Almost every scholar of Asian American literature has acknowledged the brilliance of Milton Murayama’s first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, and its notable contribution to local Hawaiian and Asian American literature. When All I Asking for Is My Body was first published, it soon became an underground classic and later won an American Book Award.

The first novel in Murayama’s planned tetralogy (which also includes Five Years on a Rock, 1994, and Plantation Boy, 1998), All I Asking for Is My Body is narrated by Kiyo Oyama, the youngest son of a working-class Japanese immigrant family. The novel opens with eight-year-old Kiyo living in Pepelau during the early 1930s and ends with Kiyo volunteering for the all-Nisei regiment in Hawaii to fight in World War II.

Part 1, entitled “I’ll Crack Your Head Kotsun,” introduces readers to the dynamics of the Oyama family: the tradition-bound Japanese immigrant parents, the rebellious older son, Tosh, the introspective and inquisitive Kiyo, and the slew of younger (and marginalized) Oyama daughters. The opening chapter focuses on the story of Kiyo’s friendship with an older boy, Makot. The Oyamas try to dissuade Kiyo from pursuing this friendship. Makot’s family is the only Japanese household in the Filipino section of the local sugar plantation, and he is deemed undesirable by the elder Oyamas—a mystery that is explained when Kiyo learns that his friend’s mother works as a prostitute.

The parents’ insistence on Kiyo’s dissolution of his friendship with Makot demonstrates both the distinctions of status that they adhere to and introduces the theme of filial piety into the novel.

In Part 2, “The Substitute,” Murayama continues the history of the Oyama family: Kiyo’s father struggles to earn a living as a fisherman in Pepelau, while his mother sews kimonos to help supplement their meager income. Believing that the Oyama family is cursed and that she is doomed to die young unless she can find a substitute to take over the family’s bad luck, Kiyo’s mother reveals to her son the origins of the $6,000 debt that the family must pay off in order to save face and to retain their pride and dignity.

This debt, first incurred by grandfather Oyama, symbolizes the tension in the novel between the older generation of Japanese immigrants who hold fast to the traditions of Japan and the generation of local Japanese Hawaiians who are growing up speaking three languages: standard Japanese, standard English, and pidgin English.

Milton Murayama

In Part 3, “All I Asking for Is My Body,” Kiyo comes to maturity. As his family moves from Pepelau to Kahana, Kiyo’s father finally gives up his fisherman’s life and goes back to working in the cane fields of the Mill Camp plantation. However, the family’s change of location only increases their debt, forcing Tosh and Kiyo to leave school after the eighth grade so that they can work in the cane fields. The politics of race, ethnicity, and class merge and play out against the backdrop of the plantation system.

The Oyama family is oppressed financially—first under the system of Japanese custom that dictates filial piety toward the father and his family (which is the reason they feel forced to take over grandfather Oyama’s debt), and then under the system of plantation hierarchy (which divides the workers by race and ethnicity from uniting together for better wages). Tosh, as the rebellious eldest son, continually questions his parents’ values and their subservience to both Japanese customs and the plantation system.

Kiyo, influenced by the radical teachings of his junior high school teacher, Snooky, also begins to understand that until he leaves the plantation, he will never be free from the cycle of poverty and debt that has plagued his family.

As the novel ends, the bombing of Pearl Harbor paralyzes the Japanese Hawaiian community. Despite his mother’s pleas for Kiyo to remain with the family, he volunteers as a way to serve his country and prove his loyalty—and as a means of escape from the stifling plantation system. A deus ex machina in the form of a pair of dice allows him to win $6,130 in a craps game, finally freeing the family from their filial obligation—and more important, freeing himself to pursue a life outside the islands, as he sets out for the European theater of war.

Sources

Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988.
———. “Bamboo Ridge Letter to the Editor.” Bamboo Ridge 5 (1979): 6–7.
———. “Problems of Writing in Dialect and Mixed Languages.” Bamboo Ridge 5 (1979): 8–10.
Odo, Franklin. Afterword, “The Hawaii Nisei: Tough Talk and Sweet Sugar,” to All I Asking for Is My Body, 105–110. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988.
Palomino, Harue. “Japanese Americans in Books or in Reality? Three Writers for Young Adults Who Tell a Different Story.” In How Much Truth Do We Tell Children? The Politics of Children’s Literature, edited by Betty Bacon, 125–134. Minneapolis, Minn.: MEP Publications, 1988.
Romaine, Suzanne. “Hau fo rait pijin: Writing in Hawai’i Creole English.” English Today 10 (1994): 20–24.
Sumida, Stephen. “Hawaii’s Complex Idyll: All I Asking for Is My Body and Waimea Summer.” In And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai’i, edited by Stephen H. Sumida, 110–163. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991.

Categories: Japanese Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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