Book'em Judge

As a District Court judge, Leslie Ann Hayashi has seen countless moral fables laid out before her. After all, what is a criminal court case but a high-stakes morality tale? You've got a protagonist, a fateful moral choice, the consequences.

Unfortunately, by the time the case gets to her, all that's left is for her to write the ending, to pronounce sentence, and maybe offer the moral of the story. Wouldn't it be nice if she could have intervened earlier?

"In the cases that come before me, I can see how their choices led people to that point and that if a certain moral lesson would have been observed, they might not be there in front of me," says Hayashi.

So Hayashi has invented a parallel universe where she has a bit more control over such cautionary tales. The 48-year-old mother of two boys is the author of a pair of children's books titled Fables From the Garden and Fables From The Sea, collections of brief Aesopian tales with an island twist.

In the books, published in 1998 and 2000, Hawaiian flora and fauna interact with each other in stories meant to teach children the potential consequences of bad moral choices and the rightness of simple virtues.

Part of the charm of her stories stems from the zoological homework Hayashi has done. The tales are adorned with the very real quirks of Hawaii wildlife - colorfully illustrated by Hayashi's lifelong best friend Kathleen Wong Bishop - which are woven into the story, teaching kids a bit about island plants and animals along the way.

Their simple "do-unto-others" wisdoms have earned the books notice. Both have won awards from the Hawai'i Book Publishers Association for excellence in children's books, and Garden has gone into a second printing. The latest volume in Hayashi's fable franchise, Fables From The Deep, was to have hit local stores as MidWeek went to press.

Hayashi has wanted to be a writer since childhood but her Fables series was born not of personal ambition, she says, but of concern for the kinds of kids she sees in her courtroom.

"It's very hard to be a child today. There's more violence and drugs; family relationships are not as strong; kids have more money; and there's more peer pressure," Hayashi says, sitting in the kitchen of the homey Kahala house she shares with her lawyer husband, Alan Van Etten.

"If they end up with the wrong group of friends, they're in danger of making the wrong choices in life."

A doting mother who gushes about her own sons Justin, 15, and Taylor, 10, she's quick to give the boys unofficial writing credit for Fables, saying the subject matter grew out of Justin's attachment to a book of fables when he was younger.

He demanded to have the book read to him nightly, but that left Hayashi wincing at some of the loopy stories.

"I was reading this stuff and just thought "I don't get some of these stories," she says. "One of them was about a camel that wanted to be a ballerina in the desert or something. I just thought, 'Huh?!'"

"So we decided to write our own stories about what sorts of lessons are important to learn in life. Both of the kids got involved and it was such a wonderful exercise for the family because it got us talking about what our own family values should be."

But Hayashi's path to becoming a published author began much further back. It began in first grade in Wahiawa when Hayashi, whose head "was always filled with stories," first approached Bishop, then just Kathleen Wong, a shy girl with a talent for drawing.

"I saw that she had this really good picture that she drew of a girl on a swing," says Hayashi. "So I said, 'Someday, I'm going to write stories and you'll do the pictures.'"

Though they attended different high schools later in childhood - Hayashi eventually graduating from Leilehua, Bishop from Roosevelt - they remained best buds, even despite competing against each other in the 1972 Junior Miss pageant.

"Neither of us thought we'd win," Hayashi says. But they proved a formidable pair, with Hayashi winning the crown and Bishop taking an award for academic achievement.

After graduation, they conspired to attend Stanford University together and stayed in close touch even after the tectonic plates of career and family slowly pulled them farther and farther apart.

After stints at Georgetown Law School and a few years in Chicago working for the American Judicature Society, a group committed to educating the public about the legal system, Hayashi returned home in 1980 and began amassing a resume that spills across a humbling 11 pages.

Among the past and present entries: president of Hawaii Women Lawyers; Family Court judge; co-founder and director of the Hawaii Women's consortium; Hawaii Women Lawyers' 1989 Woman of the Year; and recognition as one of the American Biographical Institute's Outstanding Young Women of America. She was recently confirmed for a third six-year term on the circuit court.

Meanwhile, Bishop settled in Phoenix, where she's married with three kids, teaches, and coordinates Christian education at an area church.

Despite the distance, they kept their publishing dreams alive. Those dreams got a boost in 1995 when Hayashi won the Grand Prize in the Honolulu Magazine/Borders Books fiction contest.

Her entry was a short story called Thoughts for a Dead Japanese Fisherman, based on the 1977 drowning death of her father, an avid fisherman. (In an interesting moral aside, the original winner had been stripped of the award for plagiarism).

Publishers, however, look down on prearranged pen-and-paintbrush tandems, preferring to line up their own illustrators. They told Hayashi to go it alone if she had any hope of signing with a big Mainland publisher and earning potentially greater royalties.

No way.

"I told them we wanted to do this together, that it's what our friendship is all about," says Hayashi. "We just enjoy working together and that's important to us."

So they decided to "go local," as Hayashi puts it, and the first two books were picked up by the University of Hawaii Press. Before that, however, one problem remained: Bishop's illustrating abilities. She had a natural knack for drawing and sculpting, but had never painted before, and the books cried out for vivid watercolors to bring Hawaii's colorful vegetation and sea creatures to life.

"I sent her the stories and asked for the pictures but didn't hear back," says Hayashi. "Finally, she said, 'I don't know how to paint.'"

So the ever-loyal Hayashi waited while Bishop took a painting class. "Finally she finished a watercolor of a dragonfly and called me up late one night from the Mainland and said 'I did it! I can paint! Now you have to write a story about a dragonfly.'"

She did, along with the story of the little opihi who clung tenaciously to the rocks (Moral: "Hold on, no matter how rough the waves"), the orchid that was the ugly duckling of the garden until it blossomed ("Friends celebrate each other's differences") and others.

There are even a couple of fables inspired by family experiences, such as the tale of the 'iwa that stole food mid-air from other birds. Hayashi says it was based on the theft of the family's Acura. "I'd like to teach those guys a lesson," she laughs.

Throughout, the author has kept the pressure on her illustrator. When she told Bishop about plans to follow up Garden with Sea, Bishop replied, with mock outrage, "Do you know how hard it is to paint water? What kind of a friend are you?"

Next up: a book requiring illustrations of people. Upon hearing this, an exasperated Bishop enrolled in a portraiture class.

Hayashi says she's not about to leave the bench to pursue writing full time. She loves the challenge of making sense of the "gobbledy-gook," as she calls the law.

She hit the headlines earlier this year while doing just that during the "van cam" fiasco, issuing a number of rulings that cast doubt on the legality of the controversial speeding camera system and contributed to its demise.

Even there, Hayashi saw a moral lesson.

"The Department of Transportation had no good plan for getting the program into motion. How does the saying go? 'When we fail to prepare, we're preparing to fail.'"

But neither is Hayashi slowing down as a writer. She has new works that are either in the writing stage, such as a fourth Fables installment, or that have already been pitched to publishers. She is finding, however, that her writing is exploring new territory.

At 15, son Justin has no time for childish fables anymore. It's all science fiction and long, furtive phone conversations that signal the discovery of girls. That's fine with Hayashi, who is finding that her subject matter is gradually maturing as it mirrors the development of the two sons who help her find her muse.

"As my kids get older, I'm watching them and their friends and how they interact, and that's fertile ground for stories, believe me," says Hayashi, who has a pair of young adult stories in the works.

Ironically, as published authors, Hayashi and Bishop are now in a position to go to Mainland publishers as an established team. Looking back at that day in the playground long ago, it all still amazes Hayashi.

"I have to pinch myself sometimes when I think about how far we've come," says Hayashi, looking at her reflection in the black cover of an advance copy of Fables From The Deep.

It's a tale that's still being written but the moral of the story is already clear.

Says Hayashi: "Through friendship, great things can be accomplished."