Critical Review: All I Asking For Is My Body
It isn’t a terribly difficult idea to comprehend that back in the day manual labour jobs such as plantation work forged a colourful and wonderfully diverse cast of multicultural characters and Milton Murayama takes excellent advantage of this ideal and naturally forming cast. In the novella All I Asking for Is My Body the second generation Japanese American culture known as Nisei clashes with the first generation’s issei traditional and stubborn ways. The novella itself is well put together in intended messages but with spots of ambiguity that seem to retread the same old ground.
The story is told through the eyes of Kiyoshi, the son of strict and traditional Japanese American parents in Hawaiʻi and brother to a more rebellious Toshio, as he struggles with plantation camp life during the pivotal period before and during the Second World War. Kiyoshi is further thrown into a turbulent coming of age as he and his brother Toshio struggle with paying off their parents’ six-thousand dollar debt and fighting for an identity separate from their parents instead of conforming to traditional norms.
Murayama employs the ‘In the midst of things’ approach in an elegant and well planned way. Instead of directly hurling the reader into a haze of chaotic clashes and he urges one to explore further to discover what exists behind the almost trivial conflicts in the first couple of sections of the book. Kiyoshi’s character is almost a sort of Jean Valjean, imprisoned by his parents’ traditional ways yet quite obviously more interested in leading a life beyond those age old dogmas and superstitions. I would have put a snarky quip about not trying to resist conforming because you might do it anyways but that’s what Kiyoshi ends up doing. He falls into the Japanese pitfall of substitute superstitions where misfortune is passed rather than simply found like a freshly laid scat on your perfectly manicured front lawn.
In the first section of Murayama’s novella Kiyoshi becomes close friends with an older Japanese boy living in the Filipino Camp known as Makoto Sasaki. The conflict is not so quickly crowbarred in, but seeded in a deliberate trail for the reader to follow with curiosity. At first Kiyoshi’s parents are concerned and ask Kiyoshi not to hang around the boy so much and to cease attending lunches at his home which Kiyoshi reluctantly agrees to, but soon his parents designate Makoto as a bad influence for Kiyoshi and use his filial nature to force him to abandon his friendship.
At first glance one would be pressed to say that the parents would have been acting unreasonable or odd, to say the least, but this is just the first of many conflicts between what I like to call Kiyoshi’s ‘naïve’ perspective of things. His parents view Kiyoshi’s association with Makoto as shameful and that it makes them look as if they cannot feed their child. It is strongly hinted by the author that Japanese social interactions from that day and age were rife with gossip and staunch criticism when it came to children as Kiyoshi’s mother demonstrates here:
But can’t you see, Kiyo-chan, people will laugh at you. ‘Look at that Kiyoshi Oyama,’ they’ll say, ‘he always eats at the Sasakis’. It’s because his parents are poor and he doesn’t have enough to eat at home.’ You understand, don’t you, Kiyo-chan? You’re a good filial boy so you’ll obey what your parents say, won’t you? Your father and I would cry if we had two unfilial sons like Toshio.
This gives a vast understanding of the Issei mentality, showing that the children are not only the next generation but they seem to treat them as if they were status symbols. They place weight on the children and find pride and value through their obedience and their loyalty in an extreme manner. Kiyoshi sees the wary behavior of his mother as somewhat unwarranted from his perspective. This is especially true when in this quote his mother mentions Toshio, the first born son of the family.
Though Toshio is not the protagonist of the novella, he provides a very valuable contrast for Kiyoshi to analyze and gain his own perceptions about the differences between Issei and Nisei generations. Toshio is a very brash and quick witted son who receives scolding and insults throughout the story from his parents, who see him as unfilial due to his tendencies to speak freely and informally to his parents, and his rapidly Americanizing behaviors. The differences lead to very colourful confrontations which paint the characters with loving emotion and depth that even a shorter novella such as this would normally be hard pressed to do. Toshio addresses such things directly in a conflict with his parents.
You Japanese are so unrealistic. Take yourself. You can’t support your own family. You need my help. But instead of being nice to me, you treat me like dirt. Now you want to kick me out. I’d be glad to go. I can work my own way through High School and College. You people are upside down. The parents should owe the children, not the children the parents. Look at the haoles. Obligation is to the children.
Well colour me impressed because someone complimented the white devil for once. Toshio and Kiyoshi are by no means stereotypes but their parents are the typical pious Japanese family. At one end of the scale lie the parents and on the rebellious extreme is Toshio. Kiyoshi teeters on the very center and slides back and forth between ideologies as his life continues and his experiences broaden. Everything from witnessing and placing faith in old religious superstitions to joining the military in the later story shows Kiyoshi’s constant shifting between those beliefs to which he is exposed.
What packs the characters together in a lovable way is that they exist on all parts of the scale equally and fairly. Even if at times the characters walk the dangerous line between overly stereotyped and justifiably stereotyped it does manage to wrangle the realism back in. The pious old traditions of the first generation never undermine and outweigh that of the second generation. Kiyoshi seems content in understanding that the old ways have some valid points but also recognizes that his generation is fundamentally changing; in some ways for the better and for the worse. Kiyoshi and even Toshio never seem to overflow with angst; and even supporting characters remain important and colourful enough to justify their existences entirely.
In the end the dichotomy is sculpted to show the differences between the first and second generations. Their growing division melts away with Kiyoshi, which gives a very human and lovable touch to Kiyoshi as he gambles and wins to pay his debt stricken parents with his brother Toshio. He uses his own destiny to bring fortune but in the end he honours his roots and finds it in his heart to pay the debt out of his own desire to see his family through the storm. This made me genuinely enjoy a character in a book I would have never read freely if not for this fateful review. Kiyoshi and the rest of the characters remained pleasant yet easily distinguishable from one another, lacking a ‘cookie cutter’ feel and they began take on the semblance of tenderly painted collectible figurines.
The setting itself leaves a lot open to the imagination and is somewhat easy to reconcile with if you have the general concept of Hawaiʻi and what a plantation might look like. The crafting is heavily focused on the narrative and while descriptions are lacking in words it never becomes too much of an issue where I found myself wanting to hear exuberant amounts of detail yet it is still noticed. There isn’t much else to say except in the historical contexts where events such as the attack on Pearl Harbour are concerned but not heavily fleshed out, touched upon yet still noticeably glanced over as something which indeed happened, which creates a sense of story separation and maintains its own strength to stand upon.
Pacing is well done, as the story doesn’t drag on unnecessarily, while the major character building and revealing moments occur within the relatively short first two sections they make up for it in clarity and quality. This is not to say the third section, while long, is dragging. On the contrary I found myself breezing through pages with genuine interest and curiosity about the culture and the division between the generations rapidly establishing itself like a lurching abomination in a Lovecraftian horror.
I did mention retreading and while it may have just been the occasional déjà vu. However, I consistently got the feeling that I had just read the same section or the same sentence again. Even a small note in my previously owned copy noted this and I agreed somewhat as if I had managed to send warning back in time. It was a negligible trait of the book but one that interrupted the flow from time to time due to the way it seemed to jump off the page like an impatient lemming on holiday to the Grand Canyon.
In the end what is produced is nothing masterful but something that one can say was crafted with a realistic worldview and greater interest in the experience and immersion rather than entreating age old grudges in gluttonous sections of poorly placed and timed shock humour. Yes, Shark Dialogues, I’m calling you out here and now. The characters while stereotyped to a point, were understandable; and while at times they were frustrating made so through their differences rather than being made frustrating just for frustration’s sake. It was solid, and it is one of the few class books I will not be doing something inappropriate with come next holiday.
Works Cited:
Murayama, Milton. All I Asking For Is My Body. Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1988. Print.
