EVERGREEN

A compassionate caregiver risks all to solve a brutal crime.

Hirahara’s beautifully crafted novel opens with a poem that poignantly describes the loss and devastation inflicted on Japanese Americans forced into internment camps. In 1946, two years after she was released from Manzanar, Aki Ito works as a nurse’s aide in the newly reopened Japanese Hospital in East Los Angeles, her home before the war. Noticing signs of abuse on newly admitted patient Haruki Watanabe, she asks to speak to the son who brought him to the hospital. This, surprisingly, turns out to be Shinji, aka Babe, the best friend of Aki’s husband, Art, and the best man at their wedding in Chicago a year and a half earlier. Babe served in the Army with Art, who’s days away from discharge himself. Flashbacks filled with family and friends describe the couple’s efforts to rebuild a life after detention and move the story from Aki’s stint in Chicago to her current life in LA. When Mr. Watanabe is shot, Aki tries to contact Babe, but he’s no longer at the hotel where he and his father had been living. A sense of duty and her affection for the avuncular Watanabe compel her to dig deeper, and Art’s homecoming provides further impetus and support. Hirahara expertly folds this crime story into her insightful and fully realized portrait of postwar America and the struggles of Japanese Americans to come to terms with the American society that had imprisoned them during the war. Aki and Art’s sleuthing takes them all over the city, most significantly through the criminal underworld, on the way to a complex solution. The mystery adds urgency to this historical snapshot but never overpowers it.

A thought-provoking noir with a searing period flavor.