At the start of this book, the fourth and presumably last of Milton Murayama's popular saga of the Oyama family, one of the main characters says, “;To the Japanese, you owe your parents for life.”;

Ultimately, for better or worse, that's what the story that unfolds and concludes here is all about: the duty that most parents (not just Japanese) expect from their children and the lifetime of conflicts that creates for sons and daughters who have their own lives to live.

This volume unites three voices that Murayama's readers have come to know and love during the past 20 years. There's Sawa, matriarch of the family and mother of seven; Toshio, the eldest and most bitter of the brood; and Kiyoshi, a middle son, would-be writer and Murayama's semiautobiographical alter ego. All take turns narrating the family story, giving us three different ways to see and think about the intergenerational love and disputes that dominate family life for many years.

Murayama here picks up the story he's been telling in three earlier volumes (”;All I Asking for Is My Body,”; “;Five Years on a Rock”; and “;Plantation Boy”;). As the book opens it's 1945, World War II is ending, and Hawaii is preparing for some big changes.

It's here that Tosh, a soon-to-be successful Hawaii architect, tells his mother, Sawa, why some of the other Japanese boys aren't going to return home after surviving the war: “;They've tasted freedom, freedom from oya kohkoh (filial duty).”;

As hard as he tries, though, Tosh is never going to have that kind of freedom. He's the eldest, the one who stays home—and complains about it all the time.

Kiyoshi, meanwhile is off on the mainland, struggling for years to be a writer, getting married, divorced, playing the ponies and keeping a respectable distance most of the time from the family and his own roots in Maui. At 52 he finally finds acclaim when he publishes a novel about issei and nisei in Hawaii.

  Sawa is the real center of the story, the mom who worries as much about her own future as those of her sons and daughters. When Tosh flouts the freedom of others to her, she wants to tell him in response, We gave you life. Only she just thinks it; she doesn't say it.

“;Let him win this time,”; she tells the readers, and more often than not, that's her way, hoping that her family will do the right thing by the old ways and knowing that just as often as not she'll be disappointed. When they do help, it's often more from a sense of duty than love. “;We all love our parents, but not like their love for us. Our love for them will probably come when we're in our 60s,”; one of the other siblings tells Kiyo somewhere along the way.

So, over the course of 40 years, Murayama traces the growth of this love and duty in the family, right up through the death of both parents. All the characters put their little neuroses on display, often feuding and worrying about money, love, perceived slights, the care of nieces and nephews, more money and what people will think of them while they're here and after they're gone.

Murayama also is telling another story here, a personalized history of both Hawaii and the world as they changed from the 1940s to the 1980s. In Hawaii, Tosh helps us see the major political figures come and go as they might have been viewed through a local perspective. Everyone from Jack Hall to George Arroyos to Dan Inouye is here as background as Murayama traces the rise of the Japanese from the plantations to power players in the government. Kiyoshi is left to tell history from a mainlander's viewpoint: the '50s, Kennedy, Vietnam and all the rest.

Meanwhile, it's Sawa who mostly endures and stays focused, becoming even stronger after her husband, Isao, dies. Ultimately, she makes the difficult choice to leave the familiar in Hawaii and live with family on the mainland. Even with her old age and eventual death, the kids still argue about duty and responsibility. You're never really free from it.