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What the Hula Gave Me I missed the first hula lesson because I was in a Japanese hospital trying to find out why I couldn’t get pregnant. I was in my pajamas, finishing up my first ever Japanese hospital meal while 20 local women shucked their shoes and stepped up onto the tatami. I knew some of these ladies from the English conversation classes I’d been teaching for the past nine years at the community center. Others knew about me from their children and grandchildren; I also taught English at the elementary schools in town. While these ladies – farmers, housewives, and a twentysomething hotel worker – attempted to sway their hips like Lance, I was tucking a thermometer under my arm. I’d meant to attend that first class. When Lance, one of few fellow Americans in that small Japanese town, arrived from Hawaii, I was eager to talk to him. I wanted to freshen up my memories of the islands where my husband Yoshi and I were married, where we spent the first few days of our conjugal life together. I was also hoping to sow some seeds. I wrote short stories. For several years, ideas for these stories would come to me in a timely fashion. But suddenly, my muse was unavailable. I had no ideas. My imagination, like my body, was barren. I’d checked Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way out of the library. Cameron prescribes the writing of morning pages as a step on the path to creativity. I grumpily hauled myself out of bed at 5AM for seven days in a row. Mostly, I scribbled about being sleepy and uninspired. After a few more days, I gave up on the exercise. Cameron also recommends artist’s dates, or excursions, meant to spark creativity. Go to a museum and lose yourself in great art, she says. Or stroll through a park. Or dance. It seemed like good advice, and so I signed up for hula. Lance began by teaching the ladies how to move their hands. I wasn’t there, of course. Earlier in the day, the doctor had cut two incisions on either side of my abdomen and snaked a camera inside for a look. “It will be impossible for you to conceive spontaneously,” he told me, as I lay on the table after the procedure, still numb from the anesthesia. In time, we would discuss other options. A week later, I attended the second hula class. I tried to keep up with the women who’d been practicing the moves they’d learned the week before. The twentysomething hotel worker was especially talented, her hips moving like well-oiled ball bearings. She was in love with a British teacher, who thought of her as just a friend. Some of the older women, who thought that she should be thinking about marriage by now (and who thought it was high time that I had a child), encouraged her pursuit of this young man. I knew a little something about Western dating rituals, however, and I knew the British guy, and I was quite sure she didn’t have much of a chance. She’d been throwing herself at him for a year by now, and they hadn’t even kissed. The British guy and I had both worked at the town hall, where we taught a class of mothers and children. I asked Lance to come by and give them a hula lesson. He showed up with a CD player and a handful of Hawaiian CDs. The cover of one featured a Pacific Islander with bare chest and long flowing hair. “He’s hot,” I said. “He’s also gay,” Lance replied. That afternoon, Lance taught us to sing and dance the “Huki Lau,” a traditional Hawaiian children’s song about pulling in nets of fish from the sea. And on Friday nights, he taught the women of the town to sway like palm trees and shape flowers in the air. I must confess that I’ve never been much of a dancer. Although I’ve had fantasies about flamenco and tango – and even ballet – I am basically awkward and lacking in grace. The hula moves were difficult with me. My body failed me again and again. But I kept going to the class. I was too ashamed to talk about my infertility, but I enjoyed being among those women. And the music brought back memories of my wedding at the Pua Melia Plantation, of the waterfall, and the macadamia nut wedding cake and the ukelele player, of the luau we attended the night before, with the fire eaters and roast pig. And what’s more, a few ideas were taking root. We performed at the town hall during the annual culture festival. We made our own costumes. Lance taught us how to make leis with fresh orchids. I wrote an article about the hula class for The Japan Times, an English language newspaper. And then I wrote a story about a gay hula dancer who bursts into a small farming community on an island in Japan, and the young local woman who falls in love with him. The story was published in a magazine and even generated a couple of fan letters. As for that other thing? My husband and I went through a round of in vitro fertilization. Several months later, I gave birth to twins. Suzanne Kamata lives in Japan on the island of Shikoku with her husband and nine-year-old twins. Her first novel, Losing Kei, was published in January. She is also the editor of the anthologies Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs and The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan, and is the fiction editor of literarymama.com.
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