Miki's Mad

Miki's Mad tells the tragicomic story of how a Japanese immigrant at a sugar plantation in 1900's 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 Hawai'i, Shuzo Taga meets Miki, a young prostitute who is going mad-angry, insane and wildly funny-but she, sustained by the spirit of a sardonic cat, enables him to turn their fantasies into cash. This picaresque tale upends cultural stereotypes as our protagonist outsmarts everyone, including himself. This novel is also a love song to Waialua, on the north shore of O'ahu.