Published in 2023
268 pages
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawai’i. 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.
What is this book about?
From major new storytelling talent Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood.
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.
