My sister was very busy raising a family in Florida and rarely called, and it was far too early for one of my freelance clients to be checking in. By then I had returned to the northern city that was, by now, my home. Two weeks after the dream, my phone rang at a strange hour. I wish I could tell you that, through my sister’s pet, my father had imparted profound wisdom, the kind that could only be gleaned from having entered into the Great Beyond, but all he said was Don’t answer the phone, don’t answer the phone, don’t answer the phone. Before then, I had never put much stock in notions like the transmigration of souls, but that moment, strange as it was, made me start wondering about all kinds of things. I dreamt that my father was speaking to me through my sister’s dog, a brown-and-white shorthair mutt, and then I woke to the mutt sitting upright on my bed, staring down at me with my father’s same wearied disdain, his jaws opening and closing as though controlled by a ventriloquist’s strings. It happened the night after he died, in my sister’s guest room in Florida. My father has been dead for a year and I have had exactly one dream about him.

Could it be, or is she simply experiencing a cruel trick of bereavement? 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.Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪ writer whose father has just died begins to suspect the newly-vacated apartment above her might be haunted.

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. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in the giant corpse flower a mourner has gifted her.Ĭentering 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. 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. 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. In Hawaii, a cast of women reckon with physical and emotional alienation, and the toll it takes on their psyches.

Laura van den berg the third hotel