Quotes from Milton Murayama

He was probably the only number one son in Kahana putting up such a fight, but you couldn't tell because every family was a walled city, and you never knew unless you were inside. And if you were on the inside, you never talked stink about the family, but kept up the family's face.

He'd explode and in a flash you'd see something anew, and you were never the same again.

I look like the aggressor, he'd say to me, but I not. I fighting for my life. The old man no need be a bully, the system the bully. He can afford to act the nice guy and pretend I doing him wrong. He can afford to be easygoing when he sitting on me and sucking me dry. The other number one sons crab like hell too, but they doan have the nerve to crab to their old men. They crab to me, they crab to each other, they crab to their younger brothers.

Grandfather could've declared bankruptcy and not pay back his debts. That's the trouble with the Oyamas. They want to act big and generous and honest with the outsiders. They want to put up a big face at the expense of their children.

Once you got hard on yourself, it was easy to be hard on others.

It just didn't make sense, I kept thinking. Here they worried you to death, made you a nervous wreck, don't do this, don't do that, don't do anything that'd bring shame to the Japanese race, don't be a rotten apple and spoil the whole barrel. What chance have I got, me, a single apple getting slammed by a barrelful of rottenness? Even if I tried deliberately, every day of my life, I wouldn't be able to produce one-thousandth of the massive shame of Pearl Harbor.

As long as Tosh was home, I kept wishing he'd stop crabbing so much. But now I missed his crabbing. I couldn't crab the way he could, and things kept building up in me. All this reserve and discipline and patience and self-sacrifice only wore you down and made you feel real low.

All this discipline was like pinching a balloon, I bulged somewhere else, especially inside my head.

You were in your warm secure cave with enough food and your own woman while a storm and wild beasts raged outside. The shadows and shapes which seemed so solid at night evaporated in the daylight. You couldn't blot out the rest of the world during the day, it was everywhere, oppressive, top-heavy, leaning on you.