When a young man returns to help his father sort through his recently deceased grandfather’s belongings, family secrets come back to haunt the men. The discovery of a worn photo of a picture bride drudges up memories that refuse to be erased. The spirit of the woman in the photo forces herself onto the young man’s consciousness in a desperate attempt to be remembered before the last trace of her life on earth is swept away. She forces the young man to relive the story of her arrival to Hawai’i, and her subsequent murder in the sugarcane fields. As the young man unearths the truth about his grandfather’s past, he is haunted by his own guilt, and made to confront his father about his abusive tendencies. The family’s history of violence eventually comes to rest on the young man’s shoulders and he is forced to confront demons all his own. Utilizing the structure and conventions of traditional Noh theatre, the play blurs the line between memory, reality, and fantasy to examine the hereditary nature of abuse and destruction.
