Evergreen (A Japantown Mystery)
The intrepid hero of Clark and Division returns to post-WWII Los Angeles with her parents and new husband only to discover their hometown full of new faces and dangerous associations in Naomi Hirahara’s Evergreen.
In 1946 Los Angeles, Aki Nakasone (nee Ito) and her parents have returned home to California after four years away. Aki soon lands a job as a nurse’s aide at the local Japanese Hospital and searches for a home for her parents and husband Art, still awaiting Army discharge. Though the war is over, nothing in Los Angeles is the same for Aki and thousands of others. Hirahara masters the time jump by musing “while we were gone, our competitors took over our farming operations and produce markets… while we were gone, thieves plundered our storage units…” and captures the historic reality of the changing makeup of “Little Tokyo” where thousands of Black defense workers from the South moved into the vacant buildings. Just as Aki is reunited with Art and living comfortably with him and her parents in a new home, their bliss is cut short when Art’s army friend and best man, Babe Watanabe, comes around. Aki suspects that Babe’s father may be a victim of domestic abuse at the hands of his son after showing up at the hospital with bruises he refuses to explain. Soon, the old man returns to the hospital with a fatal gunshot wound, Babe disappears, and strange men in threadbare police uniforms knock on the Nakasones’ door asking for Babe’s whereabouts. Aki’s natural curiosity leads her to the heights of City Hall and the lows of impoverished Japanese refugee camps to find the truth.
Evergreen is a brilliant sophomore outing that brings back old faces and introduces new ones for a sharply plotted mystery and a historically rich story.
