EVERY DROP IS A MAN'S NIGHTMARE

In Hawai‘i, girls and women fight to find their identities amid conflicting cultures in stories touched with magical realism.

The female protagonists of these stories range in age from preteen to 70, and all are of Hawaiian or mixed heritage. They struggle with gender issues and motherhood, with food and body image, and they find it difficult to bridge the demands of multiple cultures, to reconcile the traditions of Hawai‘i with the chaos of modern America. Often, traditional legends of ancestral warriors and mythical creatures spring to life amid the everyday. In the title story, 12-year-old Sadie is grappling with the onset of her first period and her family’s insistence that she learn about precolonial Hawai‘i: “She learns too much about her culture, things she wishes to unknow.” Is the ban on carrying pork with you (even leftovers in Tupperware) as you travel a certain road just a superstition or a real curse, one that manifests years later in a nightmarish pregnancy? In “Story of Men,” the frazzled mother of six kids buys a used clothes dryer and finds inside it a Menehune, a magical being that might be something like a cuddly elf or might be a primeval avenger. Whatever it is, this one takes over the household, with surprising results. In “Temporary Dwellers,” a teen narrates a story that takes place in a world where the island of Kaua‘i is being bombed for military training. A refugee from the bombings, an angry girl about her age, moves in with the narrator and her mother on another island. Both the newcomer and the situation in Kaua‘i are wreathed in mystery, and the narrator becomes obsessed. “Ms. Amelia’s Salon for Women in Charge” is a surreal take on cultural notions of female beauty in which a Hawaiian woman with a blond haole boyfriend visits a place where having her pubic hair waxed is paid for with an ominous “trait exchange.” In “Aiko, the Writer,” the title character, whose manuscript for a book about the legendary Night Marchers is doing things manuscripts don’t usually do, is advised by her dead grandmother, in the form of a gecko: “There are ways to tell Hawaiian stories and ways to make Hawaiian stories vulnerable to the white hand. You’ll need to be extremely careful with your choices.” Those choices animate these absorbing stories.

Magical events illuminate the all-too-real problems of Hawaiian women in an impressive story collection.