Embedded Files
Literary Hypnotism: A Rare Interview with Lee Siegel
Miki's Mad
ISBN: 978-1-944521-21-9, March 1, 2024
Softcover, 348 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in.
ISBN: 978-1-944521-22-6
Kindle Edition
Set in the tumultuous world of colonialism, technological revolution and intercultural entanglements in early 1900s, Miki’s Mad by George Tanabe is a telling of love, family, pride, and delusions arising from the collisions between perception and misperception, sanity and madness, and virtue and vice.
Tanabe, who is a recipient of the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation and the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun awards for promoting cultural understanding between Japan and the United States, tells the tragicomic story of a Japanese immigrant: On a steamship from Japan to Hawaii, Shuzo Taga discovers Miki, a young woman who is slowly going mad—angry, insane and wildly funny—and yet she, sustained by the spirit of a devious cat, enables him to turn his fantasies into cash.
This picaresque tale plays on stereotypes that our protagonist hijacks as he out-whites the haoles, out-yellows the Japanese, out-browns the Hawaiians, and in the end, outsmarts himself.
This novel is also a love song to Waialua, on the north shore of O‘ahu.
“... wondrous and sexy, sweetly humorous and heartbreakingly tragic—a profoundly life affirming pleasure to read.”
— Lee Siegel, Prof. Emeritus, Univ. of Hawaiʻi; author of Love in a Dead Language
“ ... an endlessly surprising page turner. ”
— Roger Jellinek, Executive Director, Hawaiʻi Book and Music Festival
The Shady Side of Virtue
Japanese Transgressions in Early 20th Century Hawaii
While Miki's Mad portrays a charming but conniving protagonist, it should be remembered the honest and hardworking issei pioneers also had shadier sides to their lives invlolving adultery, moonshining, theft and prostitution. In 1901, for example, 93 percent of the known prostitutes in Honolulu were Japanese women under the control of a certain Masudo-san. Miki's Mad taps into this underside and portrays the adventures of lovable characters freely deploying guts and ingenuity as they search for better lives.
A review in the North Shore News, October 23, 2024 issue, page 12
Here's an excerpt:
Waialua’s History Shows Up - In Fiction!
By Boyd Ready, Local Historian
. . .
Tanabe’s characters are intriguing, their internal dialogues on love, revenge, shame, ambition, and pride have the ring of truth. His narratives of train rides, along the Waianae coast, around Kaena Point, and up the grade to the Waimea Bay overlook, put you in the passenger’s seat. One of my favorite passages is a description of Pu‘u o Mahuka heiau, with its spectacular view of Waimea Bay and the entire coastline to Kaena Point.
The historical scenes, drawn with such accurate detail down to the Waialua places, people and early events, will make this a literary treasure for Waialua.
. . .
Miki’s Mad has all the hallmarks of fine Japanese literature I recall from a long-ago college course. Ghosts, samurai scenes, the Meiji transformation of Japanese society, the ‘death’ and suicide fascination, ‘fugu,’ or the poisonous puffer fish, and, of course, cats! Don’t miss it if you appreciate Waialua or just like good books!
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