Late in Naomi Hirahara’s novel Clark and Division, the protagonist, Aki Ito, finds a crucial clue in the strange death of her older sister, Rose. She eagerly takes it to the officer assigned to Rose’s case, only to be rebuffed. Aki has already learned to distrust the cops—in previous encounters, they’ve been everything from bigoted to dismissive—but in the face of the stark evidence she’s found, their contemptuous indifference unmoors her. “I felt that my world was spinning out of control, even more erratically than when I was in Manzanar,” she reflects. “At least in camp, we had each other.… Here in Chicago I didn’t know where to turn.”
Aki’s experience at the police station is paradigmatic of Clark and Division, a neo-noir detective novel that centers the experience of Japanese Americans in 1940s Chicago who are rebuilding their lives after being forced into concentration camps in California and across the United States. Though in many ways Hirahara’s novel delivers exactly what we expect from literature of suspense—secrets and solutions, crimes and comeuppance—it uses these genre conventions not only to amplify its depiction of entrenched racism and misogyny but also to imagine the promise of a better world, one in which communities built in resistance to unjust exercises of power can thrive on their own terms.
Clark and Division accomplishes this dual effect by ensuring that even as it resolves the mysteries of its plot, it holds open larger questions of fairness, identity, and inclusion. We often assume that crime fiction’s appeal lies in its pursuit of closure—the solution to the puzzle, the answer to the whodunit—but lingering obscurities and frustrations are equally part of the genre. As literary scholar Theodore Martin puts it, crime novels work through a “dialectic between satisfaction and dissatisfaction,” habitually handing us solutions that are partial (a powerful villain gets away) or unrewarding (the explanation lies in a far-fetched detail or scenario). This is particularly true of midcentury detective fiction by authors such as Raymond Chandler, in which greed and corruption seem inescapable and the key to a crime only yields more existential questions: What is justice? Who gets it? And to whom is it denied? As Chandler’s famous private eye, Philip Marlowe, says at one point, “when you pass in beyond the green lights of the precinct station you pass clear out of this world, into a place beyond the law.”
In Chandler’s novels, the detective is a misanthropic romantic, certain of society’s rot, even while he keeps trying to make things right, and often blind to his own complicity in the abuse of power, slapping a woman one moment and playing white knight the next. But Hirahara, while depicting a corrupt world Chandler would recognize, gives us a different kind of hero. Perpetually excluded from the conditions of privilege but driven by duty and outrage, Aki can’t afford to be cynical. For her, the pursuit of justice is also the pursuit of autonomy and basic respect. As she plans Rose’s funeral, Aki requests that her sister be buried instead of cremated, but no cemetery will accept the body of a person of Japanese heritage—American or not. Later, when Aki reports the experience to a Nisei friend, he reacts with jaded resignation: “No hakujin cemetery wants a Jap body. Same as Los Angeles.” Aki is no stranger to discrimination, but she can’t resist hope. “I thought Chicago would be different,” she replies. Chicago isn’t different, but in the city, Aki finds a gritty new resourcefulness—she is still determined, still hopeful, but increasingly savvy in her realization that there will be no formal justice for Rose.
In one of Chandler’s classic detective novels, this insight would go hand in hand with the protagonist’s steely determination to go it alone, but Clark and Division complicates this familiar story. Aki’s first instinct is to take vengeance into her own hands: confronting one of the men who mistreated Rose, she’s startled to discover that she, in an echo of Chandler’s Marlowe, is “almost without feelings” as she contemplates ending a life. But to her credit, Aki is no hard-boiled detective. When she finally must act, her emotions overwhelm her, and it’s only through the intervention of her parents—the very people she sought to shield—that her plan comes to a kind of fruition. Indeed, trusting others to support her as she seeks the truth of Rose’s life and death is the hardest lesson for Aki to learn. Though she does find answers, and even a modicum of satisfaction by the novel’s end, these achievements come only through discovering the potential for allyship in people she’d previously dismissed: a ne’er-do-well zoot-suiter reveals surprising loyalty; a bubbly friend from work becomes a spy strong enough to sneak into a back-alley abortion clinic; a surrogate aunt steps in with advice at just the right moment.
It’s a double-edged realization, for both Aki and the reader, bringing into focus all the ways gendered, racialized shame has been instilled and leveraged to divide the vulnerable. As Aki builds the friendships and connections that will ultimately help her right the wrongs done to Rose, she simultaneously discovers a shadow network of women, unknowingly united by their shared experiences of sexual violence and exploitation—women who know it won’t do any good to go to the cops, women with pregnancies so unthinkable they’ll risk their lives to end them, women who feel as though the only thing they can do is retreat into silence.
Reflecting on Rose’s final moments, Aki discovers that the independence she had always admired in her sister had come at a price. “Oh, Rose, you didn’t have to take it on all by yourself,” she mourns. “But that’s what she had always done, carried our family on her back. There was even a Japanese word for it: onbu—short, sweet and powerful.” Like all good detective fiction, Clark and Division leaves us with a sense that real justice has yet to be done, but it also holds out hope—if not for recompense, then at least for a community that might lay its foundations.
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.
