Book Report: The Tattoo

The Tattoo

By Chris McKinney

"A book about the sins of the fathers.' . . . A gritty, troubling book."-The Honolulu Advertiser

"The other Hawai'i, the one tourists never get to see."-Ian MacMillan

"Ken Hideyoshi is the new guy in Halawa Correctional Institute. He's tough looking, a hard case, observes his cellmate Cal-the mute tattoo artist of the prison, a wife murderer. SYN, a gang symbol, is tattooed on his hand, and he has a Japanese emblem inscribed on his left shoulder. He asks Cal for a tattoo on his back, in kanji script, of Musashi's Book of the Void.

While he is being worked on, he tells Cal his life story, a tale of hardship and abuse. Motherless, he was raised by a distant father, a Vietnam War veteran, in the impoverished hinterlands. In his teen years he hung out with the native Hawaiian gangs and was drawn into the Hawaiian-Korean underworld of strip bars and massage parlors. His ambition and proud samurai spirit seem, inevitably, to lead to his downfall."

First paragraph:

‘After breakfast, Cal was led to the doors of Module C. He took off his clothes and put his hands against the wall. He then let his hands fall and spread his ass-cheeks. After a few seconds, he turned around and faced the small, compact frame of Sergeant Miranda. He lifted his testicles. Cal watched the other guard, Officer Tavares, go through his clothes. After the routine inspection, Tavares tossed him his underwear, shirt, and pants. Cal glanced at Tavares’ huge tattoo-covered forearms. More than me, he thought.’

The Tattoo opens with an eye-opening, gritty look at life inside a high-security Hawaiian prison. Cal, the facilitator of the story, is in for murdering his wife and is now a lifer, an existence made more miserable as the ‘whipping boy’. He is beaten by both guards and inmates alike, sometimes because he is white, sometimes because of the swastika tattoo on his arm, sometimes simply because he is there. Cal’s throat has been sliced and now he can no longer talk. No one can hear him scream.

But his silence has also worked in his favor. He’s become the prison psychiatrist, never able to breach the doctor-patient trust. Willing or not, he listens to the stories of the other inmates, only able to reflect inwardly. Cal is also a master tattooist, his raw talent making up for the crude materials. It is these two traits that provide a modicum of peace and respect in his otherwise unbearable life.

This story is not about Cal, however. In the first chapter, Cal gets a new cellmate, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian monster of a man named Ken. When Ken learns that Cal is a talented artist and a first-rate physiatrist, he removes his shirt, gives Cal an intricate design, and so begins the real story.

In The Tattoo, the past is the present and the present is italicized. Long stretches of Ken’s flashbacks dominate the story as we follow his life from an abused child through his teenage years and into adult and parent-hood. Broken only by short periods of jail life, the majority of this story takes place on the run down countryside of Hawaii.

McKinney created a raw, honest story with dialect that echoes from the pages and characters that test the reader’s comfort level. Ken’s father is a constant source of hatred and one of the most three-dimensional characters I’ve ever read:

‘Listen. You come home beat up, das ok. But next time you come home like dis and I hear you neva fight back… You gonna have to deal wit me instead of dose little fuckin’ punks at school. You see, dis is why I hard on you, even when you was smaller. Life is fuckin’ tough and you gotta be tough, too. So wheneva I seem mean to you, rememba I stay building your character. You tough you no need worry about shit. If you can eat bullets and crap thunder, goin’ show you respect. Your grandfadda taught me da same ting when I was one kid.’

This story is a disquieting journey through one man’s life as he survives on a steady diet of hate and violence. As he suffers more and more at the hands of his father, Ken begins to change. He recognizes how the hate is changing him, but he embraces it. He thrives on it. He becomes confident, maybe arrogant, and reckless. He pushes the boundaries, enjoying the thrill of the chase and the taste of blood. The Tattoo explores how Ken, a man rooted in hate and violence, walks the razor-thin line between socially acceptable and not. Can evil ever be justified?

I really enjoyed this story and its originality. I learned much about Hawaii and its native races, about different ways of living, and about how events alter a human’s perception.

Five out of Five stars for a gripping, colorful examination of the human psyche and for the details that made this unforgettable