how to live. In the brief “Presumption” sections,
Hatterr tries to clarify the instructions for himself
as well as the reader.
The main part of the narrative is in the “Life-
encounter” sections of the book. These are ac-
counts of how Hatterr actually tries to follow the
instructions given by the saints. He does not suc-
ceed well in his exploits and is continuously saved
from trouble by his friend Banerrji and the law-
yer Sri Y. Beliram. Later Beliram becomes another
sage, Sriman Y. Rambeli, whose novel is critiqued
and defended by Hatterr in the concluding chapter
that Desani added to the 1972 version.
Bibliography
All about G. V. Desani. “Who was G. V. Desani?”
Available online. URL: http://www.desani.org. Accessed
September 15, 2006. The Web site has begun to
collect and present information on G. V. Desani
and his works.
Rushdie, Salman. Introduction. In Mirrorwork: 50
Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, edited by
Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, vii–xx. New
York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Joel Kuortti
All I Asking for Is My Body Milton A.
Murayama (1975)
MILTON A. MURAYAMA’s award-winning All I Asking
for Is My Body (1975) is one of the first novels writ-
ten in Hawaiian local dialects. Drawing from his
own experiences as a boy living in both the coastal
and upcountry towns, Lahaina and Pu’ukoli’i,
respectively, Murayama depicts his young pro-
tagonist Kiyoshi Oyama, who grows up before and
during World War II in the fictional beach town of
Pepelau and the upcountry Frontier Mill planta-
tion camp in Kahana. All I Asking is the first part of
a planned trilogy: the Oyama family saga contin-
ues in Five Years on a Rock (1994) and in Plantation
Boy (1998).
All I Asking’s plot pivots on the repayment of a
$6,000 family debt that Kiyoshi, the second son of
Japanese immigrants, eventually pays off. The novel
is divided into three sections. The first part, “I’ll
Crack Your Head Kotsun,” based on Murayama’s
1959 short story, introduces the grueling demands
made on individuals and families by the class-
stratified Hawaiian plantation society in the 1930s
and 1940s. In the second section, “The Substitute,”
the author illustrates how cultural traditions are
remembered and revised within immigrant com-
munities. Sometimes, as Kiyoshi finds out, some
cultural practices have been modified within in-
dividual families to accommodate their new sur-
roundings. In the final section, “All I Asking for
Is My Body,” Kiyoshi’s childhood world of family,
school, and friends becomes firmly embedded in
history and global affairs with the exacerbation of
race politics when Pearl Harbor is attacked.
As scholars have noted, the distinctive pidgin
dialogue—an amalgamation of the English, Japa-
nese, Spanish, Filipino, and Hawaiian languages—
strikes the reader from the opening paragraphs.
As Kiyoshi describes, locals “spoke four languages:
good English in school, pidgin English among
ourselves, good or pidgin Japanese to our parents
and the other old folks” (5). The diverse ethnic
composition of Hawaii provided a rich foundation
for an improvised language as a means to commu-
nicate across generations and different linguistic
backgrounds. Nevertheless, rather than a naïve
celebration of difference, Murayama gives readers
a realistic picture of the racial and economic hi-
erarchies that divided laborers along ethnic lines,
particularly when Kiyoshi describes the organiza-
tion of the hillside camp. In the camp, the white
overseer lives at the highest point of the hill. His
home is followed by, in descending order, those of
the Portuguese, Spanish, nisei luna (second-gen-
eration Japanese foremen), then Japanese, and fi-
nally the Filipino (96). Through the characters of
Kiyoshi and his brother Toshio, Murayama shows
that “American” values such as hard work, love of
learning, and ambition do not necessarily guaran-
tee equal opportunities for Japanese Americans.
All I Asking also offers an equally scathing critique
of the injustices in both the Japanese family and
the plantation systems.
Although the short-story version (“I’ll Crack
Your Head Kotsun”) was published in the ArizonaAll I Asking for Is My Body 11