One Day a Taniwha by Tīhema Baker

Tīhema Baker’s One Day A Taniwha is a tense, compassionate and culturally grounded novel about fatherhood under pressure. Its protagonist, Hepa, has not slept properly in four months. His baby son, Wī, cries through the night. Money is tight, work is strained, and the demand to be steady for his whānau has begun to hollow him out. He tells himself to harden up, to become the pillar everyone needs, but the effort of holding himself together is precisely what starts to pull him apart.

The novel’s central image is both frightening and apt. Since childhood, Hepa has been able to shape his dreams, finding there the control that ordinary life denies him. Then a presence with pāua-shell eyes begins to appear, first in sleep and then in waking life. The taniwha becomes an expression of dread, anger, exhaustion and inherited pressure, yet Baker is careful not to flatten it into a simple metaphor. It belongs to the novel’s bicultural imaginative foundation, where psychological realism and te ao Māori do not sit in separate compartments. They inform each other, giving the story its distinctive force.

Baker writes Hepa with striking empathy. This is not a portrait of a monstrous father, but of a loving man terrified by what sleep deprivation, shame and isolation might make possible. The book understands how easily contemporary fatherhood can become a performance of competence: be present, be gentle, provide, decolonise yourself, speak the reo, manage the bills, absorb the cultural load at work, stay politically awake, and never admit that you are close to collapse. Hepa’s struggle is personal, but the forces pressing on him are social, historical and political.

That wider pressure is one of the novel’s strengths. Hepa is the only Māori person in his council office, expected to carry knowledge, explanation and cultural responsibility in ways that many readers will recognise. At home, he measures himself against Āniwa’s connection to her marae and feels the familiar ache of not being Māori enough. Around him, government decisions and overseas violence form a grim background noise. Baker builds a pressure cooker in which fatherhood, work, identity and politics become inseparable.

The prose is direct and accessible, with dialogue doing much of the emotional work. This gives the novel a natural pace and keeps it close to ordinary speech, even as the dream sequences push into darker territory. At times, the earnestness of the book is strongly felt, and some of the political parallels may be more immediately recognisable than subtle. Yet this directness also suits the material. Baker is not writing from a detached distance. The novel has personal stakes, and its urgency is part of its honesty.

One Day A Taniwha stands within an emerging strand of contemporary Aotearoa fiction concerned with the modern family man: the father trying to be emotionally available, culturally responsible, economically useful and morally decent in a world that gives him few stable models. Baker’s achievement is to place that figure within a

Māori and bicultural frame, making visible pressures often left unnamed.

The result is a powerful and important novel about Māori fatherhood, mental health and the people who live beside a person in crisis. It is emotionally difficult, but not hopeless. Baker recognises the danger of silence, but also the possibility of karakia, kōrero, whānau and love. The taniwha may sit on Hepa’s shoulder, but the novel insists he does not have to face it alone.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Moa Press