Waiawa Station (1934) Nakashima Naoto Translated with an introduction by Ken K. Ito In a key moment in Nakashima Naoto's "Waiawa Station" (Waiawa eki, 1934), an elegiac first-person story about a Hawaii boyhood in the early twentieth century, the narrator strains to talk with his Japan-born brother. After casting about for shared topics of interest, he hits upon the idea of asking about his brother's reading: "Shigeru, what sorts of books are you reading now?" "What?" he said, turning his side to me as though he were thinking of something else. But he knew I was studying him. With a thin smile, he said, "A born-in-Hawaii (Hawaii umare) like you wouldn't know." At that moment, I was somehow afraid of my brother. I regretted getting into this troubling conversation. A gulf opens between the brothers, a gulf of knowledge and understanding that terrifies the narrator. The term translated here with deliberate awkwardness, Hawaii umare, requires some explanation. Although it is used as a nominative in the grammar of the original Japanese, it cannot but raise a question: A Hawaii-born what? This is because Hawaii umare is frequently used in adjectival form, as in Hawaii umare no […]. Considering the narrator's discomfort, as well as the topic of the conversation which turns on cultural literacy, the implied subject is likely "Japanese," as in Hawaii umare no Nihonjin. But this raises further questions: If the narrator is Japanese like his brother, why is one brother incomprehensible to the other? What are the cultural and linguistic competencies, the experiences, and sentiments that distinguish Hawaii-born Japanese? These are the questions that run through "Waiawa Station," whose most prominent plot line involves the narrator's relationship with Shigeru, the older brother who had been left behind in Japan when his parents emigrated and is unable to adjust to the culture of Hawaii and work on the plantation when he arrives later in Hawaii at the age of 18. [End Page 229] Shigeru's own sense of dislocation underpins his condescension and contempt for the narrator. His hopelessness will eventually lead to suicide. Although the other sections of the story can seem episodic—a collection of childhood moments set in Waiawa—they are best read as a counterweight to Shigeru's sense of loss: the narrator recounts with warmth and longing the human connections of a village located ten miles outside of Honolulu on the shores of Pearl Harbor. "Waiawa Station" is an expression of a deeply felt sense of place. These themes draw upon the writer's own life. "Waiawa Station" is autobiographical fiction that invites the reader to equate the protagonist/narrator with the writer—beginning with the protagonist's name, which is the writer's own. The life of the character overlaps with that of the writer. The biographical Nakashima Naoto was born in Waipahu in 1904. His family moved to Waiawa during his childhood. He attended elementary school and Japanese language school in Pearl City and went on to Kaiulani School, a public grammar school in Honolulu. Contemporary newspaper accounts show that he had a brother named Shigeru who committed suicide in 1917 by throwing himself in front of a train. Shigeru's death caused all the members of Naoto's family, except for his father, to travel to Japan shortly afterwards to repatriate his remains. The Nakashimas settled in Kumamoto, the parents' home prefecture. Naoto attended school there until he left to go to Waseda University in Tokyo, where he studied English literature but did not graduate. In the late 1920s, he began to publish fiction in coterie magazines in Japan and in Japanese language newspapers in Hawaii; his stories invariably centered on two subjects: a Hawaii childhood and the lives of returning immigrant families. "Waiawa Station," published in Bungakkai (Literary World) in 1934, was one of the few Nakashima stories carried in a major literary magazine. Nakashima moved in literary circles in Tokyo, and "Waiawa Station" shows the marks of Japanese literary discourses: the deliberate autobiography of the story exploits conventions of writing and reading associated with the shishōsetsu, or "I-novel"; and the group portrait of adolescents growing into...
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Dec 16, 2023
Tina Shrestha 
Open Access