Several years ago, a literature professor from Ashiya, Japan, located between Kobe and Osaka, visited me in Pasadena. She was studying my work, in particular my Mas Arai mysteries, which feature an aging Japanese American gardener modeled after my late father.
Months later, a fat package from Japan arrived at my home. In it was a literary anthology featuring the professor’s essay, which declared my writing style as journalistic. Journalistic?! I didn’t know how to interpret this. Sure, much of my 20s and early 30s had been spent working at the Rafu Shimpo, the Japanese American daily newspaper that has its own building on South Alameda and Third Streets at the south end of Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. But when my first Mas Arai mystery, Summer of the Big Bachi, had been published in 2004, hadn’t I transcended from that ink-fingered reporter and editor to a writer with more staying power?
This article appears in Issue 24 of Alta Journal.
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I pushed away such self-doubts. To this day, I have not been plagued with impostor syndrome related to being a writer. I’m fully aware of my limitations, but growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I heard so many voices doubting my capabilities that I could not even absorb a whisper of what they had to say. If I had, I would have shut down my aspirations to become a novelist.
Recently, however, that term “journalistic” emerged again, this time in reference to my historical mystery, Clark and Division. A book club in Salt Lake City was reading this novel, set in 1944 Chicago, and the leader’s notes were forwarded to me. In them, the leader stated, “The writing style is more journalistic than literary.” Again, journalistic! Yes, I felt that familiar pang of what—embarrassment? But this time, I was better prepared to do some reflection, because of interactions I’d had during the pandemic.
In that time of lockdown, I’d been able to engage in multiple virtual discussions (in the company of an invisible audience, of course) with high-profile colleagues such as Michael Connelly. While discussing his novel Fair Warning on Crowdcast in June 2020, I learned we had worked, for different news organizations, only blocks from one another in the 1980s. Connelly’s drive to reflect reality in his novels—whether police brutality or the pandemic—struck home with me.
To capture a reality, whether in the present or past, is a journalist’s calling or sickness, depending on how you look at it.
My interest in journalism—or, should I say, the “outside world”—stems from my upbringing and my personality. I can’t be floating as a single entity; my family and I are connected to the larger world, and I need to understand that world as much as I do my own vulnerabilities and experiences.
So in the wake of Clark and Division, I’ve come to appreciate the power of journalistic novel writing. Facts, evidence, and interviews do not inhibit imagination. They provide, rather, unique challenges. Even the construction of the first-person voice in Clark and Division has little to do with showing off fancy wordsmithing. Rather, as in journalism, the prose has to be stripped down to reveal the essence of my protagonist and her complicated life with as much authenticity as possible.
In spite of its influence on my work, journalism cannot tell all stories. There are secrets the dead cannot report to us. There may be no trail of documents and diary entries that I can piece together. It’s in these dark, mysterious places that fiction can serve the reader and even the dead. I can build context through research and then move an invented character through unexplored or hidden realities.
More than being journalistic, I see myself as a resurrectionist. To discover the humanity of the past can redefine how we look at ourselves and the world today. I have written to understand how my family and community came to be in California and how their responses—heroic, tragic, and even criminal—when the government sought to diminish their influence or even existence can both inspire and inform. By writing of this place and time, I hope to leave novels based in fact, a foundation on which new generations can create wonderful, fanciful, and fantastic tales.•
