Lester Higata’s 20th Century

“Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the lanai behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids.” Thus begins Barbara Hamby’s magical narrative of the life of a Japanese American man in Honolulu. The quietly beautiful linked stories in Lester Higata’s 20th Century bring us close to people who could be, and should be, our friends and neighbors and families.

Starting in 1999 with his conversation with his father, continuing backward in time throughout his life with his wife, Katherine, and their children in Hawai‘i, and ending with his days in the hospital in 1946, as he heals from a wartime wound and meets the woman he will marry, Hamby recreates not just one but any number of the worlds that have shaped Lester. The world of his mother, as stubbornly faithful to Japan and Buddhism as Katherine’s mother is to Ohio and conservative Christianity; the world of his children, whose childhoods and adulthoods are vastly different from his own; the world after Pearl Harbor and Vietnam; the world of a professional engineer and family man: the worlds of Lester Higata’s 20th Centuryare filled with ordinary people living extraordinary lives, moving from farms to classrooms and offices, from racism to acceptance and even love, all in a setting so paradisal it should be heaven on earth.

Never forgetting the terrors of wartime—“We wake one morning with the wind racing toward us like an animal, and nothing is ever the same”—but focusing on the serene joys of peacetime, Lester populates his worlds with work, faith, and family among the palm trees and blue skies of the island he loves.

2010 Iowa Prize/John Simmons Award in Fiction

Honolulu Star Bulletin-Advertiser

“‘Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the lanai behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids.’

OK, you had us with that first sentence in this lovely collection of short stories. Thematically arranged around the life of a nisei veteran who married a haole, each tale providing a glimpse into Higata’s universe — and neighborhood — Hamby’s sense of character and motivation glitters like a jewel’s facets. Her sense of the changes Hawaii went through over the last half-dozen decades, and the way families and friends are interwoven within, is pretty amazing.

What’s more, unlike the turgid, self-pitying, self-important exposition you usually get from most “generational” literary works, Hamby’s style is light and bemused, even when dealing with horrors like mainland haole mothers-in-law. Or when a guy hides from his crazy ex-wife by becoming a cash-only carpenter on Iniki-slammed Kauai. Or even when the neighborhood mango trees are cut down to make way for a parking lot.

The author was previously known as a poet, and her unerring sense of wordplay is evident here, as is her delight in craftsmanship. This is the sort of literature that makes you glad writing was invented.” —Burl Burlingame, December 12, 2010

Basso Profundo

“The fragrant Hawaiian breezes blow through Barbara Hamby’s elegiac “Lester Higata’s 20th Century” like a gentle tidal flow, and they belie the sometimes fierce emotional ebbs and rushes that bedevil its characters. This is sumptuous, a delicious repast, a deserving award winner from the University of Iowa Press.

We witness several of Lester Higata’s life’s salient events in reverse order: we begin with 1999, the time of his death, and end up in 1946, when he falls in love while recuperating from war wounds suffered in Italy. Ms. Hamby has stitched together a series of stand-alone short pieces, A la “Olive Kitteredge,” to illuminate Lester’s life and times. She features Lester’s wife Katherine prominently, of course, along with his mother and father, and a few memorable neighbors, too. Each piece has a nearly impossible clarity while illuminating its weighty issues, and they lend themselves to the whole quilt beautifully. Ms. Hamby knows her subject intimately, and the emotional feel here is completely unerring. We have racial prejudice, greed, generational conflict, traditional vs. modern practices, xenophobia, and abuse issues all on display. But the feeling I take away is a quiet longing, a yearning for the islands, felt by one who grew up there and has been exiled.. But this longing never gets in the way of the plot or the characters. Lester fights for his country, sustains severe wounds, falls in love and marries, puts himself in harm’s way to protect a neighbor boy being chased down the street by a belt-wielding father, and on the eve of his death, jokes with his long-dead father about his insufferable mother. Characters recur story to story, of course, and if they’re lucky, they get a close treatment at Ms. Hamby’s deft hand.

Sometimes I search for a word to do justice to the flavor of a work, and the one that works here is “beguiling.” We rush from each short piece to the next, knowing we’ll reap another reward for our effort – and the anticipation is a chief delight. I applaud whoever bestows the John Simmons Short Fiction Award at the University of Iowa. Well done!” —Luke Sherwood

“Barbara Hamby loves her characters and trusts them, and it shows on every page of these deeply imagined and beautifully rendered stories. Each story sees like a gift, and the collection as a whole leaves the reader feeling as if these people are his own brothers and sister, cousins, lovers, and friends, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers–one’s own extended family–which, after all, Hamby seems to reveal, they are.” –Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers, and final judge for the Iowa Prize

“Oh my this is a very great collection. Innovative in structure but deeply accessible in every pitch-perfect moment, Lester Higata’s 20th Century brilliantly explores the yearning that is central not only to most great literary narratives but also to every life lived on this planet: the yearning for self, for identity, for a place in the universe. Barbara Hamby has for some time been one of America’s finest poets; with this book, she has become one of our finest fiction writers as well.” –Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain