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Reimagining the elusive American dream
In The Kitchen of Small Hours, Derek N. Otsuji embraces the fragility and endurance of a family of immigrants from two prefectures in Japan: Kagoshima in the south and Okinawa, an island more than four hundred miles from the mainland. In these poems, five generations sing, save, scold, bury, and cook against the culture and history that emerged from the pineapple and sugar cane plantations of mid-nineteenth-century Hawaii, from the bomb-scapes and hatreds of World War II, and from the canning and tourism industry of the twentieth century. Otsuji writes of how his family used stories and rugged cheer to fill the spaces apart from the cane fields and the canning factory. Their recipes, rituals, celebrations, songs, dances, myths, and family stories passed from grandmother to father to son, who folds them into lyrics.
Here too are whispers, failures, and traceable absences: a face removed from photos, a love silenced to be acceptable, a dead firstborn housed in an urn. There are things that no one intended to give. Otsuji's language hungers for them anyway. The haunting reunions between author and ancestor sink just as deep as roots and hold just as fast. The cooking pot, the family photo, the moon recur as images that feed and comfort. Lyrical and warm, Otsuji's voice sounds out a sinew of words that make the remnants of heritage and home durable. In these poems each new generation seeks to reimagine for itself the elusive American Dream.
Contents
Lahaina Obaban Teaches Her Great Granddaughters About Business and Life
The Kitchen of Small Hours
A Modern Fairy Tale
Music
The Road to Kanzaki
Sadako
Death Comes to a Cousin in the Air
The Splendor of Laundry
Urn
Lament for my Father's Sister Whom He lost in Childhood
Shrine
How She Loves Music
A Brittle Sprig
Even the Airborne Among Us
Redeeming the Cans
Last Walk
My Mother Revists Mahelona Hospital Where Her Mother had been Quarantined 50 Years Ago
The Green Porch Swing
Lost
An Offering with Some Embarrassment and Apologies
Returning to My Grandmother's Backyard Orchard the Day After Her Death
How to Sell Your Grandmother's House without Remorse
The Rabbit in the Moon
Three Boys One Fish Two Eyes
Among the More Innocent Touristic Amusements of the Old Waikiki
Bachi Tales
Upon Hearing The Old Advertiser Building May Have to Make Way for New Apartments
Getting the Melons to Market
Eden
Evening Visit
Theater of Shadows
A Visit to the Hongwanji Temple on the Anniversary of our Grandfather's Death
Lease Said
The Old Flamingo Restaurant
The Afternoon We Gathered Around A Box of Old Letters and Family Photographs Retrieved from the Dust of Oblivion
Comfort Food
Reinvention of the American Dream
Nostalgia and Memory
A Japanese-American Recalls Pearl Harbor Day When He and His teammates
Headed to a Football Game in Town Were Fired of by a Zero Pilot
Apprenticeship
Upon First Seeing, Housed at the Bishop Museum, The Kessho Mawashi Belonging to my Grandfather, Skinny Sumo Wrestler
Plantation Town
Parable of the Cedars
A Marriage in Three Quatrains
Industry
Ditch Kids of the Maui Sugar Company
Cane Cutter's Song
My Father's Songs
Paternal Pedagogy
Uncles Talking Story on the Porch
On the Recent State of our Local Economy
At the Halfway House
Mochitsuki
Last Meal
First Dream
