Centered on Hawaii and spanning the time between the close of World War II to the mid-1980s, “Dying in a Strange Land” is 85-year-old Milton Murayama’s fourth and avowed final novel about the travails of the Oyama family.

The Oyamas are Japanese immigrants and their children who have experienced the poverty of Hawaiian sugarcane plantation field labor. In “Dying,” the children—seven brothers and sisters—have escaped the plantation. In doing so, they have rebelled against their conservative parents who want their offspring close to home and under their control.

Murayama’s previous novels move between1914 and the 60s. Their first person narrators alternately narrate “Dying,” giving it three contentious perspectives. They are Kiyo (Kyoshi), Murayama’s alter ego, from “All I Asking for Is My Body” (1975); his mother, the patient and long suffering Sawa, from “Five Years on a Rock” (1994) and Tosh (Toshio), the bitter eldest son, who tells his tale in “Plantation Boy” (1998).

In “All I Asking” Tosh’s parents make him drop out of high school to work in the sugarcane fields to help pay off the family debt of $6,000. They say it is his duty as the eldest son and an obligation he owes them as “oya koko” or filial piety. Unable to join the army like Kiyo because of a deaf ear (the result of his father’s violence), the embittered Tosh takes correspondence courses in drafting with the dream of becoming an architect.

In “Plantation Boy,” Tosh (who changes his name to Steven) achieves the impossible by becoming Hawaii’s first high school dropout to get an architect’s license. In “Dying,” he is a millionaire. Yet he remains astringently angry with his parents, whom he calls the “old futs.” His anger poisons the lives of three generations of Oyamas. His parents have dismissed him as a bad son; yet Tosh builds a house for Sawa and Isao and pays for their trips to the U.S. mainland and Japan.

Sawa had come to Hawaii as Isao Oyama’s picture bride in 1914. Like Isao, she lives out her life torn between Japan and America. As she approaches the close of her life, her outlook remains that of conservative rural Meiji Japanese. But her loyalties are to her adopted country. Like her husband, she hates Japan’s militarist state that led Japan World War II. Isao calls Tojo “baka.”

Isao is a brilliant calligrapher, community problem solver, marriage arranger and poet: a blessing to everyone except his family, which he pushes into debt. A failed fisherman, he dies a poor plantation worker. Sowa, a talented seamstress, keeps the family from ruin. It is Sowa’s narrative that sews together the seemingly loose-ended structure of “Dying.”

Kiyo (who becomes Morris) has been lucky. Service in Army Intelligence during World War II allows him to use the G.I. Bill to study Japanese and Chinese at Columbia University. While in the Army, he wins $6,000 playing craps and pays off the family debt. Yet in “Dying,” his life is troubled. He is plagued by diabetes. Late middle age finds him a frustrated writer collecting rejection slips while saddled with a demanding job with Customs in San Francisco. (He quits smoking because he believes he needs an extra-long life to achieve success.)

Temperamental Kiyo marries twice, both times to white women: first to the brilliant but neurotic Audrey Dutton, and then to the thespian Maud Byrnes who understands his creative needs. At 53, he desperately self-publishes a novel similar to Murayama’s “All I Asking” that wins limited critical acclaim.

Sawa and Isao consider Kiyoshi the good son who will care for them in old age. The warm-hearted Kiyo brings Sawa to live with him in San Francisco after Isao’s death—with disastrous results. Unable to adjust to San Francisco and Kiyo and Maud’s bohemian life, Sawa shuttles between her other children’s homes in California and Washington until her health deteriorates.

As “Dying” engulfs you in the Oyamas’ perennial squabbles over money and honor, you realize that no matter how successful the children of Isao and Sawa are, they are permanently wounded by the privations of plantation life. Yet it is this common heritage that binds the family in joy and grief. At off moments, they still speak to each other in a pidgin mixture of English, Hawaiian and Japanese. Isao and Sawa, who can only effectively communicate in Japanese, live and die nowhere at home.

“Dying” may at first bewilder readers unacquainted with Murayama’s previous novels. But its flashbacks minimize confusions. There’s a glossary in back for frequently used Hawaiian and Japanese words.

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3 Comments

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  magpie at 02:01 PM JST - 17th September

  Interesting. Anyone read this and recommend?

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  miumaru at 01:14 PM JST - 19th October

  Seems like an interesting story. I'd like to read it.

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  jeancolmar at 09:38 PM JST - 24th October

  I've read this book and all the other Murayama novels. Highly recommended.

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