Higa on Hongo: The Perfect Sound

To be surrounded by something and not really see or hear it.

That is how I judged my entire childhood in Hawai‘i, my first few months I lived in Troy, New York. I had picked a college as far from Hawai‘i as I could find and had ended up in “Upstate New York”—basically, the part of New York that did not contain New York City. My plan worked admirably, nothing there reminded me of Hawai‘i, and the culture shock was intense.

For the first two weeks, I hardly said anything to anyone after I asked my roommate from New Jersey to close the light. “Close the light! Close the light!” he mocked. “In Hawai‘i, do you say ‘open the light’ too?” Yeah, we do, I thought, as he laughed himself down the hallway. Everything seemed odd and insane to me, from the lack of fruit punch at the restaurants to my first hockey game, which appeared to be a modern version of jousting with everyone in armor and wielding with a five-foot maple weapon.

The isolation drove me into myself and made me yearn for home. I realize now that I was starting to think about what makes Hawai‘i—Hawai‘i? But at the time, my only goal was to gather whatever I could find that would console me despite being 5,000 miles away. I eventually realized that what brought me back home quicker and more completely than anything else was Hawaiian music. Traditional Hawaiian music, the bane of my existence during my early teenage years before I learned to drive and was forced to listen to KPOI as my father drove me to soccer practice, was the mooring that saved me during all the years I lived on the mainland.

For me, I will always associate Hawaiian music with longing and romantic notions of home and belonging. And in Garrett Hongo’s new memoir, The Perfect Sound, that same sort of longing underpins his identity as he crafts a life for himself in literature. The memoir explores his changing musical tastes and his passion for audio refinement to reveal exquisite moments of insight and reflection.

The Perfect Sound is a thick book, just topping 500 pages, and in many ways reminds me of one of the baroque symphonies of Johann Sebastian Bach: a masterwork of themes, counterpoint, and ornamentation that carries the reader on an expanse of pure aesthetic pleasure. As a writer, Hongo’s prose is to be envied. From the first sentence (“I had been a casual lover of music for the longest time during my adult life when a lucky accident happened”) through to the last sentence of the work, the care that is taken with each phrase, each example, each metaphor is palpable.

Not surprising, I guess, for someone who made his name as one of America’s premier poets, but not something you expect while reading a memoir, too many of which are dashed off in a haze of nostalgia and self-aggrandizement. As a reader, I paused many times at the novelty of a perfect comparison, or to appreciate the lyric turning of a particular phrase, or to have my breathing stop as I raced forward in my reading to find out the resolution of a particular story.

That is not to say that The Perfect Sound is an effete exercise in prosody or form. Hongo’s memoir is grounded in the stuff of American boyhoods: cars, love & lust, macho posturing, and popular music. Hongo’s recollection of the music in different eras of his life is impressive, bordering on compulsive. As his writing makes clear, music is not merely the background soundtrack of his life, but is central to that moment of his existence. Every incident he recounts (and there are many within its 500 pages) is tied to a group of songs or genre of music, and often, the electrical device from which that music was issued. For as the subtitle to this memoir states, his is “a memoir in stereo” with stereo being as important, if not more so, than the recollection of a memoir.

On one level, the book can be read as an audiophile’s lifetime pursuit of the ultimate recreation of sound. A quest, we come to learn, which results in a lifelong education and refinement of judgment. We learn of the technical refinements of the different advances in music reproduction from early transistor radios through LPs and phonographs, and on into CDs and digital media. And by technical, we learn not only brand names and places of manufacture, but the shades of difference in sound reproduction, reputation, and terminology of the different audio equipment in his life.

Two of the things I did not expect to learn so much about but came away with: a level of knowledge about vacuum tubes and their pros and cons in relation to sound reproduction in amps and pre-amps, a subject in which I can now hold my own in any talk story session with a musician; and the names of the salesman and stores that supplied audio equipment to the West Coast in the last thirty years. Hongo’s recollections are indeed prodigious, and in this memoir, well documented.

As someone who still drives a 1996 Toyota Camry with its original OEM radio and speaker system (cassettes, anyone?), I am not graced with the exacting and curated ear that Hongo has for sound. Hongo’s ear and his appreciation for fidelity was initially picked up and developed by his father, Albert Kazuyoshi Hongo. An electronic technician in the aerospace industry by trade, he was an original audio tinkerer by night, despite being partially deaf. I was amazed to learn that young Garrett would serve as the primary listener for his father Albert’s electronic audio creations, and would read his son’s reactions, facial expressions, and comments to discern whether his replacement of vacuum tubes or other audio part resulted in better reproduction.

To separate the actual lack of physical hearing of music and its labored reproduction from the emotional enjoyment of its recreation was a revelation to me.  The instances in the memoir when he recreates these father-son moments were very touching and resonated powerfully within the greater work.

“Whatchu hearing?” he’d ask, looking up from over the spinning record, adjusting the amplifier’s volume. “Too loud?—Good?—‘Nuff?”—his other questions as he calibrated the system’s level of sound.

What did I say, just turned twelve and full of happiness during those sessions?... How could I have explained to him what I was hearing? How would I have translated gorgeousness into pidgin—our sweet and common language from the islands.

I t'ink diss wan izz good!

I remember my father grinning as he spun his LPs, pleased with me, and my feeling I could do something for him. It was just one summer of our lives, but night after night it went like that, my father changing tubes like dice in a game of craps, shooting for winners, the music like tropical waters coiling against our ears.

As we observe Hongo’s life as he moves from boyhood through adulthood, there is a contrapuntal sense of grief that pulses throughout the work, an identifiable and relatable longing to do with unrootedness and loss. Hongo’s father was a local boy raised in McCully, his mother’s side owned a store in Lā‘ie, and yet Garrett was raised mostly in California where his parents had moved for economic reasons. Albert never lost his pidgin and maintained his family connections in the islands, and yet you can feel his grief of having left when he listens to his Hawaiian music records at night. Perhaps, had he lived long enough, he might have eventually moved back to Hawai‘i as a retiree, but as Garrett relates, his father died unexpectedly at the age of 58.

Much later, when Garrett is an older man himself at 68, he tells of his decision to buy a new house. He is inclined to buy a second home on the Big Island since home prices had dropped because of the 2019 eruptions. Instead, he decides to buy “a nicer place in Eugene” and sculpt the insides to create the acoustical room of his dreams and create “an Horatian place of refuge and retirement from which I might write contented, punctilious, and advisory epistles to the young and listen, in my leisurely repose, to sweet pipings from my stereo system.” The incident recalls the choices his father and mother made to stay on the mainland, and for all of us who spend decades on the mainland away from our island home.

At some point in our mainland sojourns, we are faced with moments where we either need to embrace the new culture in which we find ourselves and double down on the commitment to the life we have created—or accede to the allure of “going back home” and re-connecting with the family, the food, and the history which shaped us and our previous generations. We return stating mundane reasons such as “I wanted to raise my kids local” or “I missed the weather” or even “I couldn’t find decent sashimi on the mainland” but it’s really to extinguish that peculiar grief of feeling unrooted and disconnected from the values, language, and culture that had nourished us as children.

In The Perfect Sound, as we watch Garrett moving on with his life and establishing himself academically as he builds his reputation as a poet, the grief becomes a part of him. It is something he writes within, something he has to confront when he “returns home” to Hawai‘i and is reminded of the losses he carries for himself, his father, and even his community.

I invented a book. In secret. At first, I told no one, but I wrote that it was so in a diary of my own dreaming, as if it were a memory, though I knew I had not lived it, that the book did not exist. But I convinced myself it did… From that time in childhood when I snatched it from the garage shelf, through the move from Hawai’i to the Mainland, through Boy Scouts and juvenile gangs, football and girls, I told myself that I'd kept it. I called it the kagami nikki, a title I invented from what I knew from my rudimentary studies of Japanese literature. It meant “The Mirror Diary” and had the ring of medieval essay collections and Tokugawa travel diaries I loved so much. My vow was to become scholarly enough to read it one day. And, when I did, when I had trained myself properly and was ready, it would tell me, like the murmuring ghost of my own grandfather standing behind me in the bedroom's full-length mirror, the unshared secret of who I was and from whom I came.

This going forward while reaching back, through his art, through the music, through his quest to faithfully recreate the sounds that live in his memory, is at the heart of The Perfect Sound. Whether he is taking us back to Hawai‘i’s plantation days and the holehole bushi songs that his ancestors would have sung in the fields, the family kanikapila sessions on the North Shore, the late 1800’s when Edison invented the phonograph, up through our digital present, it is always the music that anchors us through times of joy and heartache.

Perhaps, as he intimates at the end, in a magnificently structured crescendo of love, loss, regret, and hope, it’s this—the music, any music, all music is the simple truth that binds all of us.

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Image by Clem Onojeghuo.