‘The Wayfinder’ Weaves Indigenous Polynesian Tales Into an Epic Novel

After his first trip to New Zealand, San Francisco author Adam Johnson found himself changed. He was in Auckland to give a reading for his novel The Orphan Master’s Son, a literary journey into the shadows of North Korean dictatorship that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. On the island, where the Indigenous Polynesian people known as Māori are the second-largest ethnic group, he learned how ancient tradition could persist and co-exist with the modern world. The local Māori community welcomed him onto the University of Auckland’s marae, a Māori meeting space. And Johnson was pleasantly surprised that the Māori language was recognized as the state’s official language, with high visibility in official documents and street signs.

A subsequent trip to another Polynesian island, the Kingdom of Tonga, deepened his fascination. “I don’t know if that was the first place I’d been to that hadn’t been colonized,” he recalls, but the experience stirred his imagination. “I wanted to know much more about both places,” he explains, “and the way I learn about things is by writing about them.” A particular oral history from a Māori storyteller confronted him with “real storytelling,” and changed how he wrote and taught moving forward.

The author, who teaches creative writing at Stanford, was drawn to these cultures in part because of his Lakota grandmother, whom he never met. “We have all these family ties that were broken and severed in America,” he explains. “In the reservation I can reconstruct broken legacies, things that were never passed down, and all the family dislocation. [So] whenever I go to a place where Indigeneity seems to be working, I think of what could have been for all of America.”

Johnson’s weighty novel The Wayfinder, out Oct. 14 on MCD, is the result of more than a decade of such curiosity and research, an exploration of family and history and storytelling itself. The epic, set in pre-colonial Polynesia, tells the tale of a young girl named Kōrero (“story” in Māori) who lives on Monumotu, or Bird island, a small island “located in the southern waters” that is struggling to survive. Kōrero and her people — who are inspired by the real-life Moriori people of the Chatham Islands — are sheltered. She is told by her father that “there were as many islands as stars in the sky,” but she has never left her own or met visitors from any other.

Struggling to produce the nourishment needed to survive depopulation, the island’s inhabitants constrict their food intake and resort to graverobbing for tools. They live by variations of Moriori chief Nunuku-whenua’s laws for population control, and resolve conflict through duels that end at the drawing of first blood. These restrictions are enforced by a concept that exists across Polynesian cultures, tapu, which is also the inspiration behind the English word “taboo.”

Johnson encountered variants of that Tongan legend over time, and was surprised by its longevity. “That’s a story that hadn’t died, even after Christianity and after the missionization of Tonga had removed a lot of stories,” he says. The Wayfinder honors these stories not by regurgitating them verbatim, but by foregrounding the importance of storytelling itself.

Kōrero, true to her name, is determined to be her people’s storyteller. At first contact with the Tongans, they share stories back and forth as a form of introduction and to size each other up. “Stories are the proof,” she tells the wayfinder — of who they are and how they lived. Tales are vital self-making tools.

Johnson further emphasizes the sanctity of words by weaving original poetry (which he studied Tongan to write) into the text. Poems — of great battles won, of losses suffered, of traditions preserved — are recited to communicate across generations and seas. Just as navigators must rely on stars, Johnson intimates, the islanders rely on words to create and recognize constellations of themselves.

Before he began writing The Wayfinder, Johnson recalls writing on a piece of paper: “Forget the word ‘novel.’” He told himself, “If you name what this is beforehand, you’ll limit it.” Over the course of  700-plus pages, The Wayfinder prevails in testing and besting those limits. Here, the novel is stretched to encompass, interpolate and elevate Polynesian stories — and seats them next to a hearty new tale.