I picked this up with no expectations but ended up loving some of these stories! The writer skilfully  intertwined a love for Hawaiian mythology with sobering realities faced by mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women on the island.

The stories depart from ideas of Hawaii as an idyllic paradise and instead focus on lasting impacts of colonisation on contemporary life. The balance of  myth and cold realism make for surreal reading which I really enjoyed.  I like that the women Kamimoto writes are messy, haven’t quite figured things out.

In one of my favourites, Madwomen, a mother takes sink or swim literally as she struggles with her son being “hapa-haole” . She becomes a myth she created to deal with the similarities between him and his father, fearing a loss of cultural identity.

Kamimoto confronts femininity (A woman must trade a well regarded personality trait for a bikini wax). She contends with exploitation and exotiscm (a woman recounts her experience with expat’s porn in desperation for money). There are also so different versions of women’s relationships here- friendships, maternal, romantic.

Women owning their sexuality is obviously important to Kamimoto. The stories both spotlight and rebel against objectification of indigenous women by white men.  Ownership of a woman’s body is often in contention but the writer is more concerned with women’s own biological and sexual urges. Those are written to be real rather than aesthetically pleasing.  Queer relationships are  a theme throughout- from young women discovering their sexuality, to women in later life reckoning with their romantic choices. Sure this may involve a flower growing limbs, that is fine.

I’ll warn, the first story was difficult on first read but I’m so glad I carried on. I had to let Google be my friend on this one.  In ‘Aiko, the Writer’’, a grandmother tells the protagonist to write her culture into stories without pandering to the reader with explanations (specifically white readers). Kamimoto doesn’t explain her in stories, which I also think is best.

The mix of hard reality, imagination and respect for mythology is beautiful. It’s not for  everyone, some of these are quite dark, a bit dingy and a lot of it is somewhere on the spectrum of horny. But it’s a great read. I think if  you like Mariana Enriquez, you’ll like this