When we think of the Japanese American incarceration, we tend to focus on the finite years spent behind barbed wire. But when I recently made a pilgrimage to the site where my mom and her family were held during World War II, in Rohwer, Arkansas, I was struck by a throughline. Many survivors’ and descendants’ stories revealed that their lives were fragmented and erased before and long after the years of physical imprisonment.
Beginning hours after Pearl Harbor, the FBI swept through neighborhoods arresting thousands of innocent Issei men. They tore apart families and communities. Soon after, people of Japanese descent were sent to concentration camps throughout the country. Some were sent to higher-security facilities. Some were sent to fight in Europe. Others were traded for white U.S. civilians living in Japan, while still others were permitted to find work far from the West Coast. After the war, strewn across the country, people were forced to start their lives from scratch, isolated from one another in a society still hostile to them.
Naomi Hirahara’s novel Clark and Division, both a riveting thriller and a moving, vivid look at the aftermath of the Japanese American incarceration, holds a magnifying glass to this fractured landscape.
After being released from the Manzanar camp but before they can set foot in their temporary home in Chicago, the Ito family discover that their eldest daughter, Rose, is dead. Like many Nisei men and women, Rose had been released early by the government to find work. However, torn from her family and everything known, she quickly fell prey to the violent forces of her new city. Aki, her devoted younger sister, stumbles through gambling houses, factories, churches, and government offices seeking answers about her sister’s death. She considers how different it would be to navigate Rose’s death in Los Angeles, “my birthplace…where I knew the bend of the winding streets” and where newspapers “would have featured an attack on a Nisei woman on their front page. Rose Ito’s plight would not have been ignored.” Unmoored and without a support system, it’s easy for people like Rose, and even Aki, to disappear.
Our human connections are our truest homes. For Aki, that home has been Rose. She describes her intense bond with her sister, saying, “Maybe because my life started with her touch, I needed to be close to her to feel that I was alive.… Whenever I was near enough to look at her face, I’d feel grounded, centered and unmovable.” Losing her life in Los Angeles was traumatic enough; without the one closest to her heart, Aki is now emotionally and spiritually homeless.
As Aki pieces together the puzzle of Rose’s death, the tragedy takes on a larger significance—it becomes a poignant metaphor for the immeasurable loss, tangible and intangible, that occurred because of the scattering of Japanese American families due to the incarceration. Aki’s detective work is then a larger refusal to deny that loss and a bold reclamation of what was stolen. “I was so tired of the fact that much of our existence had been erased,” she says. “If I was going to continue in this world, I had to hold on to pieces of reality, no matter how disturbing they might be.”
In mystery stories, the personality of the detective protagonist gives the book or movie its tone. Hirahara’s Edgar Award–winning Mas Arai mystery series is brilliantly brought to life by the voice of a gruff but lovable gardener and survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. In Clark and Division, we see the world through Aki, who pursues truth and justice with a tireless, warrior-like optimism. She faces racism, sexism, corruption, and violence head-on, confronting shady characters and hakujin (white) law officials and daring “anyone to try to hurt me or any other Nisei women.” Amid all this, she pursues a new romance, which, she brightly speculates, “could end happily ever after.” Her radical hope, born from survival and not to be mistaken for naïveté, is unbreakable.
It’s also deeply familiar to me. In Aki, I recognize many of the Nisei people dear to my own heart.
I see my uncle, whose stories of “Camp” (what survivors call the incarceration) were always rebellious and victorious—the times he outsmarted the guards, snuck through a hole in the fence to buy cigarettes, swiped a turkey from the mess hall and feasted with his buddies by the river. And there’s my mom, who, at 86, still boldly pursues her life dreams, despite the world repeatedly trying to stop her. I see all those who fought in the Japanese American redress movement, refusing to be erased as quiet “model minorities.” They demanded justice and in the late 1980s received an apology from Ronald Reagan and, for survivors, $20,000 each in reparations, setting an important precedent for other groups still shamefully overdue for their own reparations.
Through Aki, Hirahara performs a kind of transdimensional surgery, piecing back together what was shattered, dispersed, and forgotten in my own family and in all of us. No matter our backgrounds, each of us has broken pieces. Aki teaches us that pursuing the truth and holding our leaders accountable for past wrongs is not negative or divisive, as we’re often told, but rather how we become whole again. It’s how we move forward with something all too rare in our fragmented, sardonic, understandably despondent world: radical, warrior-like hope.•
Join us on August 17 at 5 p.m., when Hirahara will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Clark and Division. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
