All I Asking for Is My Body Quotes

“I kept wishing Snooky had come back to teach at Kahana. I'd go talk to him. He was the only guy who helped you to see things as they were out there. The others ignored your questions or what they saw out there, or tried to make you see only the things they wanted you to see. He talked of freedom, while everybody else talked of duty and obligation. It was like we were born in a cage and Snooky was coaxing us to fly off, not run away, but be on our own and taste the freedom and danger of the open space...

Freedom was freedom from other people's shit, and shit was shit no matter how lovingly it was dished, how high or low it came from. Shit was the glue which held a group together, and I was going to have no part of any shit or any group.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“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.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“All this discipline was like pinching a balloon, I bulged somewhere else, especially inside my head.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“Father wasn't as haughty as Tosh said. It was the Japanese way, face was that much more important, like the starving samurai who walks around with a toothpick in his mouth, pretending he'd just eaten. You covered up more, and it was rough when you were the one being covered up or you were holding up somebody else's face. But everybody did it... Face was pretending to be perfect or there was nothing wrong, and either way the losing of face meant exposure and shame. You ended up pretending and hiding too much, you ended up with all kinds of skeletons which shouldn't have been skeletons in any closet. You ended up covering for those above you, even defending their wrongs as right.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“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.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“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.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“Once you got hard on yourself, it was easy to be hard on others.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“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.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“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.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“He'd explode and in a flash you'd see something anew, and you were never the same again.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body

“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.”
― Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body