Picture Bride edition by Mike Malaghan Literature Fiction eBooks
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Woman of Silk and Steel
A Family Saga of Hawaii's Japanese Immigrants. From the moment we meet Haru, we fall in love with this proud girl of silk and steel. To escape being sold into prostitution in turn-of-the-century Japan, Haru takes refuge in a Buddhist temple, but happiness there is fleeting. Betrayed by her best friend, she flees to Hawaii, a strange new world where the young picture pride finds herself with a husband who doesn't want her and surrounded by a widespread distrust of Japanese immigrants. As Haru's marriage flourishes and then falters, she emerges as a strong-minded community leader. Having once pledged to produce sons to fight for the emperor, she dedicates herself to raising American children loyal to the Stars and Stripes. From the shrines of Kyushu to the shores of the Territory of Hawaii, Picture Bride is the sweeping saga of Japanese immigrants who survived--and thrived--against great odds.
Picture Bride edition by Mike Malaghan Literature Fiction eBooks
“The court has ruled— once a Jap, always a Jap.” (Kindle Location 5352)“With great pride of race, they have no idea of assimilation. They never cease to be Japanese. They do not come to this country with any desire or any intent to lose their racial or national identity. They come here specifically and professedly for the purpose of colonizing and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato race.” (Kindle Locations 5747-5749).
HAWAII, 1910s-1940s.
First-generation Japanese immigrants, an alien race from alien shores, were afraid of provoking the white men, who hold all the power in these islands. The white men, themselves only one or two generations removed from being the threatening alien race in this paradise, are beginning to fear the rising power of the imperial Japanese Empire as it annexes the Korean peninsular, parts of Russia and large swaths of China; and looks to be looking eastward toward Hawaii. As for the natives—at least those who the white folk’s guns, germs and steel hadn’t eradicated—from whom the land had been stolen, and the political power wrested only a few decades earlier: “Look at the Hawaiians. The missionaries took away their gods, their language, and most of their land. In Honolulu, lots of Hawaiians speak only English. Are they accepted? They are paraded at festivals like clowns and treated like second-class citizens in their own land.” (Kindle Locations 2894-2896)
Picture Bride: A Novel, by Mike Malaghan offers an excellent and different depiction of Hawaiian history during the troubled first half of the twentieth century—through the eyes of a first-generation Japanese community leader. As familiar as I think myself with this time and place, I learned some. Most surprisingly, about F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover’s resistance/opposition to F.D.R.’s position on imprisoning all persons of Japanese ancestry, both on the west coast and in Hawaii, if/when war broke out. Who’d’a thunk it?
Recommendation: I had a bit of trouble syncing with the authors cadence—thought at times that I was reading prose written by a ten year old, for ten year olds—during the first 20% of this novel. Once Haru arrived in Hawaii, something clicked and the story was hard to put down after that.
“No matter what she did, in Hawaii, she was not equal to the haoles.” (Kindle Location 2717)
“But the worst outcome is for us— the pioneers who took this island from the savages and built it into an American paradise. We will lose the right to govern. We’d be back in grass shacks before you know it. God made the white race to rule and the colored to be ruled.” —[attributed to Admiral Stirling, USN, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1931] (Kindle Locations 5990-5992).
Book Publishers Network. Kindle Edition, 523 pages, 8,420 Kindle Locations
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Picture Bride edition by Mike Malaghan Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
There are many reasons to read Picture Bride, the historical novel by Mike Malaghan. But for me the real joy of reading this fact filled historical novel is Mallaghan’s creation of believable sympathetic characters whose lives and varied cultures intersect at a time, 1904 to 1937, when Hawaii, Japan and the United States were going through changes which caused much anxiety, doubt, and a competition of visions.
Haru, the delightful and determined heroine, grows up in Amakusa, a poor area of Japan where parents who fell into debt were accustomed to selling their daughters into wage slavery or prostitution . . . Haru was scheduled for Borneo. Escaping this, Haru is raised and educated during her high school years in Hiroshima by a Buddhist priest and wife. In Hiroshima Haru’s argument with her best friend Ko over whether the emperor is a god, together with the doubts of Shintoist government workers about the loyalty of Buddhists to the Shinto-led Japanese government, impel Haru to leave Hiroshima. She joins a group of “picture brides,” women sent to Hawaii to marry and domesticate Japanese single men sent to work in the cane fields there who, lacking wives and family, were drinking too much and acting up. Haru’s husband, however, is to be her Hiroshima host priest family’s son, Kenji, also a Buddhist priest, who is in Hawaii for the Japanese workers there. Kenji is reluctant at best to marry an Amakusan, and tries unsuccessfully to have her sent back.
In Hawaii there follows a stream of incidents and issues. Are the Japanese going to stay or return to Japan, and what of their US born children? With Japan then expanding militarily into China and Korea, was the Hawaiian Japanese population (then 40%) just an outpost for Japanese expansion eastward? Were the Buddhists’ after-school schools, which taught the Japanese language to children of the workers, anti-American or merely a way to teach positive Japanese cultural traditions of loyalty to family, hard work etc. Could underpaid Japanese workers form unions to represent them against the exploitative landowners, many of them sons of Christian missionaries who had arrived a generation before? And as war with Japan became imminent, should the Japanese population be interned as was planned for U.S. mainland Japanese? Would these Japanese be loyal to the United States, and anyway, did the United States really want these copper-colored people as Americans?
All of these issues come up as the author recounts Haru’s life with husband and priest Kenji, their working through their own differences, their life in Hawaii and the ministrations of both to the Japanese workers, picture brides and families. The strength of the book is that its characters are not cardboard cutouts of the various sides of issues, but people whose complicated views change over time, displaying a very human inconsistency. Their conversations, and the ruminations in the midst, are intriguing. The chapters are short, and I found it difficult to find a place where I would put the story down.
Picture Bride ends before World War II begins, a prequel to Malaghan’s next book on Japanese-Americans in World War II,"A Question of Loyalty", which I much look forward to.
Malaghan has filled these pages with a barrage of information that I did not know about even though my maternal grandmother was a "picture bride." Jam-packed with information, it would take at least three meetings for a book club to discuss it fully, especially one in Hawaii. Although the novel contained text-book information, the emotional upheavals of the characters as they dealt with historical events kept the reader in suspense. So much so that the end of the novel leaves one with a whopper of a cliff-hangar even though the reader knows what events occurred. It leaves the reader wanting for the next book in Malaghan's planned trilogy with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the dilemma of the Nisei Japanese-Americans, and the internment camps. My paternal grandfather was interned for 3 years as a community culture and arts leader, and I look forward to filling in the gaps to my own personal family history now that my grandparents have passed!
“The court has ruled— once a Jap, always a Jap.” ( Location 5352)
“With great pride of race, they have no idea of assimilation. They never cease to be Japanese. They do not come to this country with any desire or any intent to lose their racial or national identity. They come here specifically and professedly for the purpose of colonizing and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato race.” ( Locations 5747-5749).
HAWAII, 1910s-1940s.
First-generation Japanese immigrants, an alien race from alien shores, were afraid of provoking the white men, who hold all the power in these islands. The white men, themselves only one or two generations removed from being the threatening alien race in this paradise, are beginning to fear the rising power of the imperial Japanese Empire as it annexes the Korean peninsular, parts of Russia and large swaths of China; and looks to be looking eastward toward Hawaii. As for the natives—at least those who the white folk’s guns, germs and steel hadn’t eradicated—from whom the land had been stolen, and the political power wrested only a few decades earlier “Look at the Hawaiians. The missionaries took away their gods, their language, and most of their land. In Honolulu, lots of Hawaiians speak only English. Are they accepted? They are paraded at festivals like clowns and treated like second-class citizens in their own land.” ( Locations 2894-2896)
Picture Bride A Novel, by Mike Malaghan offers an excellent and different depiction of Hawaiian history during the troubled first half of the twentieth century—through the eyes of a first-generation Japanese community leader. As familiar as I think myself with this time and place, I learned some. Most surprisingly, about F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover’s resistance/opposition to F.D.R.’s position on imprisoning all persons of Japanese ancestry, both on the west coast and in Hawaii, if/when war broke out. Who’d’a thunk it?
Recommendation I had a bit of trouble syncing with the authors cadence—thought at times that I was reading prose written by a ten year old, for ten year olds—during the first 20% of this novel. Once Haru arrived in Hawaii, something clicked and the story was hard to put down after that.
“No matter what she did, in Hawaii, she was not equal to the haoles.” ( Location 2717)
“But the worst outcome is for us— the pioneers who took this island from the savages and built it into an American paradise. We will lose the right to govern. We’d be back in grass shacks before you know it. God made the white race to rule and the colored to be ruled.” —[attributed to Admiral Stirling, USN, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1931] ( Locations 5990-5992).
Book Publishers Network. Edition, 523 pages, 8,420 Locations
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