Toward the end of Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division, the August California Book Club selection, the heroine, Aki Ito, makes several surprising discoveries. The mystery of Aki’s sister’s death that we thought we’d been following turns out to be one that’s more structural than we might have assumed from the seemingly intimate circumstances associated with the death, which included a sexual assault and an abortion.
The best fiction can be read through more than one lens, yielding itself to us under refracted light. Clark and Division can be read easily from several angles. There are political, social, authorial, and genre-based interpretations available to us. Aki is an amateur detective in a classic good-guy mold. She’s not her sister’s avenger, though she is her champion. And though Aki does have brief moments of bitterness, rather than be overtaken by grief at what she’s lost as a result of governmental policies and interpersonal bigotry, she’s dismayed to find that another character would give up on America. Even after going through the powerlessness, the ordeal of Manzanar, she continues to yearn for home, for California—after everything, she doesn’t stop thinking of it as home. Her psychological epiphany involves an understanding that things were more complex for her sister than she’d realized and also that her relationships with others, including her romantic one, require her not to bottle up her feelings but to reveal them.
Yet, the political awareness of Clark and Division, its educated skepticism about power and government, is salient—the novel is keenly concerned with justice and the historical lack thereof. Injustice and corruption are as crucial to the book’s meaning as they are in noir.
And so we’re honored to welcome Kristen Hayashi as the special guest for this month’s CBC gathering. A public historian and the director of collections management and access and curator at the Japanese American National Museum, she can deepen our understanding of Clark and Division by sharing her expertise about the lives of Japanese Americans during and after World War II. She holds a PhD and a master’s degree in history from UC Riverside. Her dissertation research delved into the return and resettlement of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles. She studied public history, Asian American studies, and the history of Los Angeles.
Hayashi served on the curatorial team for Becoming Los Angeles, a permanent exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. She’s on the board of directors for the Little Tokyo Historical Society and the Asian Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation. She collaborated with the former to research and write an application for a local historical cultural monument designation for the Japanese Hospital in Boyle Heights in 2016.
In her dissertation “Making Home Again: Japanese American Resettlement in Post–World War II Los Angeles, 1945–1955,” Hayashi notes that her own family had found a way to put an optimistic spin on their incarceration and the loss of their homes and property. She writes, “For the majority who struggled to reclaim their property, livelihood, family life, and dignity, this period was characterized by discrimination as well as social and economic hardship. The resettlement experiences of Japanese Americans were far more diverse and complex than the singular experience of ‘rapid success’ that the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the federal agency that oversaw the incarceration, promoted and Nisei have touted, as well.”
The WRA tried to stifle the suggestion that relocation had deleterious consequences, not only to bolster and defend its program but also, perhaps, to provide a smoother reintegration into society for Japanese Americans. Hayashi’s paper refuses an interpretation that suggests the Japanese American experience was monolithic and instead considers the complexity of that resettlement experience and the discrimination that continued to follow a grievously wronged people.
The conversation on Thursday is sure to be a rich and meaningful examination not only of Clark and Division’s absorbing mystery but also of the post–World War II period, resettlement, and hope—don’t miss it.•
Join us on August 17 at 5 p.m., when Hirahara will appear in conversation with Hayashi and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Clark and Division. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
DIFFERENT DETECTIVE STORY
Critic Anna E. Clark insightfully considers the way Clark and Division uses genre conventions “not only to amplify its depiction of entrenched racism and misogyny but also to imagine the promise of a better world.” —Alta
THE GREAT OIL NOVEL
Read critic Michael Schaub’s review of Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility. —Alta
SLOWING TIME
Zoë Ruiz writes a stirring op-ed about moving from Los Angeles to a cabin in Joshua Tree to write. She says, “I am cultivating a sense of patience and fearlessness when it comes to not just writing, but to life.” —Los Angeles Times
BOOKLASH
PEN America has released a report on author, publisher, and estate withdrawal of books between 2021 and 2023, withdrawals based only on online commentary that deemed the content or author offensive. The report argues, “The normalization of this tactic threatens to shrink the space for risk-taking and creative freedom in the publishing world.” —PEN America
TOO YOUNG
On the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, Danyel Smith (Shine Bright) pays tribute to 63 of the genre’s stars who died before their time. —New York Times
DARKENED OUTLOOK
Paramount has sold Simon & Schuster to the private equity firm KKR, which bought Toys ‘R’ Us, and other firms. The buyers paid themselves $250 million in “management fees” and bonuses before the toy company filed for bankruptcy. —Los Angeles Times
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