Naomi Hirahara imagines Japanese Americans in post-WWII LA

The late historian Mike Davis dubbed Los Angeles the city of sunshine and noir. In LA, the promise of pleasure and prosperity exists side by side with darker energies — the kind you find in novels by James M. Cain and James Ellroy and in movies like Kiss Me Deadly and Chinatown. The city’s history casts shadows that are long and deep.

You see them clearly in the absorbing new mystery Evergreen, by Naomi Hirahara. The book is a sequel to her acclaimed 2021 novel, Clark and Division, about a Japanese American family who had been locked up in the Manzanar concentration camp. In Evergreen, the family returns home to a 1946 Los Angeles where they discover that their old world has been erased: homes taken over, businesses seized by the state, the Little Tokyo neighborhood transformed into an African American enclave known as Bronzeville.

Our hero is Aki Nakasone, a recently married young nurse’s aide at the Japanese Hospital in the Boyle Heights area of East LA. One day, Aki treats a battered old man. The patient turns out to be the father of Babe Watanabe, the best man at Aki’s wedding and the best friend of her husband, Art, with whom he fought against the Nazis in Italy. Good at jumping to conclusions, Aki fears that Babe may be abusing his dad. Matters soon get worse: The old man is shot dead in his hotel room, and Babe proves, well, hard to find.

And so in her unobtrusive way, Aki starts playing detective. While Art spends long hours working at the local Japanese newspaper, Aki looks for clues, a search that takes her from the elegant reaches of Pasadena, to the squalid Burbank refugee camps where many returning Japanese American must live, to the Bronzeville nightclubs where Charlie Parker played…