Heads By Harry [Paperback]

Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2000

You can always count on a crowd outside Heads by Harry, the Yagyuu family's taxidermy shop in Hilo, where the regulars gather every day to drink beer, eat smoked meat, and pontificate into the pau hana hours.  But above the shop, where the family lives, life isn't so predictable. Toni Yagyuu, the middle child, has enough on her hands dealing with her budding diva of a little sister.  But it is the men in her life that really have her running in circles: a flamboyant older brother who wants to be a hairdresser, a stubborn father who refuses to accept her into the family business, and the Santos brothers--two pig-hunting, ex-high school football players who don't know what to think of their headstrong, outspoken neighbor.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This frank and poetic tragicomic novel completes Yamanaka's trilogy (Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers; Blu's Hanging) about growing up in Hawaii. As in the previous books, the narrator's distinctive voice conveys a cultural climate as well as a story of adolescent angst and survival. Toni Yagyuu's Japanese-American, lower-middle-class family generates and harbors conflict and disenchantment. Toni is the middle child, sandwiched between popular, successful siblings: Sheldon, her homosexual older brother, and Bunny, her conventionally pretty younger sister. Sheldon and Bunny have their selfishness in common and, with cruel nonchalance, invariably take each other's sides against lonely Toni. She is closest to her father, Harry O., who runs Heads by Harry, a taxidermy shop in Hilo. Although Toni aspires to take over the business, Harry O. would rather apprentice neighborhood youths Maverick and Wyatt Santos. Toni and her siblings yearn for handsome Maverick, but Toni always seems to be thrown together with crude, uneducated Wyatt, whose federal job hunting pigs seems to suit his personality. Harry O. has bigger plans for his children?college, preferably business degrees. Sheldon and Bunny manage to bluff and party their ways through college, but Toni is overwhelmed; she flunks out and returns home a failure. She despairingly explores a sexual relationship with Wyatt Santos and then falls humiliatingly in love with a "haole" six years her junior. Yet stouthearted Toni finds a hardy strain of unconditional love amid her family's painful disavowals and her diminished expectations. Her integrity and individuality are affirmed in a touching denouement. Yamanaka infuses her characters' pidgin English, their often coarse dialogue and their sometimes brutal behavior with gut-level poetry and fresh vernacular. With this stirring novel, the potency and honesty of Yamanaka's view of Hawaiian life achieves the haunting force of myth. First serial to A. magazine and Poets & Writers; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

The daughter of a taxidermist, 16-year-old Toni Yagyuu narrates the latest novel from Yamanaka (Blu's Hanging, LJ 3/1/97) about growing up in Hawaii. Toni will be the first person to tell you that life on the islands is no paradise. Members of her loving but dysfunctional family include an older brother who has difficulty dealing with his sexual identity and a younger, strikingly beautiful sister who vies for the attention of everyone around her. The siblings grow older, eventually moving away and living together in a meager apartment while attending college. Toni's own story is complex and filled with angst. She struggles with many of life's disappointments, including poor grades, alcohol and drug addiction, and an unplanned pregnancy. Yamanaka's writing is emotionally gripping and filled with harsh realism but at the same time liberally sprinkled with sensitivity and humor. Fans of her work will not be disappointed. Recommended for large fiction, Asian American, and young adult collections.?Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Stanton, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (March 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380733161
• ISBN-13: 978-0380733163
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #397,894 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The "real" Hawaii as few experience it., March 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Heads by Harry (Hardcover)

"Heads by Harry" reminded me of why I left Hilo ten years ago, and then on the very next page, made me wish I had never left. Mrs. Yamanaka captures so perfectly how it feels to grow up in a small town where everyone knows your parents, knows all about your mistakes, but about your triumphs too. Reading it becomes a uncomfortably personal experience when it is your small town she happens to is dissecting.

This book is as close as most tourists will ever get to the elusive "real" Hawaii promised by their vacation brochures. A Hawaii where brutal men hide their sensitivity under masks of contempt for anything different or "haole". Where the effects of a colonial plantation past cast shadows on the lives of the descendants of Asian migrant workers and where family is your rock, your curse, your tonic - all at the same time. Reading "Heads by Harry" was too familiar and intimate at times, like sitting in your Aunty's living room on a lazy Hilo afternoon, eating smoked meat while watching a steady stream of people wrapped up in their own personal dramas go in and out, beer in hand. The rough language, noble but comical characters, the smell of Bayfront after the evening rain, the yellow-orange haze that descends over Mamo Street and the KTA parking lot after dark, "Heads by Harry" captures Hilo's essence entirely.

Mrs. Yamanaka writes passionately about finding one's place in the world. And while many of us wouldn't necessary choose Mamo Street with it's dusty, out-of-business shop fronts and yes, cross-dressing hookers, she teaches us that sometimes we do not have the luxury of making the choice for ourselves.

Anyone with a rural, small town background who now finds themselves lost in the modern, urban rat race should read this book. Only be prepared for the painful rush of childhood memories about not fitting the mold when fitting in is not an option.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars slippin, February 28, 2001

By 

isaac "lawyer-surfer-christian" (middle of the pacific) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heads By Harry (Paperback)

The sublime heights Lois-Ann Yamanaka has previously reached only intensifies my disappointment at the downhill slide this book represents. 'Saturday Night At The Pahala Theater' (Bamboo Ridge Press) established her as the standard in 'local' literature in Hawai'i and was nothing short of a revelation for me and other locals without a recognized literary voice all these years. But now she seems content to churn out 'quick-n-dirty' rehashings of her original themes. In contrast with her earlier work, I failed to find any redeeming qualities in any of her characters (except, ironically perhaps, the transplanted mainland haole). Even crediting them for their somewhat unenviable(though still decidedly middle-class) circumstances, the only feeling these characters elicited from me was an intense desire to slap them all upside the head. I agree with the others that Yamanaka still excels in capturing the senses, images, and moods of local living. But I'm struggling to find the ultimate point of her writing as of late. Her early work stared uncompromisingly into the dark side of local culture, but always transcended it in the end. If nothing else, one always found redemption in the telling. Now, there's a disturbingly voyueristic aspect to her storytelling, almost as if all the dysfunctionalism and tragedy is something simply to be displayed (or worse yet, glamorized) for bestseller-reading audiences. Seems to me like Yamanaka's work has turned -- dare I say it -- cheap.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps her best yet!, February 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Heads by Harry (Hardcover)

I loved this book possibly even more than the rest Yamanaka has written. Her voice speaks as clearly through the female narrator as it does through her "in the closet" brother, brutish suitor, and old fashioned family. Yamanaka does a masterful job at showing both the full picture of the underclass in Hawaii, as now the middle class thanks to this story. This book takes you into not just Hawaii, but into all family relations, all over the world. There is no author to date I have found able to make each character as vivacious. I just cant wait for her next book to come out. This author has gotten me started looking for similar novels, though I have not yet found any to compare to the candor and heartfelt emotion in her own works. If you are looking for a story of family trials and tribulations, love and loss, and the beauty of the Islands, look no further.