Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
“My hope is for readers to see that kānaka ʻōiwi and hapa characters deserve to take up space in contemporary literature, and for these characters and their stories to live in readers’ minds long after the collection ends. For my kānaka maoli and hapa readers, ultimately the biggest honor I can hope for is that in the reading of these stories, they feel seen.”
“A writer receives a stern warning from a familial spirit. A widow forms a relationship with a corpse flower. A flailing mother copes by telling her son tales about the Madwoman in the Sea. Kakimoto’s bold and haunting stories are brilliant on the mysterious and potent languages of the body, and on the enduring power of the stories that shape us. Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare is a stunning debut.”
“Kakimoto interweaves themes of sexual desire and fertility with Hawaiian mythology in her unflinching debut collection . . . Marked by a wry sense of humor and an unerring touch for the surreal, Kakimoto’s stories add up to a powerful exploration of gender, class, race, colonialism, and domestic violence. This eloquent outing marks Kakimoto as a writer to watch.”
“Absorbing . . . Magical events illuminate the all-too-real problems of Hawaiian women in an impressive story collection.”
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She is the author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller that was named an Indies Introduce title and a September Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association. Her fiction has been featured in Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
In an interview with the American Booksellers Association, Kakimoto was asked about her process of deciding which mythologies or ancestral stories she wanted to explore: “When it came to identifying the Hawaiian mythologies, superstitions, and moʻolelo (tales) present in this collection, I gravitated toward what I had inherited. So much of what is featured in the collection, from driving over the Pali with pork to the history of the Menehune to the tale of the Night Marchers, are pulled from stories I grew up hearing from my parents and grandparents — their collective voice was prominent in my head as I was writing.”
She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. Currently a Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.
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