Jon Shirota's Leilani's Hibiscus
By Jane Kuniyoshi(Japanese .pdf also available)
On Saturday, September 14, 2002, at the James Armstrong Theater in Torrance, CA, Jon Shirota's play, Leilani's Hibiscus was performed at both 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Translated from the English version into Japanese by Katsunori Yamazato, Ph.D., Vice President of the University of the Rhukyus, the actors performed the whole play in a mixture of Japanese, Hogen (Okinawan dialect) and Hawaiian pidgin.
The play was directed by Mr. Koki Ryosyu. The story (plot) of Leilani's Hibiscus is a warm and poignant love story between a native Hawaiian girl (Leilani) and an Okinawan man, Yasuichi Gusuda. The place is Maui, Hawaii, in the summer of 1960. They are both deeply in love, in spite of their cultural differences. He leaves for Okinawa, promising he would return and marry her. She gives him a parting gift of a red hibiscus, a flower that grows abundantly in Hawaii as well as in Okinawa. The hibiscus will remind him of Leilani until he returns to Hawaii. After nineteen long years, Yasuichi returns to Hawaii for the purpose of transferring the ashes of his brother and his wife back to Okinawa. While at the gravesite, memories of nineteen years ago haunt his memories. He confronts Leilani, now married with three children, the eldest girl, Emi, his love child. With every intention to return to Leilani, as promised, due to unforeseen circumstances such as the war, sadly, their dream to be together was shattered.
In the end, all parties involved are reconciled and accept the solution of Yasuichi's mission to return his brother's ashes back to Okinawa and his niece and nephew's opposition to seeing their parents leave Hawaii. Yasuichi leaves for Okinawa with part of their ashes left in Hawaii and part to return to their homeland, Okinawa. This love story, at times hilariously funny and tearfully tender, binds Okinawa and Hawaii. Although war, racial prejudices, language and family are the primary issues, the local and universal worlds are simultaneously presented in this multilayered play.
The actors captured the full essence of the story that Jon Shirota wanted to tell. The audiences at both performances consisted largely of people from Hawaii of Okinawan ancestry that related to that particular time in Hawaii's and Okinawa's history. Jon Shirota, from Maui, Hawaii, himself, writes about people of Hawaii and his own ethnic background with deep understanding for its customs and culture.
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