indication of the lymphoma that will eventually claim Lynn’s life. Though the physician and her parents speculate that nothing is physically wrong, Lynn’s dream of swimming in the ocean—though not in bodily form—foreshadows the eventual reality, which she seems to intuit, that she is terminally ill.

“We would meet at the Grand Canyon when I was 17. I would be gazing at the awe-inspiring chasm when a freak gust of wind would lift me up and fling me over the rail. I would hang in the wind over the Grand Canyon, moments from certain death. My life would flash before me. I would regret so many things. […] My screams would pierce the air. And suddenly, a strong arm would reach out and catch me. At the end of this strong arm would be Joe-John Abondondalarama. The sun would glisten off his black hair. His eyes would shine like the sun. Thunder would sound in my heart! Lightning! Eventually, we would have seven children.”

Katie’s very active fantasy life includes an imaginary future husband, Joe-John. When she describes her imagined beau to Lynn and her friend Amber, however, it stuns Katie to realize that the older girls see Joe-John as merely a fantasy. This demonstrates the author’s insight into child development—Katie is in the stage at which fantasy and reality have not completely diverged, a stage from which Lynn has already departed.

“Poultry was one of the biggest industries supporting the economy of Georgia, but that did not stop many people who did not work with poultry from looking down on those who did. That and the fact that I was Japanese were the two reasons girls at school ignored me. Sometimes when Mom and I ran into the girls from my school with their mothers the other mothers would not even acknowledge mine. My mother did not have to work. My father would have been happy to support all of us; in fact, I think he would have preferred it. But there was the important matter of the house that we needed to buy.”

At first surprised at the notion of bias against her and her family, Katie comes to understand that the prejudice she encounters is not only because of her race but also because her parents are poultry workers. Another challenge Katie faces is that, unlike in most families in the 50s, her mother works outside the home. Ultimately, the Takeshima family’s goal is to rise out of poverty by saving money and acquiring a single-family home—that era’s American dream. The 30-year mortgage for new homes became available in 1948 and for existing homes in 1954. This instrument would allow the family to buy “Lynn’s house.”

“‘That’s a thug.’

‘What’s a thug.’

[…] Didn’t your mother tell you? The workers are trying to unionize. The thug works for Mr. Lyndon. He discourages union activity. He doesn’t let any of the employees gather in the parking lot, even if they’re not talking about the union.”

Kadohata’s depiction of workers attempting to organize and owners opposing them is historically accurate. The author’s description of harsh workplaces is also on target: small pay scales, no paid vacation, 12-hour and longer shifts, and no work breaks. Dick, the “thug” or “bull,” was also a common reality of the poultry factory workplace. Even after workers voted to unionize, management often used violence to intimidate employees—some of the factory workers who show up for Lynn’s funeral have bruises.

“‘I don’t see why I have to sleep on the floor,’ I said.

My father’s face darkened. I felt a little scared. He never got truly mad at us, ever. That was our mother’s job. My mother looked as if she was going to cry. But I was famous for being hardheaded. Maybe it was because Lynn had always let me have my way. […] I was shocked when my mother pulled the covers off and yanked me up by my arm. My father rested his hand on her to restrain her. She started crying. I didn’t know what was going on. It was just a bathtub ring. My father looked at me sternly. ‘I want you to clean the bathtub now,’ he said very quietly.”

As Lynn’s still undiagnosed illness worsens, it takes a toll on family dynamics. Katie is pressured to be responsible for Sammy. Lynn, the object of continual concern, withdraws. Sammy, whom Katie had called “the calmest baby in the world” (59), begins to whine. Katie observes that her parents’ traditional roles shift as well. Anxiety spreads throughout the family when Lynn does not get well.

“It turned out that Silly’s father had died shortly after she was born. Her uncle—her father’s brother—was like a father to her. Her uncle had owned a sign store once, but it had gone out of business. Silly needed to work to help pay for her school clothes. In her spare time she also helped her mother fold union flyers.

She made me feel lazy. I did manage to clean up after myself a little, but other than that I didn’t’ do much of anything except take care of Sammy. […] And yet my parent could afford to buy me my school clothes.”

Silly and her family are an example of a different kind of lower working-class family in mid-50s rural Georgia. While the Takeshimas are subsistence workers, they earn enough to save money for a potential house; their children do not have to work outside of the home. Silly, whose mother has an office job, has two part-time jobs to pay for her personal needs. Silly and her mother live outside of town in a home with no running water. Katie recognizes the disparity, which makes her feel guilty.

“The phone rang, and she [Auntie] went to get it. Nobody moved while she talked. When she was finished talking, she walked back into the living room and just stood there. Then she burst into tears and ran out of the room. We all stared after her. Uncle got up slowly and left the room. In a moment we heard him and Auntie talking.

Then it got very quiet in the other room. […] They were holding each other very tightly.”

This passage is significant in a couple of respects. First, the adults in the Takeshima clan for the first time realize the nature and severity of Lynn’s illness. They also elect to conceal it from the children, creating a barrier that means family members deal with Lynn’s illness with different levels of awareness and expectation. Second, near the end of the narrative, Uncle reveals to Katie that he and Fumi also lost their first child. Thus, when Fumi hears Lynn’s diagnosis, she and Uncle relive the grief they felt when their son died.

“I told my parents that Amber had dropped Lynn. I wished I hadn’t, because I saw how it hurt them. Then I was glad I had, because after I told them, they talked for a long time in the kitchen, and afterward they announced that we were going to the bank to take out a loan.

‘I thought you didn’t want to borrow money from the bank!’ I said.

‘We want to get your sister’s house,’ said my mother.”

The Takeshima family tends to keep secrets to protect one another’s feelings. However, when Katie reveals that Amber has broken off her friendship with Lynn, the family responds with a cascade of loving actions: The parents decide to buy the house Lynn has always wanted; the children reveal they have saved $100 from their allowance for the house; the girls hold a reverse dispute over who gets the better study location, with Katie forcing her sister to take the better spot. This series of events is a healing moment for Lynn, whose energy and emotional state improve.

“I ran off through the field, hoping I wouldn’t get lost. But after awhile I couldn’t figure out which way I was supposed to go. It seems to my memory that at first we’d walked north to get to the picnic site, and then we’d turned west. That meant that I should walk east and then south. But when I walked east, it seemed to me that I was going in the wrong direction. […] Then I realized it didn’t matter which way I went. I just ran.”

The children’s euphoric picnic in Mr. Lyndon’s great pasture becomes a disastrous crisis when Sammy gets his foot caught in a foothold animal trap. The event is a proving ground for Katie, who emerges as a rescuer for her injured brother and overwhelmed sister. Her emotions go from dread to panic to girlish excitement as she manages to handle the crisis, despite her fear of being alone. Ironically, she expects that, rather than recognizing her heroic efforts, her parents will criticize her.

“Late into the night I could hear my parents sitting in the kitchen talking, on and on, and I knew they were talking about us kids, in the way the could talk about us endlessly and never get bored. Sometimes it seemed that one way or another, no matter what my father was saying, he was talking about us. He was talking about all the things he could do for us—and, more often, all the things he could not.”

Katie is aware that all her parents’ decisions are made with the advancement of her family’s well-being in mind. In this passage, she acknowledges the extent of their concern for their children and the frustration her father feels at his inability to accomplish the things he wants for Katie and her siblings. She recognizes the depth of his angst when her father, who typically shows no emotions, expresses profound regret.

“‘You know who Billy is?’

‘No.’

‘He’s the best sexer in Georgia. He won the national competition in Japan before he moved to the States. He can sex twelve hundred chicks an hour with one hundred percent accuracy.

[…] ‘How many can you do an hour?’

‘A thousand, ninety-eight percent accuracy.’”

This exchange takes place between the always curious Katie and one of the chick sexers who works alongside her father. The conversation reveals several significant things about the poultry industry. Even in the 50s, Georgia had numerous counties whose farms produced 10,000,000 usable chickens annually; this reflects about half the chickens hatched since producers discarded male chicks. Sexers each handled several thousand chicks in a shift, with efficient workers evaluating 1000 birds an hour and receiving one-half cent per chick. Billy Morita, the champion sexer, would thus earn about $6.00 an hour, a large sum, given that the national minimum wage for adults was $1.00 an hour in 1955. 

“For everything in my life I would ask, why? […] I asked myself why we had to move to Georgia. It was because my father needed to work at this hatchery so he could support us better. Why did I kind of like that boy? Because he was kind of cute. And why was Lynnie sick? Why? There was no answer to that.

Later that day I stole a couple of male chicks and set them down in the field. ‘Be free!’ I said. Sammy and I walked across the street, to a pecan grove, and picked up nuts from the ground. Sammy had crazy bizarre teeth like rocks, and he would crack the nutshells so we could eat the insides.”

Staying at the hatchery night and day while her father works multiple shifts, Katie has a philosophical moment about some of the major quandaries of her life. She wonders about all the seemingly inexplicable questions and asks herself why her sister got sick. In protest against the inevitabilities of life, Katie frees two male chicks destined for euthanasia, reveals her newfound self-confidence.

“‘What’s lymphoma?

‘It’s a very bad disease. But your sister’s going to get better. Now that we have the house, she’s happier.’

I went to the bedroom. Lynn was sleeping, as usual. I looked up ‘lymphoma’ in the dictionary. It took me 15 minutes just to figure out how to spell it. The dictionary said: Any of the various malignant tumors that arise in the lymph nodes or in other lymphoid tissue. Then I looked up ‘malignant’ in the dictionary. It said: threatening to life virulent a malignant disease. Tending to metastasize; cancerous. Used of a tumor.

And that was how I found out Lynn might die.”

In the fallout over Katie’s shoplifting of pink nail polish to paint Lynn’s fingernails, her father at last shares Lynn’s diagnosis, though without giving Katie any specific information. Not hesitating, Katie investigates the seriousness of the disease, quickly discovering the gravity of Lynn’s illness. This is another transition point in Katie’s gradual loss of innocence.

“We left early on a Saturday morning. My parents seemed relieved to see us go. It made me surprised and guilty to find out how glad I felt to get out of the house where everything reminded me of my sister. I felt guilty whenever I left my sister’s side, but at the same time I could not be with her every moment. If I had been, I would have lost my mind. Maybe I was losing my mind. Sometimes, even just for three minutes, even when it was my turn to be with Lynnie, I had to step outside. I had to look at the sky. I had to be anywhere else but in that sad room with her.”

Having expressed a growing sense of despair that nothing she does can heal or bring much comfort to her sister, Katie accepts a weekend of respite on a Thanksgiving trip with Uncle’s family. As her guilt ebbs into joy and playfulness for the first time in weeks, Katie feels renewed and recommits herself to caring for Lynn over a long period of time. Kadohata implies that Katie is really the key to her family’s resilience.

“New Year’s is the biggest holiday of the year for the Japanese. Every year since we’ve lived in Georgia, Mrs. Muramoto held a big party. She served sake and mochi and a couple dozen different snacks. We would usually stay until about ten and then go home. Just before dawn I would get up and write down my hatsuyume, first dream of the new year. Then we would meet the other families and go to the empty lot nearby with our lawn chairs to watch the sunrise. Watching the first sunrise is the traditional way to celebrate New Year’s in Japan. The last few years, though, nobody had bothered getting up for sunrise. The fathers were all too tired for such a celebration.”

The small Japanese community in Chesterfield preserves their cultural identity by observing ancestral Japanese customs. New Year’s is the most important Japanese holiday, so its celebration is a big deal; however, Katie observes that her parents’ jobs are so enervating that they do not have the energy to mark the customs that root them to their homeland and culture. 

“I wondered if anyone else in history had ever been as sad as I was at that moment. As soon as I wondered that, I know the answer was yes. The answer was that millions of people have been that sad. […] there were all of the millions of people in all the many wars throughout history and throughout the world, and all the millions of people with loved ones killed by millions of other people.

A lot of people have been as sad as I was. Maybe a billion of them had been this sad. As soon as I realized this, I felt like I was no longer a little girl but had become a big girl. What being a big girl meant exactly, I wasn’t sure.”

Shortly after this profound realization, Katie wakes to the news that Lynn has died. Katie’s recognition of the ubiquitous nature of extreme grief and Lynn’s final charge to her to take care of their family are two final elements in Katie’s Loss of Innocence and coming of age.

“When we got home, my mother was sewing a hem in the kitchen. She was fixing my black dress and I knew I would be wearing to the funeral.

‘I was worried,’ she said.

‘Katie ate 5 tacos,’ said my dad. ‘That takes time.’

He and my mother both looked at my stomach as if expecting to see it explode. When it didn’t explode, my mother raised her eyes to my father. She said the things she like to say when she wanted to remind him that he could not afford any sort of unusual behavior. ‘You’ve got a long day tomorrow.’”

The events of this turbulent chapter funnel to this moment. After Katie’s dad smashed Mr. Lyndon’s windshield, Katie’s inspired cleverness allowed them to escape arrest by a deputy sheriff. As her parents go to bed, Katie stays up and, unasked, washes the dishes and cleans the kitchen. Kadohata demonstrates that Katie is the hub around which the family functions, the embodiment of resilience.

“My father had taken off only two days of work when Lynn died. We were trying to survive back then. He needed to buy food for me and Sammy, so he could not spend all his time crying. I know that sounds cold-hearted, but it was not. He needed to think about his children who were still alive, because he was honor-bound to think of the living before the dead. If he stopped working for three days, that might mean we would not eat fish one night or could not pay the mortgage on what we thought of as Lynn’s house.”

Kadohata includes this passage alongside several references to the unionization effort in which Katie’s mother plays a surprising, successful role. While Katie’s father pushes back his grief to go to work heroically the day after Lynn’s funeral, the author implies that humane labor laws would have made such a transition more bearable and less emotionally devastating. The one element of unionization that persuades Katie’s mother to vote for the union is the new contract clause allowing three days off for the death of a loved one.