The Book Of Kane And Margaret
Hiroki Araki-Kawaguchi is a good friend, poet and author I've known for about 18 years. We started collaborating on projects in 2015. Below you can see some illustrations from a book he published in March. The Book of Kane and Margaret draws from Kiik's family's experience with internment in America during the 2nd world war. The book presents interrelated vignettes that paint a world without being rigid about the rules or characters, kind of like a dream. In each of these vignettes Kiik takes a genre, mood, or character, deconstructs it, and weaves it into life at the Gila Relocation Center in Arizona. The stories helped me understand how even though we tend to externalize, encapsulate, mummify these moments in history, they are really living inside everything if you look closely.
"an hour." This illustration depicts a scene from a story about a couple who build a magnificent aircraft called ""The Tear of Kumamoto"" hoisted by ten thousand birds. Like all of Kiik's stories this one is equally about the negative space - what is unspoken between the couple. "
"a wig." In this story the main character Margaret relives a heartbreaking moment with her lover Kane by asking another man to impersonate him with a wig. Margaret asks the impersonator to recite lines from their last night together where Kane contemplates an escape from the camp and Margaret pleads with him to stay.
"a suitcase." In this illustration for The Book Of Kane And Margaret by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Kane prepares to pack a single suitcase for the trip to the Gila relocation center - it's all he's allowed to bring. Among other things he considers packing fragments of iridescent abalone shells used to decorate and illuminate a walkway for his mother, lungfuls of mist from the coast exhaled into paper bags, wild strawberries.
"dissolving newspaper and fermenting leaves." This cricket is special - he invades your dreams and eats your memories. For example he begs the main character to join her in her dreams and then asks to devour her family members in her dream. After the deed is done she can’t seem to remember their names while awake. The story deals with life in a Japanese internment camp during world war 2 called the Gila relocation center, and the cricket also plays a role in freeing this character from her prison. There’s an elusive thread connecting her Japanese heritage, her memory, and her bondage under the state. Stylistically I tried many variations to address these complex themes.
"wood's rose, orange hogweed, little flameflower." This story starts out as a tale about a vampiric man-sized parasite, but melts into a bittersweet romance between a practitioner of non-traditional medicine and another member of the camp. I think one of the inspirations for this was the CIA's use of the Aswang myth (a vampire creature) to win battles in the Philippines.
