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.