Do You Have to Read Naomi Hirahara Mystery in Order

http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2018/3/13/mas-arai-last-mystery/

Mas Arai's Last Mystery: Interview with Naomi Hirahara

Naomi Hirahara

"I [accepted a] writing fellowship in Kansas to focus on the novel that I had been working on for years. When I returned to LA, I again needed work and began writing biographies for the Japanese American National Museum. And then my novel began to morph into a mystery, which turned out to the perfect container for my story and protagonist, Mas Arai."

—Naomi Hirahara, writer of Hiroshima Boy

Acclaimed author of the Mas Arai mysteries Naomi Hirahara is coming to the Japanese American National Museum on March 17. She volition be discussing and reading from her most recent volume Hiroshima Boy—the last in a series of seven mystery novels featuring the Japanese gardener detective Mas Arai.

In this final installment of Mas Arai's adventures, the sleuth is getting older. His friend Haruo has died, and he travels to Japan to evangelize Haruo'southward ashes to his family unit on the minor island of Ino most Hiroshima. Mas originally plans to hand his friend's ashes over to his family unit, turn around and return immediately to the States—but as so often happens, his all-time-laid plans get amiss when he discovers the trunk of a young boy floating in the island harbor, and returns to his room to discover his friend'south ashes missing. Mas decides to stay on the island to solve the twin mysteries of the murder and the missing ashes.

Critics are praising Hiroshima Boy as "a wonderful finale to a fine mystery serial," and many likewise continue to enquire whether Hirahara will change her listen and bring back the much-dear Mas Arai down the route.^ane But the writer herself spoke with Discover Nikkei, and she is satisfied with the series' close. Hiroshima Male child, the title a reference to both the murder victim in the story and to the protagonist himself, is a fitting end as it brings Mas back to his roots. "I knew that the final mystery needed to exist in Hiroshima," Hirahara said in our interview. Readers acquire in Mas'south very get-go case, Summer of the Big Bachi, that Mas's feel growing upwards in wartime Hiroshima and surviving the atomic bomb course a large function of his identity, so it is appropriate that his last monkeyshines brings him total circumvolve back to the source of those memories.

Hiroshima was a difficult place to set a mystery tale, even so. The author herself is not intimately familiar with the prefecture, nor with how the comparatively less transparent law operates in Japan. The setting thus presented a sizable challenge to Hirahara'southward research and writing process. "I knew that the final mystery needed to be in Hiroshima," she says, "only I was wary most writing a novel set in a place I have visited, simply is not my home."

To solve these problems, Hirahara decided that the majority of the novel would accept identify small offshore island where her own relatives still run a retirement home, where there is a pocket-sized constabulary presence, and where there is still a tangible community memory of the diminutive flop. "Ninoshima, where the story is set, is about a 15-infinitesimal ferry ride from Hiroshima proper," Hirahara explains. "After the August 6, 1945 diminutive bombing, 10,000 victims, many of them wounded, attempted to make their style to Ninoshima on makeshift rafts. Ninoshima hadn't sustained much concrete damage while all of the buildings in the city were flattened. It was an island of refuge. That'southward some other reason why information technology was an appropriate place for the mystery." Ninoshima became a place where both Hirahara, through her relatives, and Mas himself could discover refuge and a basis amid islanders who all the same remember the traumatic history that affected both of their families.

Hirahara has dipped her hands into numerous genres over the years, from reporting and editing at the L.A.-based Rafu Shimpo to nonfiction books to mysteries. And she is inspired by writers that range from Louise Erdrich and Lois-Ann Yamanaka to Chester Himes and Walter Mosley. "Nothing about my writing career has been that calculated," she says. "My centre draws me to people'due south stories simply the tide pulls me into different directions. I don't fight it because I feel that the power of story has to be organic."

And truthful to this organic pull of different genres, Hirahara'due south next two ventures will be into film and historical thrillers. "I feel relieved and at peace with the terminate of the Mas Arai serial," the writer shares. Just that does not mean that nosotros have seen the final of the curmudgeonly protagonist Mas Arai himself. Hirahara is currently assisting with production of an independent flick adaptation of "The Big Bachi", the starting time book in the Arai series. And for her avid readers, fear non. Hirahara is already in the process of writing her next volume! It is still to early to set details in stone, she says, but in brief, "it's a historical thriller which will be tentatively titled "Clark and Division," and will deal with the postwar resettlement of Japanese Americans from camps."

Y'all can hear more than well-nigh the volume Hiroshima Boy, and about the graphic symbol Mas Arai'due south time to come in picture show at the Japanese American National Museum on March 17, 2022 at 2 p.m. The author will read from Hiroshima Male child and bear witness slides from her research trip to Ninoshima while writing the final adventures of Mas Arai. (For more information >>)

Note:

1. Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries, Naomi Hirahara Official website.

* Discover Nikkei is a project of the Japanese American National Museum, fabricated possible through the generous support of The Nippon Foundation

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Source: https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2018/3/13/mas-arai-last-mystery/

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