Island hopping
by Anton Zuiker on May 7, 2026
Last night, I finished reading The Wayfinder, a novel by Adam Johnson. I had started this book on Christmas Day (I give books to each of my family, and when I saw this on the table at Flyleaf Books, I took it home and put it under the tree with my name on the tag), and I took my time reading the 713 pages. Savored them, really.
I thoroughly enjoyed this story of Tonga and the royal intrigue that sent princes and storytellers and poets and fefine girls and a talking parrot on journeys throughout the South Pacific. It’s Polynesian magic realism (written by a Stanford University professor who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe). I read this here in North Carolina, but what made it especially personal for me was my own connection to the Pacific: my time in Hawaii, where I briefly studied the Hawaiian language, and my Peace Corps service in Vanuatu, where I drank kava (“bitter like puddled water” writes Johnson, just as I remember it). Through the years, I’ve also read with interest about the knowledge of traditional navigators, such as this 2016 NYTimes feature and this 2025 science story, both about the Marshall Islands.
What might a nomadic life look like? Consider Vaha-loa. Cradled by wave troughs and weaned on limu, this maritime vagabond had, before his first whisker, felled a man with a Tahitian sling, shared breath with a volcano in Vanuatu, and seen the seas luminesce against submerged reefs. His father taught him the arts of barter and ransom. His mother, stealth and evasion. And he had a third parent: the vastness of the sea, whose tutelage remediated all other lessons but one: a human’s lowly place in the oceanic scheme.
I liked that line about sharing the breath of life with a volcano—I had breathed in the vapors of Benbow, Yasur, and Lopevi, all volcanoes in Vanuatu (and Kilauea in Hawaii).
Earlier in the novel, Moon Appearing, one of the heroines—there are many strong and wise girls and women in this story, in which the king and other men wreak havoc across the seas—“finished her chores, her hair had fallen and she smelled like pond water. It was evening, and the light from the west lit the thorny ribs of palm fronds and set the pale green ferns aglow.”
As I read that, I felt myself once again swinging in my hammock in Liro Village in the late afternoon as I looked across the village through “a green and liquid light that I swear I could just about swim through.”
Reading this book was like swaying in the hammock, swimming in the glow of the islands, floating in the poetry of village life and sounds of tropical birds.
Kōrero is another heroine, a girl storyteller who connects all the threads of this story. Her name is the Māori word for talking and conversation, much like the Bislama yumi stap storian and talk story that I learned in Hawaii. Both of those phrase have been important through my 25 years of blogging and community building and influenced my decade of narrative. I’ve been thinking about ways to keep up that focus, and The Wayfinder pointed the way.
“Kuo pau ke ke ‘alu,” she said to him. (You must go.)
“Pea ko koe e nofo,” he responded. (And you remain.)
That’s a refrain throughout the story. So good.
This was quite the reading experience. Thank you, Adam Johnson.