Miki’s Mad tells the tragicomic fictional story of how a Japanese immigrant at a sugar plantation in 1900s Hawaii made a fast fortune, not by working the fields, but by diving beneath social customs to mine the depths of love, greed, revenge, ambition, kindness, dreams and other human conditions.

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.

George Tanabe

Softcover, 349 pp.