Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawai'i. Her fiction has been featured in Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. She lives in Honolulu.
Books (1)
Synopsis:
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth.
A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman's fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase.
Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.
"The contemporary Hawaii of Kakimoto’s debut is neither idyllic backdrop nor tragic fable; the stories evoke the land and its intermixing cultures in all their anxiety, claustrophobia and restlessness . . . Weaving Hawaiian words into English ones, Kakimoto positions language as a tether to our most ancient and eternal selves . . . Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare is rich and wise, humming with confidence in the knowledge of a particular community’s lovely, miserable ways." - The New York Times Book Review
"It would be fitting but too simple to call this collection haunting. The stories in Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare are so lavishly imagined, and their characters—from young women to mythical beings to watchful ancestors and even Hawaii itself—are so defiant, that to offer any solid definitions seems like a betrayal of the book’s ethics. Here, boundaries between the past and present, the living and the dead, are not so much flimsy as nonexistent . . . Even after one closes the book, the power of these stories remains." —Washington Independent Review of Books
“Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a short story writer that all other short story writers should study. She has the ability to captivate readers with a single sentence. Her prose bursts with exquisite confidence that makes it hard to believe this is a debut collection. Every Drop is a frontrunner for Book of the Year.” —Debutiful
“Kakimoto interweaves themes of sexual desire and fertility with Hawaiian mythology in her unflinching debut collection . . . Marked by a wry sense of humor and an unerring touch for the surreal, Kakimoto's stories add up to a powerful exploration of gender, class, race, colonialism, and domestic violence. This eloquent outing marks Kakimoto as a writer to watch.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
| 272 pages | 5.51" x 8.25" |
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