To fully appreciate Naomi Hirahara’s Crown City, it’s helpful to understand the multidimensional nature of the Pasadena native’s work. Most literary critics label Hirahara a mystery writer and former journalist, but these descriptors fail to acknowledge her strengths as a social historian. While best known for her Edgar Award–winning Mas Arai series, Hirahara first published Green Makers, a 2000 study of Japanese gardeners in Southern California, and since that work, she has continued to write history‑infused nonfiction illuminating the Japanese American experience. And with her A Japantown Mystery series, starting with Clark and Division in 2021 and continuing with Evergreen in 2023, Hirahara began using historical research to anchor her mysteries.
The first two entries in the series follow the Ito family, forced to leave their home in Tropico, a now-lost community near Glendale, for a World War II internment camp in Manzanar, then relocated to Chicago before returning to their home in Los Angeles in 1946. While both novels are whodunits, they are also richly attuned to the cycles of dislocation and trauma that Japanese Americans faced during World War II and the postwar years. Now, in the third of the Japantown mysteries, Crown City, Hirahara adjusts her lens to focus on the Japanese presence in the U.S. during an earlier, more foundational period of Japanese immigration and settlement in California, specifically Pasadena.
In 1903, Ryunosuke “Ryui” Wada is an 18-year-old living in the bustling, cosmopolitan port city of Yokohama, Japan. Following the deaths of his mother from tuberculosis and his father, a master carpenter, from a work-related accident, the orphaned Ryui makes the bold decision to immigrate to America to work as an apprentice carpenter for Victor Marsh—whose character is based on a real-life Australian merchant and immigrant to the U.S.—who operates an Asian art supplies store in Pasadena.
After an arduous transpacific journey, Ryui arrives with other immigrants in San Francisco, then travels by rail to Pasadena, which his escort tells him is the city of kings, or Crown City. There, Victor has arranged Ryui’s lodging at Mrs. Riley’s run-down Marengo Avenue boardinghouse, which is something of a workers’ United Nations. It is also home to Simon and Ian Boyle, laborers from Ireland; Torajiro Baba, a.k.a. Jack, a restaurant worker and budding photographer from Okayama, who becomes Ryui’s roommate; and Gigi Greeman, a young white seamstress from Ohio whom Ryui deems “the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.” Louie (the nickname bestowed on Ryui by Gigi) and Jack are not the first “Nipponese” boarders at Mrs. Riley’s. The other boarders often speak of Eddie Morita, an enigmatic figure who had a disagreement with Jack before disappearing.
Hirahara’s meticulous research is obvious in the way that she contextualizes the lives of these working-class residents within Pasadena—a health-conscious escape for wealthy, winter-weary Easterners and Midwesterners that is also rife with real estate, oil speculators, and opium dens—and combines that knowledge with an origin story of an Issei immigrant who’s both witness to and victim of the city’s love-hate relationship with the Japanese. “In Yokohama, I encountered Europeans, Americans, and Australians on a regular basis, but we Japanese still outnumbered them,” Louie reflects soon after his arrival. “They were like white sesame seeds on a golden grilled rice ball—decoration and seasoning, but still not the main attraction. Here in Pasadena, I was the ornament. I didn’t know if I would get smashed or spat out if I wandered into the wrong place.”
With virtually no firsthand knowledge of America, Louie struggles to understand the prejudice he faces as he encounters a range of historical Pasadena figures, including Toshio Aoki, a celebrated Japanese artist; Colonel Green, a health‑elixir entrepreneur and owner of Hotel Green, where Aoki has a studio; and A.C. Vroman, a bookseller and photographer. These characters are skillfully drawn, supported by vivid details of local businesses and social events, such as Aoki’s “cherry blossom” dinner, held at the Hotel Green, where Louie is asked to serve, due to a shortage of Nipponese staff.
During the dinner, one of Aoki’s paintings is stolen. The next day, Aoki asks Louie and Jack to quietly investigate the theft, in the hopes that the painting can be returned without further incident or embarrassment—especially if the thief is one of Aoki’s wealthy white guests. But Louie wonders if the theft is related to a hooded man riding a bicycle who accosted him the night of the dinner, throwing a piece of paper at him that read “Die Jap.” Later, Louie learns Aoki had received identical threats, exposing the possibility that the attacks are part of a larger effort by whites to run the Japanese out of town, as they had Chinese immigrants.
The subsequent discovery of the body of Jack’s former roommate, Eddie, found in the Arroyo next to a poison-laced bottle of Colonel Green’s elixir, heightens the mystery element of the novel and makes these amateur detectives wonder whether Eddie’s death and other crimes are connected. While those answers may come slowly, the revelations are wrapped up in a larger, and ultimately more satisfying, story of Japanese immigration.
While Crown City is technically a stand-alone novel, it’s framed by letters linking it closely to the other Japantown mysteries: a 1943 letter from Louie (as Ryunosuke Wada), ill with Valley fever at the Gila River internment camp and remembering the past, and a 1945 letter from his son, Richard, written just after the war. The connection deepens through Louise Wada, the addressee of the first letter, who is also the Chicago roommate of Rose Ito, the victim in Clark and Division who later appears with her husband, Joey Suzuki, in Evergreen. Taken as a series, Hirahara’s Japantown books brilliantly underscore how the Itos, Wadas, and others contribute to an interconnected narrative of Japanese American trauma, resilience, and survivorship, while leaving open what fascinating historical chapter the author will explore next.•
A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Paula L Woods is an author, editor, and contributor to Alta Journal, as well as a crime fiction columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
