Behold the Many by Lois-Ann Yamanaka tells the tragic story of Anah Medeiros, a child stricken by tuberculosis and sent to join her infected sisters, Leah and Aki, at Saint Joseph’s orphanage in Kalihi Valley in 1915. The ravages of tuberculosis persist and Leah and Aki succumb to consumption, leaving Anah orphaned in a sea of foreign Catholicism. But Anah is not alone. The spirits of her sisters conspire with that of a spectral boy to torment Anah’s soul and flesh. Amid mostly tranquil surroundings, Anah’s life becomes a living hell. Despite incessant spectral visitations, Anah grows, and the bitter taste of survival is sweetened by the collecting of honey, love and the creation of her own family.

Eschewing clichÈd visions of tourist industry-spun Hawai’i, Yamanaka offers a gritty view of early 20th-century life on O’ahu. By including letters from the children throughout the story, Yamanaka creates a grand multi-narrative that takes Behold the Many beyond a ghost story: It is the story of a generation of lost children, of tragic struggle and, ultimately, salvation.

Yamanaka’s other books include Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, Blu’s Hanging, Heads by Harry and Father of the Four Passages. Yamanaka is the winner of a Lannan Literary Award, an Asian American Literary Award and an American Book Award. She is co-director of Na’au: A Place for Learning and Healing in Honolulu, from where she graciously conducted this phone interview.

Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Tell us about Na’au.

Our philosphy is that good writing starts with creative writing. The public schools created their own standards, so they created their own monster that would not involve writing as an art form, it would be writing as a skill base like math. I don’t see any artform in the rubrics that they use to evaluate the writing, so they’re justly killing themselves–but that’s them. The best thing I could do was get the hell out.

How did you come up with this story?

Stories come to me when they are stories that have to be told for whatever reason. The universe will let me know that that’s the story I have to tell. Otherwise, why invest so much time and effort, you know?

So it’s not so much a conscious effort. You wake up and you have the idea?

It’s just a story that seems to be lingering around my life. In the case of Behold the Many, my house was actually haunted. We didn’t move out because it was too expensive–we had a mortgage. So we stayed. Eventually the story told itself, and that was the story of these children who were stranded here because they died of tuberculosis at the orphanage up the street. They believed that their mother was coming to get them to take them home, but they had died, and that confusion caused them to be trapped there.

They told you this when you spoke with them?

Well, it took a long process of research to find out who they were and what was going on. They didn’t come right out and tell me the whole story.

How did you do the research?

Somebody told me something, and I started putting the pieces together. Then someone else told me something else, so then I’d go chasing that for a little bit. All the little pieces started coming together including going and staying at the orphanage, which is now a retreat home. You can book rooms for your church group.

Was there an actual Anah?

There was, but her name in real life was Asha. Aki was actually one of her little sisters. She didn’t want her name changed in the story–part of the research included using help of a spiritual medium to talk to the children–she didn’t want her name changed in the book. I had thought that Aki was a boy, that he was a brother we were dealing with because I didn’t know that at the turn of the 20th century, it was not envogue for Japanese parents to name their children with the suffix ‘ko’ on their child’s name. Like Yukiko, Umiko–it wasn’t in style, so the child’s name wouldn’t have been Akiko. It would have been Aki. I had thought all along that Aki was a boy, the brother of Asha, but it was a little sister.

Behold the Many has a unique multi-narrative voice. How did that develop?

It was a nightmare because I had told the story from Anah’s point of view and because I had never written a book or a short story–maybe one in college in a 300 level class–in the third person. Third person has always been my fear because I don’t know how to do it right. So I did the whole story in first person and then I thought I’m going to be funky with the narration. It’s going have another point of view at the end of each chapter–like a mini chapter. My editor hated the whole concept, so I had to rewrite it in the third person point of view, but he allowed me to keep that literary structure at the end of each chapter.

I really liked it–although he bashed my brains. He said historical fiction is limited by the first person, especially the first person and a child’s narration. I had to rewrite the whole story. He told me that I didn’t know what historical fiction was, so he sent me three boxes of books to help me to understand what historical fiction was. Oh, I was so pissed. Meanwhile, I was still freelancing. I didn’t have this school, and I wasn’t going to get a penny of my advance until he accepted the draft. I didn’t have time, and I was down to my last can of spam.

Are you happy with the final product?

You’re never done. You still find mistakes. Even now I have regrets about the book because there were things that I left out. But I guess it wasn’t supposed to be.