Local emotions
Beads, Boys and the Buddha Wendy Miyake, Lotus Moon in Love Publishing, 188 pp, $13.95
Chick lit has finally gone local. And spearheading the women’s crusade for the literary equivalent of comfort food for the Islands is Wendy Miyake’s self-published Beads, Boys and the Buddha. The slender volume is the Honolulu Magazine Fiction Contest winner’s first collection of short stories, and they are funny and bittersweet tales of Hawai’i women falling in and out of love–and eventually finding who they really are in the process.
The 2001, aforementioned prize-winning story ‘GetMyMoi.Com’ is reprinted here and tells the tale of Hamachi, a 30-something, single, local Asian woman whose fisherman father wants to set her up for marriage. In addition to starting the collection, it sets the tone for the rhythm, details and moods and desires of the female characters that inhabit the entire collection.
The classic Miyake female character seems to be a little lost in her single-ness, and Miyake’s story-arcs are usually aimed towards some sort of reconciliation with the very concept of male/female relationship, while at the same time showing nuances of Honolulu life. Take the fantastically named main character from the title story ‘Beads, Boys, and the Buddha,’ bead-shop owner Lotus Odachi, who eventually finds bliss with a younger man.
While the prose and characters can get a little heady in their cuteness, Miyake’s eye for detail within modern O’ahu life is the real charm, like in a sequence flowing with activity from ‘GetMyMoi.Com’: ‘Hamachi watches from the car. She can see her father through the opening in the headrest. He looks like he’s in a Norman Rockwell painting, something titled, Schoolboy Waiting for Dessert. Only her father is in Starbucks Mililani, drinking a cup of Brazilian coffee, holding a cellular phone and giving her a thumb’s up sign through the window. His painting smiles weakly and turns to the big buns on the Stairmasters blooming in the window at 24 Hour Fitness.’
For all the potential carnality within the loves and lives of the urban couples in these stories, there is a certain middle-class safeness. Even death doesn’t seem scary in Miyake’s world. Nothing gets too explicit or, for lack of a better word, realistic, giving these tales a sort of third-person, magical quality–an unreality or a parallel, flipside-of-a-coin universe of O’ahu. On the other hand though, it’s refreshing in a way since the trend for serious fiction in the Islands before the millennium seemed to have been of a darker, bleaker sort. Wendy Miyake’s first story collection may be a tad problematic in its ultimately simplistic themes, but it’s still an interesting and illuminating portrait of the contemporary Honolulu woman. And perhaps it’s a herald of a lighter side of written Hawai’i too.
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