Song Of The Exile

An engaging love story dissipates long before this chronicle of a native Hawaiian family's melancholy experiences comes to a minor-key conclusion with statehood in 1953. Davenport (Shark Dialogues, 1994, etc.) introduces us to Keo and Sunny, young lovers, in Hawaii during the late 1930s. After hearing a visiting jazz group, Keo is entranced by the music's energy and emotion and vows to master it. Dew, the group's leader, tells him he must come to New Orleans or Paris someday, and Keo vows to take Sunny with him in pursuit of his fortunes. Initially unable to travel, she finally reunites with Keo in 1940 in Paris. As the Nazis march into the city, pregnant Sunny flees to rescue her lost sister in Shanghai. Feeling guilty for having let her go alone, Keo follows and finds Sunny and his newborn daughter before he's imprisoned in Shanghai. Sunny's sister and daughter die, then Sunny spends the remainder of the war in Rabaul, where she's forced to serve as one of hundreds of thousands of comfort women--girls, really, some as young as ten--for Japanese soldiers. Released from prison, Keo returns to Hawaii, picks up his jazz music, and, while touring through postwar Asia, continues his unsuccessful hunt for Sunny. His heartache grows, his music declines, and the plot fans out to encompass several additional characters, including Endo, a former Japanese soldier who once saved Keo's life in Paris but who also participated in the abuse of Sunny on Rabaul. The tale ends with statehood affirming cultural pride but also bringing the expectation of further exploitation. Davenport has a clarity of vision that makes her descriptions of Hawaii a match for the island's Mush environment, though her attempts to vary the themes of her core story add just complicated overgrowth.