Hawaii is a world apart, not quite another country but far more than just another American state. The little town of Volcano, 4,000 feet above sea level on the Big Island, between Kilauea and Mauna Loa, is one of the Hawaiian islands' hidden treasures, a place of cool air, dense green forests, and night skies lit up by the glow from Kilauea's lava flows.
It's also the birthplace of poet Garrett Hongo, whose return to his origins is the springboard for Volcano, a work of lyrical prose by a master of language, and a wonderful introduction to the subtlety and complexity of life in Hawaii.
"Volcano is a big chunk of the sublime I'd been born to--the craters and ancient firepit and huge black seas of hardened lava, the rain forest lush with all varieties of ferns, orchids, exotic gingers, and wild lilies, the constant rain and sunshowers all dazzled me, exalted me."
Hongo walks through the lava fields and rain forest around Volcano with a determination to bring this "exotic and slightly miraculous place" to life on the page. His success is due to his extraordinary gift for language and the extreme precision of his observation. His work is a reminder that poets are the most accurate reporters of all.
A poet's gift for observation fills Volcano with detailed descriptions of the natural world that come alive with the music of language, taking us to a world of o'hia forests and hapu'u ferns, of pahoehoe lava glowing at night in Kilauea's East Rift Zone. Hongo's words urge us to slow down and savor their rhythms, to return to favorite passages and read aloud:
"A warm mist, blue and then, losing its cerulean hue, shading out to gray, gauzelike in the afternoon light... I could tell at once it was a place 'of moonlight and rain,' as they say in Japan, ugetsu, a world of faery and imagination where the dead might dance in the right light, where the milky river of stars and the swallow bridge of heaven might set down and be a passageway between this and the afterlife."
Volcano also offers a look at the many varieties of Japanese-American life in America, reminding us that Asian identity in this country is a long way from its portrayal in the mass media. Hongo writes with compassion of the immigrant issei, eager to do well in a new country, the nisei, enduring the shame of the wartime "relocation" camps, and the sansei, growing up in a world their ancestors could never have foreseen. Each is movingly portrayed within the author's own family.
Garrett Hongo will take you to places you've never been, no matter who you are, with a master's technique and a sense of humor that never deserts him. Volcano revives the reader's powers of observation, encouraging us to look more closely, remember more precisely, the next time.
