Clark and Division may be Naomi Hirahara’s first historical mystery, but its themes and techniques are hardly a departure for the author, who has written both crime fiction and work that deals with the Japanese American communities of Southern California. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was a reporter and an editor for Los Angeles’s Rafu Shimpo, the largest Japanese American newspaper in the United States. During the years that followed, she wrote a number of nonfiction books before publishing her first mystery, Summer of the Big Bachi. The novel features detective Mas Arai, who, as an adolescent, survived the Hiroshima bomb.
This article appears in Issue 24 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Released in 2021, Clark and Division also has roots in World War II and California, although much of the action takes place in Chicago. Its central characters are members of the Ito family, who, after two years of incarceration at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, are given early release and move to the Midwest in 1944. Their history grew out of information Hirahara uncovered while working on her 2018 nonfiction book, Life After Manzanar, cowritten with Heather C. Lindquist. “When we were looking where people went from Manzanar,” she told the website CrimeReads in 2021, “Chicago was the top destination.”
As to how this came to be, Chicago was outside the deportation area. (Most camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated were in California and the rural West.) The Itos’ experience at Manzanar and their engagement with Japanese American communities both in California before the war and later in Illinois reveal the nuances of a history that, for a long time, was effectively erased. “Our periods, which used to occur at about the same time while we lived in [the Southern California town of] Tropico, disappeared altogether while we were in camp,” Aki Ito tells us; the family’s younger daughter, she is the novel’s narrator. She also plays the role of detective after her older sister, Rose, is struck by a subway train. Although the death appears to be a suicide, Aki believes something sinister was involved.
There’s a tradition in crime fiction of the amateur sleuth: civilians who like to trade in favors, who solve cases (or attempt to) for reasons of their own. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins is one example. Aki is another. Her interest is personal, a matter of family obligation. But it also leads to a cultural reckoning. Like many of the novel’s characters, Aki carries the weight of trauma; it’s no stretch for her to imagine a similar trauma may have had something to do with her sister’s death. As she investigates, she finds herself drawn ever more deeply into both the Issei and the Nisei communities of Chicago as well as that of recently relocated Japanese Americans. This is a floating world of sorts, with everything out of place and nothing settled. In that sense, it is representative not only of its moment but also of the one in which we currently find ourselves.•
