History is not made by incidents. It is forged in their aftermath. The way that people adapt to events, the way they break down, the way they tell stories or hold them—these are as much our understanding of the past as time itself. In an era of the biopic and widespread book banning, of legislating American history out of student curricula and a yawning cultural memory hole, a novel like Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division is a bold, necessary text. Not just for the vivid portrait it paints of Nisei freed from the Manzanar camp, remaking their lives in Chicago, but also for the remarkable way it shows how an unfolding story—even one built on fine qualities, like loyalty and hard work—can trap people.
The trap is set in Aki Ito’s life by where and when it begins. Raised in the Glendale neighborhood of Tropico, the heroine of Hirahara’s novel grows up rooted in Los Angeles, which is a landscape and a home but also a world of vanishing maps. Tropico incorporated with Glendale just before Ito’s mother arrived in America from Kagoshima—her father was one of the Issei who had come to work in its strawberry fields. By the time Aki was born, Tropico was—as a separate place—disappearing. Aki’s family had one another, though, and that would get them through a lot—their work and one another.
Hirahara’s life as a crime writer and social historian has revolved around telling stories that excavate these lost cities within cities—especially Los Angeles—revealing how they remain yet very much alive. Clark and Division marks a turning point in her work, however, for it animates the way these old geographies are carried over to a new one—this time in America’s heartland. And how those well-worn maps of operation form a challenge to grasping new realities.
Within 30 pages of Clark and Division, Aki has been born, grown up, been shipped off to Manzanar, and then is set free. In the full swing of war, America needs to draft Nisei men into the army, and by answering test questions correctly, first Aki’s sister, Rose, and then her family are released to Chicago, with careful instructions not to gather in groups of more than three. “I understood the resettlement agency’s strategy,” Aki says. “If I were working for the government, I would send hundreds of Rose Itos out into the wide plains of the Midwest.… If anyone could convince a suspicious public that we Japanese were patriotic Americans, it would be my older sister.”
It is there, in 1944, on the corner of Clark and Division Streets, that the novel begins in earnest, and in the wake of a terrible tragedy. Shortly before the Itos arrive, Rose is killed from a fall onto the train tracks. Her death is labeled a suicide, but Aki cannot believe that her sister would take her own life. From the coroner Aki learns that her sister also recently underwent an abortion. This information she keeps to herself, knowing her parents are already in shock.
Into the tumult of World War II–era Chicago, within a population told it is being watched, the novel brilliantly plunges us. Nisei from the camps are piling into Chicago, overtaxing the job market, the housing market, and everyone’s assumptions. In her first days, Aki meets a Nisei woman just up from Arkansas and discovers that at Greek diners you eat something sweet before sitting down to eat.
Even more than novelty, Hirahara has precisely re-created the many overlapping networks of support and mutual aid that quickly assembled in Chicago then—let alone any other city, wartime or not. The church groups and dance halls, the underground bars and daisy chain of employment recommendations. The mafias with their tentacular reach. Rose, Aki learns, had been employed at a bra factory, making cheap undergarments, while taking precious good care of her own dresses, which remain like a set of clues to the life she led before her death. Grief-stricken, Rose’s parents can barely say her name.
As it builds its story, Clark and Division threads brilliantly between secrets and well-known facts. Aki and her parents are poor, twice relocated, fearful of losing their new freedoms, and utterly dependent on the kindness of strangers. So Aki narrates in a wide-eyed, somewhat post-traumatic register, desperate to believe the best of people. She doesn’t have much choice, given how estranged she is from the streets of Tropico. When she meets a part-time gangster—or screwup, it’s not quite clear—also from Tropico, she suspends judgment due to the tenacity of hometown ties. It takes the rest of the book for us to find out if this is a good choice or not.
The fact that the reader needs to judge Aki’s ability to weigh what is true and what is rumor lends tremendous suppleness and tension to Clark and Division. As Aki retraces her sister’s steps, encounters the friends Rose made, and rubs shoulders with the men she met, everyone from the man at the registration desk of the Nisei hotel and pool sharks to icebox deliverymen and priests, yet another ghost of doubt enters the text. Was Rose Ito really like her sister? In essence, a well-behaved, hardworking young woman? Or had she gotten herself involved in something she could not control? This question rises up from Aki’s upbringing and gently lays its shade on each one of her sleuth-like interrogations. Nothing takes place in this book only in Aki’s head: we are always navigating her perceptions, projections, and the shared space of people who do the same.
As this question blooms in Clark and Division, an area of vulnerability within a vulnerable space emerges, one Hirahara maps in even greater detail than she does Chicago itself: that of Rose’s perceived or actual behavior as a woman, an especially precarious space as a woman just released from a camp for demonstrating “loyalty.” In the streets around Clark and Division, in the dive bars and underground gambling dens, Aki begins to realize that there are places Rose could have become lost—or where a man could have hurt her and easily gotten away with it. When it becomes clear that other women may have had similar trouble to Rose, Aki tries to get these women to talk. Not all of them want to. Some shut the door in her face. Some scold her. Some listen, and a very few help her.
Everyone in this novel, it could be said, is suffering from a form of PTSD. Some have been freed from camps easily; some have had detours in reform zones. The varieties of coping on display in Clark and Division are powerfully rendered, even when quickly sketched. Aki’s parents bear up as many do when trying to carry the weight of the world: by working. And by drinking. Periodically through the book, Aki’s father returns home very late, paralytically drunk, and it doesn’t require much commentary to explain why. When Aki gets work at a nearby library, she makes friends with a Black coworker and a Polish coworker, and wisely, Hirahara never turns these into instrumental plot points. Aki merely discovers in their care and warmth friendship outside Japanese American circles, and that softens the blow of her own circumstances. It also steels her resolve to achieve justice for her sister.
In truth, Aki desperately needs this resolve. Chicago might have a river, too, but in many, many other ways, it is different from Los Angeles, a comparison Aki makes in one of the book’s most beautiful passages. “I knew the bend of the winding streets and the pitiful concrete bed of the Los Angeles River without looking,” she says. Meantime, the Chicago River courses through the city without apology. Without the familiarity of the land and with precious little help from the Chicago Police Department, Aki falls back on a part of the city map that she feels she could understand: the press. “The more sensational rags, not to mention the hakujin ones, would have featured an attack on a Nisei woman on their front page. Rose Ito’s plight would not have been ignored.”
Hirahara, who edited the Rafu Shimpo newspaper, is an ink-stained crime writer. She clearly loves newspapers. They appear throughout this book, from the various newspapers of the camps, which are referred to in passing, for news of Rose’s death could have traveled there, to the Chicago dailies, in which Aki has more faith than the police. Including these quasi-public spaces gives the facts and whispers Aki collects by asking questions a kind of minor, official echo chamber. They give an already enclosed city another form of enclosure.
The truth, Aki knows, though, will never be found in them in its entirety. But a crucial part of it might be—especially if she works with a newspaper reporter to bring her sister’s case to light. And thus we begin our race to a finale. What an arc this short, brisk, brilliant book traces. Aki grows up in California believing she belongs, save for discriminatory comments by a classmate’s mother. The actions of the U.S. government shatter this feeling, and then it makes the condition of her family’s release a performance of not only this feeling but also the loyalty that once attended to it—even as they must swear to America their vulnerability. You cannot gather in groups of more than three. One by one, Aki threads around that line and finds the grim, real truth to life in Chicago, after the camp, at least for her sister. What a story Naomi Hirahara has made of it.•
Join us on August 17 at 5 p.m., when Hirahara will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Kristen Hayashi to discuss Clark and Division. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
