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Lois-Ann Yamanaka weaves raw,
meaty characters with familiar
faults in her latest novel

Father of the Four Passages: By Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 233 pages, $24

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By Cynthia Oi
Star-Bulletin

SOME of the characters in Lois-Ann Yamanaka's new book will drive you nuts. You'll want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and yell into their faces, "What's the matter with you!"

Because in all their failures, all their mistakes, all their pain -- received and given -- you see pieces of people you know, maybe even yourself, and despite their meanness and weaknesses, you'll find you love them.

Sonia Kurisu is a drug-hazed, heavy-drinking, searching-for-God loser who finds herself attracted to drug-hazed, loser men who mistreat her. She's a wannabe artist who sings in a crummy Las Vegas lounge, a woman who kills three unborn children before finally bringing the fourth into her miserable world. The one she allows to live is afflicted.

Sonia's psyche has been broken by her father, who leaves whenever the spirit moves him to wander the world, sending back beautifully poetic letters that always close with declarations of his love. But rather than comfort, the words seem to expand her feeling of abandonment.

"I keep all of your letters, Father.

"You who I search for. You whose words find me. The beauty therein. The emptiness without."

She is further cracked by her barmaid mother, who in anger and frustration at her husband's constant leavings, sends Sonia and her older sister Celeste to live with their grandmother.

As the girls grow older, Celeste wraps her pain in achieving, gathering around her outward appearances of a worthwhile life. To Sonia, it is betrayal.

"I hate my sister Celeste. Celeste who always reminds me that she raised me the best she could. Poor thing. Poor her. The kind of girl who's forced into substitute mommydom too early ...

"Sister/Mother, it all sounds so loving. But she of the iron-fisted mommydom became the Sadist."

Sonia, the masochist, pinballs through adolescence, aborting three babies along the way. It is the "only one I did not kill" that shoves her deeper into anguish because he is autistic.

Sonia sees Sonny Boy's affliction as another "karmic payback" but he is the light on her path to healing. His birth triggers the voices of her unborn and their questions force Sonia to answers that release her.

The structure of "Father of the Four Passages" circles the story-telling, revolving from present to past to present and back again. It also unharnesses Yamanaka's considerable poetic abilities.

The novel differs from Yamanaka's trilogy of "Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers," "Blu's Hanging" and "Heads by Harry." The pidgin dialogue she used in the earlier books isn't there and while Sonia's background stories take place in Hawaii, the present is in Las Vegas. None of this matters either in the new book or the old, for this writer can lead you on a journey no matter the destination.

Yamanaka also takes a poke at herself in "Father of the Four Passages." In wanting to blame someone, something for her mess of a life, Sonia lays out a list: racism, blue-collar upbringing and "too many ethnic-female-with-dysfunction novels."

Although race and poverty come into play, they are not the overriding issues and although Sonia is ethnic, female and dysfunctional, Yamanaka doesn't let these become principal.

From her own life, Yamanaka pulls the element of Sonny Boy's condition; her son is autistic. But she creates from this a mysticism, a magic that infuses Sonny Boy with a power to overcome. There is no self pity, no-weight-of-the-world-on-this-poor-mother sentimentality.

Instead, she uses her powerful, awesome skills to haul you deep into dark, raw spaces, then releases you to the brightness of understanding grace and forgiveness.

"Father of the Four Passages" is relentlessly painful and angry, at times horrifying. Sonia's agony wrenches and jams as she comes to realize the embracing quality of unmerited love.

Few writers have the guts to stuff such rip-your-heart out words onto a page. Yamanaka bravely shoves them in front of you. The result is an unforgettable novel filled with those you find you can love.

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