Turning heads
as an author
Lois-Ann Yamanaka
comes off of Blu's Hanging
with another hitHeads by Harry By Lois-Ann Yamanaka
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), $24 hardcoverBy Cynthia Oi
Star-BulletinAT first glance, Lois-Ann Yamanaka doesn't look much different from the many other thirtysomething women around town.
The Gap khakis, sandals and black, short-sleeved turtleneck she's wearing aren't unusual. Even with multiple earrings, four silver bracelets on her left arm and a horse-hide motif shoulder bag, she doesn't draw much attention in a Japanese restaurant bustling at lunchtime.
Her hair is short and streaked, her face carefully made up, lips perfectly lined in a shade a touch darker than the rest of her kewpie-doll mouth.
The veneer is regular. The eyes, however, gleam keen and straight. They telegraph the richness of a soul who can write stories that squeeze the senses and yank at the imagination.
Her latest novel, "Heads by Harry," ($24, Farrar Straus and Giroux) will be in the stores next week, completing a trilogy begun with "Wild Meat & Bully Burgers," published in 1996, and followed by "Blu's Hanging" in 1997.
Not surprisingly, Yamanaka, 37, talks pidgin, the language she uses artfully in her books. She is alternately candid and guarded; her words swing from funny to sober. She is sharply aware of herself.
Yamanaka writes with a fearlessness fueled by a need to create, and the need itself is a defense against self-destruction.
"The stories present themselves to me," she says, placing chopsticks across her plate of unfinished sashimi. "But it's not easy. There's lots of darkness."
"I get scared sometimes when I blocked," she explains. "I think I not going get out of this. I get scared.
"Because the opposite side of creating is self-destruction. If I'm not doing something, I self destruct. I get scared because when I not creating, I can fall into depression, drinking, going overboard.
"So I go home. When I heading toward that funk, I take a trip home to Molokai or Hilo. Get back to being all right."
The sashimi and diet Coke lunch is also part of getting back to all right. "I not eating rice. My new thing is I not eating rice and sugar. No carbohydrates, no fruit sugars, no tomatoes, no carrots, no hidden sugars like in ketchup, you know that kine stuff," she says.
Yamanaka thinks she's overweight. Yet, as she walks to a construction site where she will gamely climb up through a hole in a hollow tile wall to pose for a photographer, she looks tiny, her microfiber black jacket flapping around her frame.
"I just wen' buy one size 12 jeans." She whispers when she hits the number in that sentence and whispers it again in the next.
"First my goal was size 12. I just like look good in clothes when I on the stage, but now I think maybe I can look good naked, yeah?" She laughs at the idea.
She explains her reason for losing weight.
"Mine is because when you go up in front of people liddah, you get always get that thing hanging on you, like somebody going make one crack about you like, 'She fat.' So I always try to gear up before I gotta to go on the road and part of it is managing that and taking control of other things instead of letting it all being out of control."
Going on the road means touring for her new book. She does New York City and the East Coast next week, comes back to islands for more book appearances here, heads for the West Coast for a week or so, then flies back to the East again.
The tours are hard on her family, husband John Inferrera, and son John, almost 8 years old. They are tough on her, too, but in a different way. She tells about a reading she was scheduled to do in New York City in her early days of being an author. Only one person showed up, "this guy, Pablo."
"And I thought, 'Oh, I no like do it, only get one guy,' and my agent said 'Get up there, someone came to see you.' "
So she did the reading, but her heart wasn't in it. Then the following July, at another reading in Central Park, "there was Pablo again."
"He came to have a book signed but this time he came with a couple of friends.
"I should have given him the best reading of my life, just blasted, yeah, give 'em one good full-on reading. Instead, I was shame. I never going do that again. I should have given the reading of my life -- for one Pablo."
Yamanaka seems to look on such incidents as lessons in life, something to remember, to add to the spool of threads she can weave together for another story.
"Heads by Harry," a story of a Hilo taxidermist and his family, who live above his shop, is an example of making whole cloth. Her grandfather was a taxidermist and her father also worked at it on weekends.
"My dad used to take us out to the mountains for hunting, but he never let us shoot gun," she says. "My mother ban the guns. We couldn't even touch them. So in the book, when they shoot guns, that was like the dream of mine, to shoot gun."
She speaks of her father affectionately and recalls his practicing taxidermy. "He wicked, you know," she says affectionately of her father. "He used to pull a piece of skin off and throw 'em at you. So you sitting and he fling the skin on you, and land on your neck." She screws up her face and pantomimes pulling bloody hide from her throat and laughs again.
"My father, he so -- he get one sign in the yard (in Hilo). We live right on the main drag, Kilauea Avenue, and it says 'Taxidermy' in his stupid calligraphy and our phone number, stuck in the middle of a bed of flowers. It's so funny. So now the book coming out, he going change the name of his business to 'Heads by Harry.' "
The renaming seems to please her, as does her father, a retired school principal, who now drives tourists around for Jack's Tours in "a stretchmobile."
"Every year, he save all his money to do one major trip to part of the world he never been to before. He's so interesting, the choices he making after retirement."
So interesting that his travels have inspired her next book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, "Father of the Four Passages."
"The stories keep presenting themselves to me. My father doing this thing now, going around the world. It just presented itself because he made the decision for himself. So he's like my collaborator.
"I not going see those places he going see ever in my life. Because I have no desire to be in Katmandu, trying to see if one Hindu cow going give me right of way on the road. I no like ride elephant in Burma, cross the border illegally and all that. I like nice hotel, amenities, room service."
Now that she's achieved some fame in the literary world, she can have the amenities. And she enjoys some anonymity despite her celebrity, maybe because she looks so regular.
There is recognition, however.
At the construction site on Kapiolani Boulevard, the men working there want to know why she's climbing the hollow tile wall for the picture-taking.
When the workers are told who she is, one recognizes her name, but not because she is Lois-Ann Yamanaka, award-winning writer.
"Eh, I know you," the worker says. "Your father gave me detention when he was principal."
Lois-Ann Yamanaka will read from her latest novel, "Heads by Harry," on the following dates: Author's reading
Feb. 17, 7 p.m., Borders Books & Music, Waikele
Click for online
calendars and events.
