“Terrarium V” by Charles Cohan. From the collection of Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

It is Sunday morning in Honolulu, Dec. 7, 1941, and it is Melba Yamada’s eleventh birthday. She awakes with the first light seeping through the rice-bag curtains, and the first doves lowing in the trees. The mynahs are just beginning to rouse themselves into affectionate grouchiness, and the palms are barely moving as they finger the edge of the tin roof. She hears her mother moving quietly in the kitchen. The rice is already finished and creamy miso soup is swelling beneath its lid. Her father will be home soon from his night on the sea, smelling of fish. He will eat, then go to the bathhouse on Beretania Street and steam until the mahimahi, the aku, the opah and kajiki no longer inhabit his pores.

Melba has slept in her dress so as not to disturb her sisters and brothers. She steps over them, curled on their futons. “Ohai, Okaasan.”

Her mother is robed in clean yukata, bound by the oldest obi she brought with her from Japan when she was only seventeen. Sticking out from the crisp kimono hem are her two knobby, ugly, adult feet planted solidly on the immaculate linoleum. Her mother’s face is flat and blank, not unlike the soup, and just as nourishing. Her thick, gleaming hair is piled high and anchored by two red wooden hashi. She answers Melba’s “good morning” with a tilt of the head, indicating the two absolutely perfect musubi sitting on the table. Inside each rice cake is a tangy ume.

Melba wants to kiss her mother. She always wants to kiss her mother, but she cannot. Her family is not the kissing type. She scoops up the two musubi, knowing they are her mother’s kisses. “Domo, Okaasan.” She calls her goodbye over her shoulder, “Ite mairi masu.”

She is almost out the door when her mother says with obvious effort, “Happy birthday,” in precise English, the “happy” coming out just fine, the “birthday” a little shaky in the middle.

Melba stops, so pleased she turns around and bows from the waist, keeping her eyes on the floor. She moves toward the door and doesn’t turn her back until one foot is outside. This is the dance of affection they do, she and her mother. The screen door closes and she runs barefoot for the mango tree to wait for her best friend, Sweetie Wai‘oli.

Top to botton: “The Wayfinder—Bailer” and “The Wayfinder—Spine” by Kloe Kang. From the collection of Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

Every Sunday morning, the girls pick plumeria for Sweetie’s beautiful mother, who dances in Waikīkī at La Hula Rhumba on Sunday nights. She pays the girls a nickel each to make the lei for herself, three musicians and two other dancers, fingertip length, sixty-eight flowers exactly for a dancer’s lei; shorter, forty-eight flowers, for the musicians; plus hair flowers—four hundred fourteen plumerias in all. They have to finish picking in time for Sweetie to make nine-thirtyMass or the nuns will kill her.

Carefully, with sure, catlike moves, Melba climbs up the mango tree to where the branches sway with danger, and perches in the crook of the trunk. From here she can look down on her neighborhood and watch, unseen, all the comings and goings, listen to dogs and roosters, to people calling to each other. Melba sees who spits in the street when they think no one is looking. She sees the look of pain on the face of Auntie Kapu as she walks heavily from side to side, supporting her great weight first on one swollen ankle and then the other. Auntie Kapu fills out her ample mu‘umu‘u all around. Her hips are of truly awesome size and her ‘ōkole is butter. Auntie Kapu stops every so often to catch her breath, wipe her brow and touch, as if for strength, the hibiscus in her graying hair, which is wound into a tight, neat knot at the nape of her neck. When Auntie Kapu sees someone coming, she pulls herself into a queenly immensity, smiles generously, whether she knows them or not, and greets them with “Aloha.”

If they are Hawaiian, they will respond, “Aloha no, Auntie. Pehea ‘oe?”

And she will nod, “Maika‘i.”

If they are Japanese they will not speak, but bow their heads and hurry on. Melba knows all the subtle degrees of bowing, how to give slight in apparent humility.

If they are Chinese they may very well respond to Auntie in Hawaiian because they have been here awhile and have learned it. Or they may inquire, if they know her, “How you stay, Auntie?”

If they are haole, and a man, they may tip a hat. Haoles need hats because their skin gets haole rot in the sun. Not one of the passers-by, no matter who they are or how they answer, will see Auntie’s pain. Nobody but Melba, looking down from the mango tree with the perspective of the Buddha, knows how the Hawaiian lady hurts.

Melba also knows the sounds of the military airplanes that fly intoHickam, Pearl and Wheeler. When she hears the drone of an engine, she closes her eyes and listens carefully to decide which plane it is: the beaky P-40 or the bulldog-faced Dauntless Dive Bomber. She is positive she knows more about airplanes than her brothers— Peter, who just turned fifteen and thinks that makes him an expert on everything, and Raymond, who reads so much at twelve, his eyes are already wrecked and he couldn’t see the difference between an airplane and a mynah bird if his life depended on it.

Melba’s favorite airplane is the China Clipper. She always hears it before she sees it coming around Diamond Head. She loves the luxurious drone as it glides elegantly past Waikīkī and over Honolulu Harbor. She sees its full-bellied bulk and ducklike pontoons wing past Kalihi Kai. High among the mangoes, she sings, “Far away places with strange sounding names, calling, calling me.” She draws out the notes dreamily, “Going to China, or maybe Siam ... ” As the plane descends low over Ke‘ehi Lagoon in the final stretch toward Pearl Harbor, she pictures the excitement of the passengers looking out the windows at her ocean, spread out below them in the heavenly teals of a peacock’s feathers. To their right they will gasp at Melba’s brooding mountains, at the curtains of color hanging over the valleys, where sunlit rain dances down in veils. She is as proud of her island, beautiful O‘ahu, as if it were a parent who spoke English.

Savoring the vinegar and sugar flavors of her musubi, feeling the crunch of the nori wrapper and eating around the middle, saving the little plum until last, she predicts to herself that this birthday will somehow be a day of days. She is so happy she can almost fly with an unbearable joy inflating her body, lifting every inch of her, wildly singing, into the air.

Sweetie is coming down the road running, skipping and walking, swinging her cloth bag, talking to the clouds and trees, not out loud, of course, and not even consciously, just attuned to their harmonies. Sweetie is almost always airborne.

Melba scrambles down to meet her.

“Hau‘oli lā hānau,” Sweetie says, handing her a tiny seashell that is the most beautiful shade of lavender Melba has ever seen. “For happy birthday.”

“Where you find this?”

“Kailua.”

“Not.”

“For real.”

“Thank you,” Melba says and hands her the second musubi.

Barefoot, the girls walk and skip, heading into the valley. Balancing carefully on wooden planks because the water is cold, they cross the ‘auwai in three different places to get to their favorite plumeria trees.

The girls work quietly, contentedly, humming and counting as they pinch soft blossoms from stems, being careful to take neither buds nor brown-edged “deadheads,” and most especially not to break off the clusters, for this is not pono.

“Was that seventy-seven or seventy-six?” asks Sweetie.

“Seventy-six. I’m up to eighty-two. Eighty-three, eighty-four ... ”

Melba hears planes overhead. It strikes her that they don’t sound like P-40s or Dauntless Dive Bombers, and they certainly are not the China Clipper. Something is off. She continues to pick and count while the planes rumble on the periphery of her attention. She hears little pops way up high.

At first the girls don’t look up. The noises get louder, like distant thunder. Then they glance at each other and step from the shade of the plumeria tree, from the umbrella of flowers, and look to the sky. Planes, like a disturbed nest of wasps, are swooping, soaring, diving. Tiny puffs of dark smoke pop into the perfectly blue Hawaiian morning.

Melba, standing on an old lava wall, looks up, shielding her eyes with her arm. “What they doing?” Sweetie, unperturbed and determined to catch up while her friend is distracted, goes back to plucking. “Ninety-two. They must be playing war games or whatevah. Ninety-three ...”

The puffs become dark clouds crowding the sky. Melba is fascinated. “Look.” She points. Thick black smoke is towering in the west, from the direction of ‘Aiea and Pearl Harbor. Possibly it’s a cane fire.

The girls stand there in the sunshine, flowers in their arms, faces upturned, and then they see, as one plane flies low and very near them, the large blood-red Hi No Maru, the rising sun, on the underside of the wing.Melba feels her heart stop. She looks at Sweetie. “Those are Japonee planes.”

Sweetie bites her lip. “We go for home.”

They race down the valley, skipping over the ‘auwai, planks clattering, flowers flying. Sweetie’s big brother, Junior, is running to meet them, eyes wide and feverish with excitement. “It’s war. We having one war.”

Melba’s mother is waiting for her on the front steps.

The family is gathered around the radio. It’s playing “The Star Spangled Banner.” And then it goes dead. Her father fiddles with the dials, ear to the radio, and gets the police band. He appears not to notice Melba’s arrival, has perhaps not noticed or considered her jeopardy, being out there, unprotected under the open sky, away from home. He is pale and stone silent. She knows he, too, is frightened, her amazing samurai father. She wants to cry.

The radio bristles with static and urgency. Pearl Harbor is burning, ships going down. Schofield Barracks has been strafed, the airfield at Hickam is in flames. Anyone with medical training is asked to report to Pearl Harbor at once. Citizens are ordered to stay off the streets. The tofu factory on Kuakini Street has been hit. An ambulance is needed on McCully Street. Except for the squawking radio, it is so quiet inside the Yamada house, it is like someone has been born or died. The attack lasts two hours. By the time the last red emblazoned wings peel away, Pearl Harbor lies in ruins and more than three thousand people are dead. President Roosevelt comes on the radio and says that Melba’s birthday will live in infamy.

The Yamada children go out in the yard and sit solemnly under the mango tree. They know their parents need to be alone to speak their fears in whispers. Hazel, who is eight, asks, “Why the Japonese bomb us? They no know we Japonee, too?” Peter snaps at her from his full gangly majesty. “We’re not Japanese. We’re American.”

Melba, who could be maddeningly precise, says, “We’re both.”

“I wish I was older.” Peter paces the yard. “I’d fight for my country.”

Melba suddenly feels sick to her stomach. She runs to the hibiscus bushes and, with great satisfaction, throws up, heaving and gasping, then collapses in the grass. On this birthday, her life has changed forever.

Peter sits beside her, putting his hand on her forehead. “You okay?”

She nods, her eyes tearing. “I’m empty.”

Hazel brings their mother, who fusses over Melba and leads her to the house, easing her down to the bedroom futons, which in all the commotion haven’t yet been rolled up. Okaasan washes her face with a cool cloth, puts a glass of water to her lips and soothes her with soft Japanese words.

RITA ARIYOSHI is a multiple winner of Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism awards and a recipient of the Pushcart Prize for Literature. She is a frequent contributor to SPIRIT OF ALOHA.