The Book of Kane and Margaret: A Novel

by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

Overview

WINNER OF FC2’S RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE
 
A novel about two teenage lovers who disrupt a World War II internment camp in Arizona
 
Kane Araki and Margaret Morri are not only the names of teenage lovers living in a World War II Japanese relocation camp. Kane Araki is also the name of a man who, mysteriously, sprouts a pair of black raven’s wings overnight. Margaret Morri is the name of the aging healer who treats embarrassing conditions (smelly feet and excessive flatulence). It’s also the name of an eleven-year-old girl who communes with the devil, trading human teeth for divine wishes.
 
In The Book of Kane and Margaret, dozens of Kane Arakis and Margaret Morris populate the Canal and Butte camp divisions in Gila River. Amidst their daily rituals and family dramas, they find ways to stage quiet revolutions against a domestic colonial experience. Some internees slip through barbed wire fences to meet for love affairs. Others attempt to smuggle whiskey, pornography, birds, dogs, horses, and unearthly insects into their family barracks. And another seeks a way to submerge the internment camp in Pacific seawater.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781573668866
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi writes dreampop speculative fictions that can be enjoyed on a bus ride or in line for coffee. All his best stories have something to do with talking insects. He is author of Disintegration Made Plain and Easy.

 

Table of Contents

Contents evening song a small fortune a marriage whiskey over barbed wire dissolving newspaper, fermenting leaves our beans grow fat upon the storm a cluster of cactus wrens soapberry wasp, thundercloud plums a white man yellow creosote blossoms, piss-stained gaillardia palo verde, prairie broomweed the glorious chizuko an ocean doorway of blossoms six notes of cicada songs an hour saguaro flower, desert apricot mallow an egg dolls of the toymaker, yuki shimada a steady diet kidneywood blossom, groundcherry husk a transcription a wig over the fence and into the desert river thistles, celestial sage, rosy opuntia pears the thief 's body absence of an ocean a disappearance beside the yatsushiro sea a goshawk woods' rose, little hogweed, orange flameflower one thousand remedies for extraordinary sneezes a tiny murder a conception in 1944 oxlip and pearl all your sweet babes a lesson a suitcase the season of hair every arizona night an october leave your drawings in this house a visit talking of the ocean with you acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Araki-Kawaguchi’s inventive, surreal novel in stories (after Disintegration Made Plain and Easy) follows a group of characters who leave the bounds of a WWII-era Japanese internment camp through magic and mischief. . . . This beautifully rendered reflection on a dark moment of American history will appeal to fans of literary speculative fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Araki-Kawaguchi’s The Book of Kane and Margaret is an important book and a brilliant one. Surreal, moving, and beautifully written. One of my favorite reads of this or any year.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation
 
“A wondrous trance—one of those novels that defies the rules to make its own indelible order. Araki-Kawaguchi’s debut is a virtuosic performance of sentences and empathy. Fable, history, slapstick, and a riotous lament—The Book of Kane and Margaret contains it all.”
—Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper


 

“A dazzling debut from an important new writer. Highly imaginative, bittersweet, astonishing, playful and yet also poignant.”
—Ann VanderMeer, editor of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy
 
“The Book of Kane and Margaret is ravaging—a magical tale of a family shaped by internment , a necessary document of human and narrative inventiveness—an abundance of astonishments, harrowing, coy, joyful, audacious, wise, loving, true. It’s not just a great debut, it’s a great book.”
—Lucy Corin, author of The Swank Hotel
 

From the Publisher