'Middle Son' story born from family tale

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

WAILUKU, Maui — Just before her novel, "Middle Son," was published in 1996, Deborah Iida had a moment of dread in the dead of night.

"I had this vision of these people saying, 'Who do you think you are? What do you think you're doing? Why did you steal this from us?,' " said Iida, sitting in the quiet upstairs bedroom of the modest home she and her husband, Harold, bought 20 years ago in the Kanaloa subdivision.

Then, in her mind's eye, Hiroshi, the stern paternal character in her novel, strode between her and her questioners and answered them: "Who do you think you are to tell me who can write my story?"

Iida, who describes herself as a level-headed wife, homemaker and mother of three who isn't prone to visitations from the spiritual world, nevertheless found this waking dream both comforting and believable.

She realized that, although "Middle Son" began with a real-life incident in her husband's family, the story is her own: "Once he said that, I thought, 'You know, that's true. This character came to me, this character was mine to write." Even if someone else in the Iida family were to base a novel on the same anecdote she heard — about a man who promised his childless brother that he would give him his next boy, the "middle son," as his own — their novel wouldn't be the same, she reasoned. In her hands, "Middle Son" grew into another tale, about a man who feels responsible for his brother's death.

So she stopped worrying.

Plantation-era experience

But Iida, who speaks quietly, thoughtfully, but with firmness, does offer one caution: "If you cross culture, you better get it right."

Iida has been told she got it right and she says this is because she was able to experience the remnants of the plantation lifestyle in the home of her mother-in-law in a Japanese camp in Pahala on the Big Island, before the closing of sugar mills there. She knows what it feels like to soak in a furo, to walk through the neighborhood seeing the clothes on the line, the lemons pickling in the big, glass jars.

"Middle Son" was a 1997 New York Library "Books to Remember" selection and also an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year that year. It's an all-ages kind of book that is on school reading lists but is sophisticated and subtle enough to interest adults. Last year, it was selected by the Maui County Library system as the book the entire county would read together in a program called "Maui Reads 'Middle Son'"; Iida made appearances in every library in the county to read from her book and engage in discussions about the issues it raises — about loss and loyalty in families, about separation and silences and about love that transcends words.

This month's "Good Read" as selected by the Honolulu Advertiser Book Club is "Middle Son" by Deborah Iida of Maui; Berkley, paper, $12.95.

She was intrigued to notice how the same characters provoked very different reactions in people. "What I learned is how we bring ourselves to what we read," she said. "I mean the exact same words bring out different feelings in different people."

"Middle Son" was "discovered" at the Maui Writers Conference, where it won the conference writing award in 1993. Iida, who had begun writing merely as a means of finding some peace and exerting some control over the chaos of raising three children who were then under the age of 4, dates her ownership of the title "writer" from the moment when conference founder John Tullius read her manuscript aloud. Now, she says, "the book has met more people than I have. It has its own life and there is a letting go that comes."

Since then, Iida has served on the faculty of the pre-conference writing retreat, and worked with the high school students who attend the annual event. She has for some years been writing and revising a contemporary novel about a Hawaiian family, seen partly through the eyes of a young haole woman who marries into the clan.

Essential authenticity

IIDA

But if she is satisfied with what she reads, she says with a sigh, "I have some decisions to make." She is perfectly comfortable with the fact that a publisher spending thousands of dollars on a book has the right to refuse to bring out something they don't think will sell. But she said, "in the end, we writers have to write what we believe in. It's that beauty and that truth that you're after and you just have to go in that direction. I wouldn't know what else to do."