The Watcher of Waipuna

Gary Pak's first short story collection creates a world both familiar and strange. The voice of Pak's fictional community, Kanewai, is immediately resonant to contemporary Hawaiʻi readers. Yet, his stories recall worlds rich in legend, mythology and, at times, the fantastic. They are stories that tell of the struggles of a colonized community and the enduring spirit of Hawaii's people. Gary Pak is "a hypnotic storyteller whose writing evokes a wondrous, palpable sense of place, unmistakably Hawaiʻi from the thick pidgin of the author's characters to the preternatural world of ghosts, thumb-sized children and nature as animating spirit.