Kira-Kira

Hank drives his pickup right up to Sammy and Lynn. He tells the girls to get into the bed of the truck and puts Sammy on the passenger seat. They hear dogs in the distance. He drives off the field and onto a street, zooming rapidly. Even scared and feeling that she is probably in trouble, Katie finds the trip exhilarating. She decides Hank is a hero.

At the hospital, Hank doesn’t wait for the girls. He carries Sammy inside and places him on a gurney. Caregivers take Sammy for treatment immediately. Hank sits in the waiting room with the girls. He finds a coloring book and crayons for Katie, which she accepts and uses even though she feels like she is a little too old for coloring. She finds Hank different from other white people she has encountered so far in life: “White people were not really mean to me, but they were rarely nice, either. And here was Hank, acting like we were the most important people in the world” (153-54).

Though upset about Sammy’s leg, Katie’s parents express gratitude for Hank’s help. Katie recognizes that her mother’s pad smells of urine. The doctor notices the odor, though Hank does not seem to notice it at all. Riding home with Mother, Katie assumes she is going to be in trouble, but Mother says nothing. That night Sammy sleeps in the bedroom. Katie tells her father that their bicycles are still on the road by the field. Father searches for the bikes, but they are gone. The family cannot afford to buy replacements. Katie’s father talks about all the things he wishes he could do for his children, but cannot.

Lynn grows so ill she cannot attend school at the beginning of the new year. She remains in the hospital for two months. This means that sometimes Sammy and Katie must go with their father to the chicken hatchery where he works 12-hour shifts sexing chickens. The other sexers enjoy having Katie and Sammy inside the building, since movement in and out of the hatchery is open compared to the rendering plant.

In the middle of one night, the plant loses power. Mr. Lyndon contacts a repairman to fix the generator and calls a deputy sheriff to bring the repairman to the plant using police lights and siren. Upset that workers must euthanize all the male chicks, Katie steals two of the little male chickens, takes them out into an adjacent field, and sets them free. She and Sammy walk across the road into a pecan grove. They pick up pecans that Sammy cracks open with his jaw teeth.

Finally in November, Lynn returns from the hospital. Katie goes out of her way to take care of her sister. When Lynn remarks that she would like to have some pink fingernail polish, Katie goes to the variety store and steals some. She paints her sister’s fingernails. Though observed stealing, Katie does not get arrested. She feels good about what she has done, but the next day a store employee shows up at her house and Katie’s mother pays for the nail polish. Then, her father sits Katie down. He tells her that Lynn has lymphoma, and then exhorts Katie to be the best that she can be: “I know you’re a good girl, […] I’ve always known that. But sometimes I like to see it, just to remind me. You think you could remind me of that a little more often” (176). Katie looks up lymphoma in the encyclopedia and discovers that it is a potentially fatal illness.

She goes to the store to apologize to the manager. He lectures her, telling her about Oscar, a boy in his family who started on a life of crime when he was about her age.

Lynn sometimes gets better and comes to the table to eat with them, but other times she cannot. Katie and her mother occasionally carry Lynn outside and lay her on the ground so Lynn can look up at the heavens and enjoy the sky. On some occasions, her eyes glaze over and she does not seem to see the sky at all.

The family enters a difficult period. Lynn’s health does not improve, her medical bills create financial difficulties for her parents, and she is now so physically frail that she requires constant attendance. Once night, Lynn makes many demands of Katie, never satisfied with what Katie does for her. The sisters grow so angry that they say they hate each other.

As the holidays approach, Uncle takes Katie and Sam on a camping trip with his family, Silly, and a surveyor friend named Jedda-Boy. Trying to follow Jedda-Boy to a new camping location, Uncle gets lost and gets stuck, nearly driving his truck off a cliff. Finally, with Silly working the clutch while Uncle and Katie sit in the truck bed for traction, they get unstuck. As they drive away, the passenger door falls open and Katie falls onto the road. She realizes then that Uncle has done many things for which she could get him in trouble, but he bribes her with candy not to say anything to her parents. At the campground, she has a wonderful time playing with her two boy cousins and Silly. The girls trick the boys into pretending they are deer and the girls are hunters. Instead of hunting the boys, the girls go back to the camp and play cards. Katie feels renewed when she goes an hour and a half without thinking about Lynn: “I felt refreshed, as if I could now sit with her for ten years straight if necessary to help her get well” (191).

Katie imagines the different things that they will do once Lynn gets well. The biggest holiday for Japanese people is New Year’s Day, though her family has not really celebrated because of the constant factory work. When New Year’s Day arrives, Katie waits in Lynn’s bedroom, watching the white people on the street celebrate with odd New Year’s Day customs. At about 11:30, Lynn has a serious talk with Katie, telling her to start getting better grades and taking care of their parents and brother. Katie goes outside and sits, awaiting the rising sun. She falls asleep and wakes up when her father picks her up to carry her back into the house. Father says simply that Lynn is gone.

Katie goes into the bedroom reluctantly and looks at her sister’s body. Lynn looks beautiful but altered. Her parents hold one another. Katie asks who was with Lynn when she died. No one was with her, which troubles Katie. People come and go, and there is a flurry of activity as they talk about Lynn’s funeral. Someone refers to Lynn as a body and Katie reacts angrily, causing the people around her to whisper. As the day wears on, Katie goes outside and watches the sunset, climbing a ladder on a nearby garage to watch the light go down on the last day that her sister lived.

Katie sits at the table with her family as they eat rice and sardines for supper but she doesn’t eat anything. When Sammy gets up to fill his water glass, he limps, reminding his father of the trap that caught his ankle. Katie’s dad decides to take Katie to the open field where Sammy stepped on the trap, though her mother objects. They find the place where the children had the picnic. Father gets out of the car, searches for something that he puts in the trunk, and they drive across the field to Mr. Lyndon’s house. Father takes a two-by-four out of the trunk, walks up to Mr. Lyndon’s red Cadillac, and smashes the windshield. He then drives all the way to the next town, and then stops on the road. When a sheriff’s deputy pulls up and asks what they are doing, Katie lies that they are going for tacos. The deputy asks if they’re going to Pepe’s and Katie responds yes. The deputy says someone with a blue Ford has smashed a windshield at Mr. Lyndon’s house. Katie’s father’s car is a gray Oldsmobile. The deputy sees that Katie has been crying and asks what is wrong. She tells him that her sister died, which takes him aback: “He seemed to think. The night had grown cool, and when he breathed through his mouth, mist filled the air in front of his face. He switched on the flashlight again and pointed it at my father. He turned it off again. He straightened up and nodded at my father. ‘Better get her some tacos’” (212). They go to Pepe’s, where Katie eats five tacos while her father watches.

Katie and her father go home. Her parents go to sleep, leaving her alone in the kitchen. After spending some time crying, Katie gets up, does the dishes, and washes all the surfaces in the kitchen before going to bed.

The family plans a memorial service at the funeral home. Katie is to be among the speakers because Lynn loved Katie the most of anyone. Every Japanese person in the community shows up, as do Lynn’s teacher, some of Mothers, coworkers, Silly and her family, and Hank. None of Lynn’s classmates come. When the time comes for her to speak, Katie is afraid. She gives a beautiful eulogy about her sister, but forgets the final comments she intended to use to describe her sister’s life. She says thank you and sits down.

At the graveside, everyone has picked a flower to drop into the place where the urn goes. As Katie’s father drops a white rose into the hole, it falls on the ground nearby instead. As Father stands immobile, Uncle takes the flower, drops it into the hole, and then puts his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Katie’s father weeps. This is the first time she has seen him cry. His whole body shakes. After the service, Uncle takes Katie home. When she bursts into tears and confesses to him that she once told Lynn she hated her, Uncle tells her that his first child, a little boy, also died after a lingering illness. The hopelessness of the situation made Uncle feel similar powerful emotions: “Lynnie didn’t hate you. You didn’t hate Lynnie. You were mad because she was so sick. […] When someone is dying, you have crazy thoughts” (222).

The next week in school, Katie turns in the comments she meant to use in the eulogy as an essay about her sister’s life. She writes how, on a windy day, as little girls living in Iowa, they climbed on the roof with two boxes of Kleenexes and let the tissues fly to see how they would look going over the cornfield. Though they got in trouble, it was beautiful to watch and memorable. This is the theme of her sister’s life: She could take ordinary things and make them seem special.

With the help of her uncle, Katie makes an altar for her sister on Lynn’s desk. Periodically, Katie brings gifts to her sister’s spirit: things to eat, flowers, and keepsakes. She leaves the window by the desk open sometimes. She believes that her sister’s spirit will remain nearby for 49 days, and then it will depart. Katie starts cooking for her parents because they are losing weight as nobody wants to cook. Katie makes two recipes for five straight days each. Then she borrows a cookbook from Mrs. Kanagawa and makes a different recipe every night. She also does the dishes and keeps the house clean.

Once, when Uncle converses with Father about the possibility of unionizing poultry workers, Katie mentions that her dad smashed the windshield of Mr. Lyndon’s car. At that, Father takes her to Mr. Lyndon’s house, where he confesses that he smashed the windshield. He apologizes and offers to pay for the repairs. Mr. Lyndon fires Katie’s father; his attorney will contact him about the reimbursement.

Katie’s dad gets a job with another chicken hatchery that doesn’t belong to Mr. Lyndon. Katie’s grades improve markedly, amazing everybody. On her 12th birthday, she and Silly go to Lynn’s grave and dance just for Lynn’s pleasure. Her father takes them and laughs at their dances. This is the first time Katie has seen him laugh in a long time.

When there is a pro-union meeting at Silly’s mother’s house, Katie’s parents allow her to go and help serve snacks to the 100 people who gather. In the middle of the meeting, Katie’s parents show up, then quietly leave. Mother asks her about a child at the meeting who is bald. When Katie tells her the girl has cancer, Mother finds the inner resources to overcome her natural timidity to vote for the union in secret:

My mother didn’t say anything more. But when the union vote was held the next week, the union won by one vote. That was a surprise, because everyone had expected it to lose by one vote. My mother seemed pleased that the union had won, so I knew how she’d voted. (237)

Katie’s father decides to take a vacation. He asks if Katie would like to go to the swamp, but Katie would rather go to the beach in California because Lynn always wanted to go there. Katie’s parents give her Lynn’s diary. Looking through it, Katie sees Lynn’s last will, written four days before her death, in which she listed things she wanted to bequeath to different family members. Lynn left her diary, her dictionary, and her encyclopedia to Katie.

Katie’s family makes the trip to California to the Pacific Ocean. They arrive on New Year’s Day. Katie wishes Lynn was with them to see how beautiful it is.