A new novel follows two young lovers the summer before a tsunami levels their hometown in Hilo, Hawaiʻi.
"Everything to the Sea" is a literary love story set against disaster. Its two main characters, Jane and Kenji, find themselves divided by the wave and all that it entails. Readers spend the next decade following the two lovers as they grieve, try to rebuild their lives, and find their way back to each other.
Debut author Alicia Upano says the story came to her while writing another novel, one concerned with the environmental toll of climate change in Hawaiʻi. In that novel, Jane and Kenji showed up as two minor characters who had lost their families in Hilo.
“The only problem was I only wanted to write about Jane and Kenji. I wanted to write about how they met, how they loved their families, how they fell in love,” Upano said. “I fell in love with them falling in love, and so the old novel was scrapped, and Jane and Kenji became heroes of their own story.”
Jane and Kenji fall in love in Hilo, but when Jane leaves for Honolulu, Kenji follows her. It’s ultimately what saves their lives — the wave hits in Hilo soon after. He returns home while she moves onward to build a life elsewhere, and this contrast becomes a central conflict in the story.
Upano uses this plotline to explore the tension between staying home and leaving in search of something new. Born and raised in Hawaiʻi herself, she left for college at 18 and didn’t return until 16 years later.
“I missed home,” she said. “Leaving is a young person’s move, and so after 16 years gone, I was ready to return.”
Drawing attention to that idea, she described "Everything to the Sea" as a story not just about love, but also about community, grief, and homecoming.
Beyond exploring these themes, Upano’s novel offers one perspective of what it means to live in Hawaiʻi.
“Hilo is much more complex than I could render, and so is my imagination,” she said. “As someone who was born and raised here, it was really important for me to at least attempt to render Hawaiʻi in its complexity and its layers. It’s beautiful, but it’s also complicated.”
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 11, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Annabelle Ink adapted this story for the web.
