Night Fisher

Night Fisher begins like a high school coming of age story, but ends up not really being one. Kikuo Johnson’s star, Loren, is a high achieving student with no blemishes on his record. He lives with his supportive and caring father. We realize just what kind of student Loren is when his father calls him for a talk.

“What are we gonna do about this?” he asks.

“Abouuut?”

“Your GRADE!”

We see a snapshot of Loren’s transcript which contains 8 A’s and a B.

“… But I didn’t think B was that bad a grade.” Loren responds.

“It’s not a BAD grade but you can do better right?” his father demands.

We are familiar with this kind of parent, and expect Loren to be a diligent student and an overall spotless kid. But immediately his purity is challenged by a phone call. After a brief exchange, Loren has hopped in his father’s truck and arrived at a sketchy house. His best friend Shane leads him around back. Loren trails behind, looking around this unfamiliar place. Particularly effective is Johnson’s decision to consistently draw Loren bespectacled. His glasses make his eyes look like big white saucers and add a sort of bewildered, wide-eyed effect to Loren. This effect contrasts nicely with the callous and belligerent hooligans he finds himself with when hanging out with Shane.

At this house, Loren is introduced to crystal meth (not for the faint of heart… or those that value their brain). Huge conflicts arise in just a handful of pages. Spotless Loren mixed in with hard drugs; Bambi-eyed, meek Loren with meth head punks (they accuse Loren of being a rich kid because he attends private school with Shane). But these tensions don’t elicit the same type of emotional response from the reader as we might expect—in fact, by the end of the story such problems are fairly inconsequential. This is incredible because any reader with just an inkling of what crystal meth is capable of will expect destruction on all fronts.

We are constantly reminded of Loren’s pure, boy-scout past with little frames of boy-scout diagrams. He helps a man change a tire and tie a knot (unsuccessfully). Steps of the how-to diagrams are inserted between action to action frames. At another point, we see graphs of trig functions, calling to mind Loren’s high achieving academic past. But interestingly, the story does not devolve into a “decay of the pure” type sequence. Instead, the story is about Loren experimenting. His nature stays intact—at the end of the story, he is still bug eyed and bewildered. Things change all around him but he still hasn’t found himself.

In this way, focusing on Loren and expecting some kind of significant transformation is fruitless in Night Fishers. Instead, as raphirae insightfully noted, the reader would do well to focus on the political undertones of the book, linking Loren’s rapidly changing life to a rapidly changing (invaded) Hawaii and Loren himself to Hawaii as it was in the past.