In my bedroom there's a secret door up to the groceteria, which I could sneak into at night, after everyone went home. Then I can choose anything I want to eat when I get hungry, when all you, Maisie, Poppy, and I have to eat in the house is mayonnaise bread, peanut butter and jelly, or dry saimin.
And I would take Maisie and you with me too, so we can get all the ingredients to we need to make the biggest laulau dinner, the whole works--day-old poi, lomi salmon, haupia, pipi kaula, and squid luau, just for the three of us, and Poppy.
That's my wish. My one and only wish.
Ivah Ogata is a young girl living on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i. After her mother's death, she has had to take up the role of a mother, looking after her imaginative little brother Blu (whose name comes from "Blue Hawaii," a pet name from their mother inspired by his real, Presley) and her youngest sister Maisie, who has become non-verbal. Their father, Poppy, is still around, but he works nights as a janitor at the Bank of Hawaii, and his despair at the death of his wife has made him increasingly bitter and resentful, especially toward Blu. Ivah does her best, but poverty makes their situation a difficult one, her two charges are especially challenging. The "hanging" of the title comes from a moment when Blu, inspired by the westerns he sees on TV, imagines himself to be an outlaw and comes close to accidentally hanging himself. He makes ropes out of the good sheets, like characters in cartoons. He has an adventurous spirit, but without the discernment of age to temper it: Ivah finds him exposing himself to a local creep in exchange for candy. And yet, Blu is generous and kind, too--he'd made sure to get three candies, one for himself, one for Ivah, and one for Maisie.
The central conflict in Blu's Hanging is within Ivah, who feels torn between looking after Blu and Maisie and her own dreams of a different life. This plays out in some predictable ways, as when the one kind schoolteacher suggests that Ivah apply to a prestigious school in Honolulu. But the novel itself is far from predictable, and enlivens a familiar scenario with the richness of its imagery and the sharpness of its characters. Yamanaka evokes a Hawaii of the 1960's where a child's life is perilously close to sex, danger, and spoil, to dying dogs and cats in heat, to blood and urine, dirt and rust. It situates Ivah's conflict in a particularly Hawaiian setting, noting that she's the only one among the Japanese students who receives a token for free lunch at the school, an indignity usually reserved for the Portuguese laborer families and native Hawaiians. She butts head with her haole teachers, white women who have arrived in Hawaii on work programs and not discovered the tropical paradise they were expecting. Once, when she discovers that a teacher has been shaming Maisie for soiling her underpants (another psychological effect, we understand, of the mother's death), Ivah ransacks the teacher's dormitory and spreads her ripped panties all over the street. In one climactic and chilling moment, Ivah learns that her parents met at Moloka'i's leper colony, a place they once thought they'd spend the rest of their lives. Her mother's death, as it turns out, resulted from kidney failure from overuse of the sulfones used to treat leprosy--terrified that she would be sent back to the colony and separated from her children, their mother medicated herself to death.
"But tonight," Ivah writes, "I loosen the knots in the rope that tie him to me, and let the rope fall away. Fall from my brother, who has learned how to fly." In the end, Ivah is unable to protect Blu in the way she wants. And it's important, perhaps, that she understand this, which her mother could not. She saves him from further disgrace at the hands of the creepy old man, but she cannot keep him from having much-too-early sex with the girl next door, a sinister Portuguese that Ivah labels a "Human Rat." The one thing that didn't quite work for me was the end of the novel, when Ivah discovers that Blu in the midst of--spoiler alert--being tied up and sodomized by Uncle Paco, another local pederast who might more properly be categorized a sleazebag than creep. Is it too extreme or too melodramatic? Or is it a moment that doesn't shy away from exactly the kind of dangers that Ivah must let Blu confront himself if she is to follow her dreams in Honolulu? My feeling is that it goes a little too far, but I found the book mostly so convincing that I'm not bothered by it.
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