Naomi Hirahara: Evergreen

I was a big fan of Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division, in 2021, and I wasn’t alone. She took home the Agatha, the Anthony, the Bruce Alexander best historical from Left Coast Crime, and the Mary Higgins Clark, at the Edgars. It was named a NY Times mystery of the year.

The story begins in late 1944, and Clark and Division is both a specific geography and place in time, and a stop on a journey, the Chicago neighborhood where many American Japanese, released from Manzanar and other detention camps, have been allowed to resettle, to try and rebuild a life. They haven’t been allowed to go home, which in the case of the Ito family is Los Angeles, but they’ve been offered parole. Aki Ito, the younger daughter, looks forward to being back with her adored older sister Rose, who had been released earlier, and gone on ahead, but when Aki gets to Chicago, her sister is dead, killed when she fell off a subway platform, in front of an oncoming train. An unhappy accident. A suicide, perhaps. Aki suspects not.

Clark and Division takes its time, building the world Aki navigates, the hostile, the indifferent, the familiar, and the mystery of her sister’s death.

The resolution isn’t an easy fix, in keeping with the ambiguities of culture, and dislocation, and loss. And the undercurrent of wartime, like a bass melody, behind the brighter notes of the piano. All told, an immersive experience.

Evergreen is the sequel.

1946. Aki, now married to Art Nakasone, is back in California with her family. But what they left behind isn’t recoverable, the physical properties no more than their emotional histories. Everybody’s got battle fatigue. Literally, in the case of Art, who fought with the 422^nd, the Nisei regiment, and has nightmares about combat. All of them suffer post-traumatic stress, even if they keep it to themselves. It’s the key theme of the book. Evergreen is the name of the cemetery in Boyle Heights, where Aki lives, and every character is haunted in some way, if not by the past, then by their lost futures.

I don’t think Evergreen is as successful as Clark and Division, and I’m at a loss as to why. The mystery doesn’t seem as personal, in one sense, but it gets under Aki’s defenses, all the same. I wonder if it isn’t that the canvas is so much bigger. Hirahara keeps the focus on Aki, and tells the story through her eyes; Aki is a clear-eyed narrator, and not easy to surprise. She characterizes herself as unsophisticated, but that’s her own habit of thinking– she’s very savvy, particularly about navigating the structural politics of the postwar American Japanese. Maybe that’s the difficulty, that the environment is so dense, socially, and yet internally conflicted, which seems very un-Japanese. They’ve lost harmony, and community.

More disconcerting are of course the contemporary echoes, and all too obviously, that’s what kept catching my mind’s eye, and taking me out of the fictional comfort zone of Aki’s story.

We’re sharply reminded that the isolation and humiliation of the American Japanese isn’t some historical anomaly. What happened to the Itos and the Nakasones is happening to other families, as we speak, but this time it’s the Garcias and the Quintanas. The effect on people is the same. The willful and gratuitous violence, the small cruelties, the morass of legalisms, which only remind us how carefully the Nazis documented the Final Solution.

The soft-spoken subtext of Clark and Division, and of Evergreen, isn’t that It Can’t Happen Here, but that it has happened here. All it takes is to turn a blind eye.