“Hanau ka Ua: Hawaiian Rain Names”
Collette Leimomi Akana with Kiele Gonzalez
Kamehameha Publishing, $30
Just as our parents, filled with hope and love, chose names to identify and celebrate us as unique individuals, the Hawaiians named the many different rains that bless our islands.
“They knew that one place could have several different rains, and that each rain was distinguishable from another,” writes Colette Leimomi Akana in “Hanau ka Ua: Hawaiian Rain Names,” a lovely collection of signifiers for every imaginable form of isle shower, storm, drizzle, drop and mist, from A to W.
“They knew when a particular rain would fall, its color, duration, intensity, the path it would take, the sound it made on the trees, the scent it carried, and the effect it had on people,” continues Akana, who with her daughter, Kiele Gonzalez, culled these rain names and the stories informing them from more than 200 years of chants, poetry and songs, excerpted here in Hawaiian with English translations.
More than anything, place defines rain, which morphs according to wind, time and district. There is Waahila, a rain “associated with Nuuanu,” also found throughout the Koolau and, at times, in Waikiki. “Splendid is the scent of Nuuanu upon the wind / The panting breath of the Waahila rain.”
There is Paupili, which means “to soak pili grass,” a rain associated with Maui but also Hawaii island, Oahu and Kauai. “It is adorning the trees / The koa, the amau fronds are soaked / Palai fronds of Mahaikona,” says one of many rainy laments, this one for the death of Kamehameha IV.
“The rains of our islands speak of love, fertility, and life,” writes Sig Zane, who produced the cover as well as a suite of plant illustrations in saturated color transparencies for the book, which is beautifully designed by Barbara Pope.
Next time it rains, take a cue from this marvelous book and go outside to experience the beauty.
“My Name Is Yoshiko”
Yoshiko Susan Kawaguchi Matsumoto with Pamela Varma Brown
Write Path, $12.95
In 1947, when California-born Yoshiko Matsumoto was 28 years old and living in Chicago with Tom, her Kauai-born husband and a World War II veteran, she learned that she had uterine cancer and would not be able to bear children. It was a blow she took in stride — with “gaman: enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity” — just as she and her family had borne being “evacuated” and interned during the war, first in a horse stall at the Santa Anita racetrack and then in a Rohwer, Ark., “relocation center.”
She remembers, “It was heartbreaking to watch Japanese men and women have to walk away from businesses that they had spent years building, with all their belongings left inside their stores.” An aspiring fashion designer, Yoshiko left her sewing machine for safekeeping with a non-Japanese neighbor.
The Matsumotos adopted a little girl, Rachel, who eventually gave them three grandchildren. At age 69 she received reparations and thought how her father would have valued the apology more. But this simple, touching memoir is above all a love story about Yoshiko’s life with her cheerful husband, who worked as a mailman while she held various jobs until they retired to Kauai, where, 94 and a widow, she still lives. Co-written with Pamela Brown, who has edited and published two volumes of “Kauai Stories,” Matsumoto’s story is told in a forthright, conversational voice that makes it a pleasure to read.
