Healing from the War: Naomi Hirahara's first novel

Naomi Hirahara has written a fine first novel in Summer of the Big Bachi. A former editor of the Rafu Shimpo, the bilingual Japanese American daily in Los Angeles, Hirahara has both written an engaging mystery story and examined the lives of the generation of Japanese Americans coming of age during World War II. So Summer of the Big Bachi has transformed the mystery story into a generation’s story.

The hero, Mas Arai, a 69-year old survivor of the A-bomb blast in Hiroshima, works as a gardener in Altadena/Pasadena area just north of Los Angeles. Mas is one of 500 Hiroshima survivors who were born in the United States and then returned to their native country after the war. Mas’s favorite pastime is gambling at the backroom of the lawnmower shop owned by Wishbone Tanaka, a survivor of the relocation camps.

One of Mas’s best friend isTug Yamada, a member of the 442^nd , the legendary army unit of Japanese Americans that won an amazing amount of Purple Hearts and Silver Stars for their heroism fighting in Italy. Throughout the novel, more and more of these men’s lives from 1945-1999 are revealed. We learn about their wives, their children, their careers, their hobbies, their close friendships—how they made a life in Southern California. Mas’s philosophy has always been, “[Y]ou can’t blame the Bomb, Accept it, go, and forget.” Mas like his friend Tug is a ultimate survivor who went on to create a rich life after the war.

All these men believe in “bachi” of the title”: if you hurt someone, you soon get hurt in return (what comes around, goes around). There is also a mystery involved two men who came separately from Japan. Both the older man Nakane and the young reporter Yuki Kimura are looking for Joji Haneda who was Mas’s childhood friend in Hiroshima.

Despite not wanting to help either man, Mas sends the young reporter Yuki to the house of Junko Kakita, the mistress of Joji Haneda . Yuki arrives to find the mistress has just been attacked. After the police arrest Yuki as the suspected attacked, Mas tries to investigate seriously. Yuki is alone in California, so Mas steps in as a substitute grandfather to help him. So now we have a traditional crime for this mystery to solve, but some of the clues are 50 years in the past. The novel moves between the mysteries of 1999 Los Angeles and the mystery of 1945 Hiroshima.

As Mas investigates, we learn both what he and his teenaged friends had to do to survive in wartime and occupied Japan Some of the bad guys are the Japanese chauvinists who harassed American-born Japanese in Hiroshima because they had English-language books. Hirahara exames the questions of loyalty to country, to friends, and to self. Another bad guy was teenaged Riki Kimura who sold heroin on the black market when Hiroshima was occupied by the U.S. The novel investigates a further mystery: where does evil reside?

Mas doesn’t think like his friend Wishbone that the world owes him because the Americans locked him up during the war. For Wishbone, the Americans are the evil ones. While Mas sympathizes with the Nisei’s suffering, he feels differently after living through Hiroshima: “Once you witnessed that, you saw evil, and it didn’t live in just Americans or Japanese. It lived close by in friends, in neighbors, and most frighteningly, inside yourself.” Finally, the novel concerns itself with forgiving oneself for surviving Hiroshima and not being able to save one’s friends. Hirahara has transformed the mystery novel into a fiction that searches into the mysteries of life itself. She has written a splendid first novel.

Hollywood Boulevard Anti-War March 3/19

It was raining with a slight drizzle when I walked through Hollywood to Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street at noon for the anti-war march commemorating the 2^nd year of the war. I stopped to buy a candy bar at a coffeehouse at Selma and Cahuenga, noticing the two young L.A.P.D. in the front of the room drinking their coffee? Coffee break? Munching my chocolate down Hollywood Boulevard, I saw a couple more L.A.P.D. lounging next to their bikes. Most of the streets were blocked off: Hollywood Boulevard was and most of the side streets were.

Actually this march almost didn’t get its permit because the local businesses thought it would be bad for business, but a deal was cut at the last moment calling the march a “parade,” so it was legalized. Actually, most of the police looked relaxed, hanging out in doorways. The anti-war marchers have proved themselves to be peaceful crowd after two years of marching down Hollywood Boulevard. The drizzle is a little harder as I stand on the southeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard half listening to the speeches. Speeches and songs go on for a while, with a rousing anti-war lesbian demanding both the Iraq War to end and the right to marry her fiancee getting the most rousing applause.

More people kept on arriving in the drizzle until there must have been 5,000 people there—maybe more. It’s hard to tell. I manage to take photos in the break in the rain. The most prominent new banner is for Iraq Veterans Against the War marching near Veterans for Peace. The Iraq Veterans Against the War carried a U.S. flag draped coffin. To me, they were the most moving. It’s good to see they have organized. I also remember the seven year old girl with long blonde hair holding up a huge American flag with a peace sign instead of stars—she marched behind her mother.

I

Top Forty: Los Angeles' Top Forty Works of Fiction

The first part of oldies But goodies, the latest hits plus some obscure numbers you need to know. From Oscar Acosta's radical Chicano lawyer hanging out with the Brown Berets to Joseph Hansen's gay detectives searching for clues during the AIDs plague:

Acosta, Oscar- Revolt of the Cockroach People. – novel of Chicano revolt in1960s by the legendary Oscar “Zeta” Acosta

Adamic, Louis. Laughing in the Jungle. Debunker novel about LA in 1920s-the first fine novel showing poor immigrant struggling to achieve his dreams.

Boyle, T.C. Tortilla Curtain. Novel of the two couples in Topanga Canyon: the wealthy Anglo and struggling Mexican-American

Bukowski, Charles. Post Office .Story explains why a postal worker would go postal.

Cain, James. Mildred Pierce. Brilliant story capturing life of single working woman in Glendale during the 1930s.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. – the first, the great, detective novel.

Connelly, Michael. Angel’s Flight. Fine detective work dealing with mid-1990s conflicts over L.A.P.D. and race.

Didion, Joan. Play It As It Lays. The great car story of a alienated actress driving.

Dunne, John Gregory. True Confessions. Corruption and murder in high places in Catholic church in late 1940s L.A.

Fante, John. Ask the Dust. Wrenching tale about poor young man living in Bunker Hill and struggling to have his dream of being a writer..

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s last unfinished novel describing the last brilliant Hollywood movie producer.

Fitch, Janet. White Oleander- Girl surviving the craziness of the foster care in this tale.

Fuchs, Daniel. The Golden West- lovely short stories and a novella about Hollywood by Jewish-American working class writer who worked a sreenwriter in 1930s-1950s.

Himes, Chester. If He Hollers, Let Him Go African-American fights racism in South Central- best novel written about Los Angeles during World War II.

Hansen, Joseph. Early Graves. Gay detective investigates deaths of gays with AIDs.

The second half of oldies but goodies, the latest hits plus some obscure numbers you need to know, from 1920s exposes of corporate corruption by Upton Sinclair to 2000 exploration of East L.A. by Luis Rodriguez and many points in between:

Hirahara, Naomi. Summer of the Big Bachi. Mystery about Japanese-Americans spanning a time period from war-torn Japan to present-day Los Angeles.

Huneven, Michelle. Jamesland. Funny novel explores L.A's obsessions with eating good food and exploring new religions.

Huxley, Aldous. After Many Summer Dies a Swan- Brilliant satire of Hollywood and its environs in the 1930s.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. 1st novel about Southern California published in late 19th century about half-Mexican/half-Native young woman Ramona and her sweetheart having hard times in Anglo era.

Kadohata, Cynthia. In the Heart of the Valley of Love- surviving the horrors of postacolyptic days of 2052 Los Angeles.

McCoy, Horace. They Shoot Horses Don’t They. Classic noir about Depression L.A. marathon dancers.

Morales, Alejandro. Brick People. Magic realist novel about epic struggle between Mexican-American brickyard workers and the Simons family who owns the brick yeard.

Mosley, Walter. Walking the Dog- brilliant novel about African-American ex-con rebuilding his life in Southcentral.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Blonde. Sizzling fictionalized novel about actress Marilyn Monroe.

Ponce, Mary Helen. The Wedding. Novel about working class Chicana’s large wedding.

Rechy, John. The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. One of the best L.A. novels of the 1980s about Mexican-American woman surviving hard times.

Revoyr, Nina. Southland. Searing novel about two generations of blacks and Japanese in Crenshaw district.

Rense, Rip. The Last Byline.Captures the decline of the old time newspapers in California and the rise of corporate journalism

Rochlin, Michael. Cascaron. Wonderful novel about the last days of the Mexican ranchos in Southern California in the 1850s.

Rodriguez, Luis. The Republic of East Los Angeles. Fine stories about East Los Angeles.

Schulberg, Bud. What Makes Sammy Run. Classic noir expose of film industry and a nasty movie executive.

See, Carolyn. Making History. Living with random violence on the Westside.

Sinclair, Upton. Oil. The first strong anti-boomer novel exposing corruption in the oil industry in the 1920s.

Tervalon, Jervey. Understand This- Surviving drugs in a black neighborhood.

Tobar, Hector. Tatooed Soldier. Great work dealing with Guatemalan immigrant on the city’s downtown mean streets during the 1992 riots

Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. Brilliant satire on 1930s L.A. from a master.

West, Nathanel. Day of the Locust. Classic noir on down-and-out Hollywood wannabees.

Woods, Paula. Inner City Blues. Mystery with African-American LAPD detective heroine investigating murder during 1992 riots.

Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables. Dazzling stories about Japanese-Americans in L.A. from through 1930s farms through the post war period.

Top Forty: Los Angeles's Best 40 Works of Fiction

The second half of oldies but goodies, the latest hits plus some obscure numbers you need to know, from 1920s exposes of corporate corruption by Upton Sinclair to 2000 exploration of East L.A. by Luis Rodriguez and many points in between:

Hirahara, Naomi. Summer of the Big Bachi. Mystery about Japanese-Americans spanning a time period from war-torn Japan to present-day Los Angeles.

Huneven, Michelle. Jamesland. Funny novel explores L.A's obsessions with eating good food and exploring new religions.

Huxley, Aldous. After Many Summer Dies a Swan- Brilliant satire of Hollywood and its environs in the 1930s.

Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. Fine tale of a single day in life of gay professor--captures Los Angeles of the early 1960s.

Kadohata, Cynthia. In the Heart of the Valley of Love- surviving the horrors of postacolyptic days of 2052 Los Angeles.

McCoy, Horace. They Shoot Horses Don’t They. Classic noir about Depression L.A. marathon dancers.

Morales, Alejandro. Brick People. Magic realist novel about epic struggle between Mexican-American brickyard workers and the Simons family who owns the brick yeard.

Mosley, Walter. Walking the Dog- brilliant novel about African-American ex-con rebuilding his life in Southcentral.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Blonde. Sizzling fictionalized novel about actress Marilyn Monroe.

Ponce, Mary Helen. The Wedding. Novel about working class Chicana’s large wedding.

Rechy, John. The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. One of the best L.A. novels of the 1980s about Mexican-American woman surviving hard times.

Revoyr, Nina. Southland. Searing novel about two generations of blacks and Japanese in Crenshaw district.

Rense, Rip. The Last Byline.Captures the decline of the old time newspapers in California and the rise of corporate journalism

Rochlin, Michael. Cascaron. Wonderful novel about the last days of the Mexican ranchos in Southern California in the 1850s.

Rodriguez, Luis. The Republic of East Los Angeles. Fine stories about East Los Angeles.

Schulberg, Bud. What Makes Sammy Run. Classic noir expose of film industry and a nasty movie executive.

See, Carolyn. Making History. Living with random violence on the Westside.

Sinclair, Upton. Oil. The first strong anti-boomer novel exposing corruption in the oil industry in the 1920s.

Tervalon, Jervey. Understand This- Surviving drugs in a black neighborhood.

Tobar, Hector. Tatooed Soldier. Great work dealing with Guatemalan immigrant on the city’s downtown mean streets during the 1992 riots

Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. Brilliant satire on 1930s L.A. from a master.

West, Nathanel. Day of the Locust. Classic noir on down-and-out Hollywood wannabees.

Woods, Paula. Inner City Blues. Mystery with African-American LAPD detective heroine investigating murder during 1992 riots.

Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables. Dazzling stories about Japanese-Americans in L.A. from through 1930s farms through the post war period.

Michael Connelly Writes LA Brilliantly

Two colleagues of mine have been praising detective writer Michael Connelly for a long time, saying he's their favorite Los Angeles detective writer I've never read any Connelly until one of my students loaned me his novel Angel's Flight. The novel was a gripping read, capturing the period of the mid-1990s in L.A. when the town was split by racial conflict and all attempts to reform the L.A.P.D. were making the slowest of slow progress.

In Angel's Flight LAPD detectives find two dead bodies in Angel's Flight, the much beloved funicular railroad downtown that takes people up to the top of Bunker Hill. One of the dead bodies is the black civil rights lawyerHoward Elias whose specialty is suing the L.A.P.D. over cop brutality. Obiviously, the L.A.P.D. officers he had sued are prime suspects. The white lead detective Harry Bosch and his two black detective partners have to investigate cops as well as any other suspect while the cops resent being looked on as suspects. The city leaders are terrified of another riot like the 1992 one while black churchmen lead protests demanding justice. Angel's Flight captures those racial conflicts in Los Ageles better than any other piece of fiction I've read.

Part of the pleasures of the novel is its use of locations. Besides finding the muder victims on Angel's Flight, the detectives go to the deceased lawyer's office which is in the Bradbury Building which Connelly calls "the dusty jewel of downtown." Then the detectives go to the lawyer's apartment which is one of the new apartment towers downtown as well as his home in Baldwin Hills and then stop by Grand Central Market. The characters really inhabit the downtown streets as well as the corridors of power in Parker Center and the houses of the wealthy in Brentwood in a way similar to how Phillip Marlowe explores the whole town.

Another of the novel's pleasures is the naive hard working hero idealistic Harry Bosch who wants to think well of his fellow white cops as well as investigate them as possible suspects. Bosche is forever getting in trouble with his bureaucratic superiors--the novel does a great job of caputring the experience of working for a large city bureaucracy. Bosch like the other white cops can't believe in Elias's latest case accusing the L.A.P.D. of torturing an innocent black man; it's only later in the novel when Bosch finds that Elias was completely right: his client was innocent and manhandled by the cops. Part of the novel is watching idealistic Harry Bosch who peels away lies including the lies he tries to believe in. The hero has to face his own demons and terrors in his investigation, so Connelly is writing a fine character as hero who goes from naivite to knowledge. At the same time Bosch has to deal with how to keep his integrity while working within this bureaucracy which tries to protect itself.

Another pleasure is Connelly's ability to capture the media frenzy of press on the trail of a hot story at the press conference at Parker Center. He shows us Los Angeles buffeted by conflicts among the L.A.P.D., frenzied media, and community civil rights activtists--his LA is real as today's news story. While other novels might have the place right, Angel's Flight captures both the place, the period of the mid-1990s and the periods intense conflicts. My colleagues were right--Michael Connelly is a brilliant detective writer, a worthy succesor to Raymond Chandler.

"Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad" Party with Golem

Last Thursday I went to see two groups from New York: “Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad,” vaudville, comedy, music, burlesque of seven young Jewish women; and Golem, a klezmer/rock band. It was a soldout show in the little backroom at Tangier Restaurant in Los Angeles

“New Jewish Girls Gone Bad” is fronted by the Goddess Perlman, a singer/comic/bad Jewish chick. Well, if I ever wondered what raunchy vaudeville on the 1920s was like, I got to see it. Perlman entered in one extraordinarily breast bearing costume after another, and acted like a female Lenny Bruce. Fifty years ago Bruce showed a Jewish boy could talk dirty, and it’s only taken fifty years until a Jewish girl could also talk dirty on stage. She said such lines as “I put the whore back in hora.” The audience didn’t laugh—it seemed too much for them as if they were thinking, “Nice Jewish girls don’t talk that way onstage.” Well, sometimes they do.

In the show there were two comics telling us about dating disasters; a spoken/word poet Vanessa Hidrary, a writer/actress whose work combined Jewish feminism, slam poetry, and hip-hop to affirm her Jewish identity to jokers in bars; singer Michelle Citrin, a former Jewish camp singer who wore dreadlocks and sang her own blusey songs. The best of all were then Shiksa dancers (a.k.a. Hot Pink Feathers from San Francisco) came in stage. First, three young women dressed like Eastern European girls from Fiddler on the Roof arrived, moaning about who will fix them up a marriage match and then two young women dressed as Hasids with big round fur hats flirt with them. Then the two Hasids proceed to do a striptease. Definitely, not a pious reworking of the tradition. At the end all the performers came back in star studded short blue costumes and did a can can.

The second hour was the wonderful band the Golem, named after the original Frankenstein created by a rabbi in Prague some centuries back. Annette Ezekiel, who is a bandleader, accordionist and singer, created this new Golem. Ezekial is also a diva, commanding the room with her brilliant singing, her dark beauty, and her joy in the music. The fine vocalist Aaron Diskin also helped wonderfully to bring Golem alive. They were a tight, superb band, bringing to life that jazzy nightclub side of klezmer but reworking it for 2005. The band sang songs from the new CD “Homesick Song,” powerful songs about love, usually from a women’s viewpoint; each of the songs was set in a different city of southern and Eastern Europe. While “Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad” were in-you-face confrontative, Golem was seductive, wooing the audience with it superb musical reworking of traditional klezmer added to jazz and rock.

Seeing the two acts together reminded me that in American popular culture the defintion of Jewishness is Fiddler on the Roof, celebrating a life lived in Eastern Europe 100 years ago--a definite act of nostalgia. My great-grandmother was the last women in my family who had an arranged marriage and that was before 1900. But what's omitted is the last one hundred years of living, as if social history--the actual lives of three generation of Jewish Americans-- is a big taboo. Well, "Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad" and Golem gave us a little taste of the last 100 years of Jewish life we've been missing on stage.