“A book about ‘the sins of the fathers’.... A gritty, troubling book and he’s done it well. The issues he raises are key to Hawaii today and for future generations.”
—Honolulu Advertiser |
“The other Hawai’i, the one tourists never get to see.”
—Ian MacMillan |
“McKinney excels in his descriptions of the Hawaiian landscape…. In Ken Hideyoshi, McKinney has created a character both gritty and complex.”
—Small Spiral Notebook |
| "Unforgettable…If McKinney's ultimate achievement is his portrayal of Hawai'ian culture in a way that mainland Americas – those who've never seen, nor ever will, anything but the touristy side of Hawai'i – can identify with, then the ultimate failure belongs to the mainland American publishing houses for ignoring the book for so long."-- San Antonio Current |
"Rough-and-tumble, rife with fully drawn badass characters and plenty of action, McKinney's novel is powerful and strong" –Time Out Chicago |
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Ken Hideyoshi is the new guy in Halawa Correctional Institute. He’s tough looking, a hard case, his cellmate Cal—the mute tattoo artist of the prison, a wife murderer—observes. SYN, a gang tattoo, is written on his hand. He has a Japanese emblem inscribed on his left shoulder. He asks Cal for a tattoo on his back, in kanji script, of Musashi’s Book of the Void. While he is being worked on, he tells Cal his life story, a tale of hardship and abuse. Motherless, he was raised by a distant father, a Vietnam war veteran, in the impoverished hinterlands. In his teen years he hung out with the native Hawai’ian gangs and was drawn into the Hawai’ian-Korean underworld of strip bars and massage parlors. His ambition and proud samurai spirit seem, inevitably, to lead to his downfall.
Chris McKinney is of Korean, Japanese and Scottish descent. He was born in Honolulu and grew up in Kahaluu. He portrays the native Hawai’ian experience from the inside, where children of mixed ethnicity grow up far from the clear water and pristine beaches of the rich visitors’ resorts.
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