by Naomi Hirahara
Evergreen, the second in this “Japantown Mystery” series, was recommended months ago by our friend Frako. When I went to the library a few days ago with my to-read list, I decided it was a good time to read about another period in history when immigrants were being persecuted by the American government, and I decided to go back and read this first in the series first. It has won numerous awards, and reading the acknowledgements and notes reveals that it was deeply and thoroughly researched. I was also delighted to find out that the author, Naomi Hirahara, lives in Pasadena but grew up in Altadena. I’m not usually a big mystery fan, but a genre mash-up with historical fiction is a good fit for me.
We first meet the Ito family in 1941, living in a part of Los Angeles I had never heard of that no longer appears on the maps. Just north of Atwater Village and east of Los Feliz, I-5, and the Los Angeles River, there was a settlement called “Tropico,” where beginning early in the twentieth century Isei (first generation) Japanese farmers grew vegetables for the downtown Los Angeles produce market. After Pearl Harbor was bombed they joined the rest of the west coast Japanese and Japanese-American community by being incarcerated, in the case of this family, at the Manzanar “War Relocation Camp,” a concentration camp in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains.
Prisoners were eventually given the option to leave the camp by agreeing to resettle far inland where the government could stop worrying that they might be spies for the Japanese government, so the Ito family made their way to Chicago. Their oldest daughter Rose preceded the rest of the family and found a job, but the day before her parents and younger sister Aki arrived in Chicago, she was found dead on the subway tracks, which the police ruled a suicide. Aki knew her older sister too well to believe that story, so she takes it upon herself to find out what really happened to Rose.
There was some foreshadowing that gave me some clues to figure out what happened, which I suppose is the whole point of reading a mystery. But I preferred to just let the whole thing unfold without trying to make myself feel smart by figuring it out before the author provides the Big Reveal. And of course I would never spoil it by spelling it all out here!