Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In Hawaii, a cast of women reckon with physical and emotional alienation, and the toll it takes on their psyches. A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (boar) on the haunted Pali highway portends one woman's increasingly fraught relationship with her body during pregnancy. A woman recalls an uncanny experience, in which Elvis impersonators take centre stage, to an acquaintance who doesn't yet know just how intimately they're connected. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in the giant corpse flower a mourner has gifted her.
Centering native Hawaiian identity, and how it unfolds in the lives, mind and bodies of kanaka women, the stories in Kakimoto's debut collection are speculative and uncanny, exploring themes of queerness, colonization and desire. Both a fierce love letter to mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory simmering with tension, Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare takes seriously the superstitions born of the islands. Kakimoto's characters seek pleasure and purpose even in absurd circumstances, often with a surprising sense of humor, and her stories treat Hawai'i as so much more than a postcard from paradise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kakimoto interweaves themes of sexual desire and fertility with Hawaiian mythology in her unflinching debut collection. In the title story, 12-year-old Sadie transports pork leftovers from a party via the Pali Highway, risking the wrath of Kamapua‘a, the Hawaiian fire goddess Pele's ex-lover, who is half man, half pig and curses anyone bringing pork over the old Pali road. Sadie's transgression may have incurred a lifetime of bad luck, beginning when her family's car hits a wild boar. Years later, the injured pig mysteriously replaces Sadie's baby in the child's bassinet. "Hotel Molokai" recalls the time the 13-year-old narrator's grandmother brought her to visit family on the island and make a pilgrimage to a sacred rock imbued with powerful fertility magic. Thinking of her abused cousin, a teenage boy, the narrator wonders why her family should want more children when they don't take good care of the ones they have. In "Ms. Amelia's Salon for Women in Charge," working-poor Kehaulani, whose banker boyfriend likes her to get her genitals waxed, goes to a new salon where she must choose a personality trait to give up in exchange for her waxing. 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.
