Hiroshima Boy Read online

  Praise for Hiroshima Boy

  “I’ve always admired Naomi Hirahara’s Mas Arai. A brilliant, unique addition to mystery fiction from the very beginning, his character has straddled time, place, and culture, with roots in one of the most terrible acts of violence war has ever inflicted upon humanity. And Mas has prevailed while growing older in a country that does not always value the wisdom of its elders, or those who work with their hands. This may be the last entry in the series (really?), but I am sure readers will come to love Mas for years—he is one of a kind. Hiroshima Boy is a wonderful finale to a fine mystery series. Kudos to Naomi Hirahara.”

  — Jacqueline Winspear, author of the New York Times–bestselling Maisie Dobbs mysteries

  “With Hiroshima Boy, Naomi Hirahara offers readers another fine, artfully understated story about a man who believes himself to be average, yet is anything but. Carrying the ashes of his deceased best friend, Mas Arai returns to Hiroshima, where he spent his childhood and was witness to the bomb that devastated the city and its populace. When Mas stumbles onto the body of a murdered boy, what began as a simple mission to keep a recent promise becomes a complex journey in understanding the past. Like a Zen poet, Hirahara creates a quiet surface with a powerful storm beneath. The novel purports to be the last in this Edgar Award–winning series. We can only hope that Naomi Hirahara has a change of heart.”

  — William Kent Krueger, New York Times–bestselling author of Ordinary Grace and the Cork O’Connor mysteries

  Praise for the Mas Arai Mysteries

  “A shrewd sense of character and a formidable narrative engine.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  “Hirahara’s well-plotted, wholesome whodunit offers a unique look at LA’s Japanese American community, with enough twists and local flavor to keep you guessing till the end.”

  — Entertainment Weekly

  “In a genre in which unusual amateur sleuths are the norm, Mas Arai is in a class by himself.”

  — Oline Cogdill, Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “This perfectly balanced gem deserves a wide readership.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “In author Hirahara’s deft hands (she’s an Edgar winner), the human characters, especially Mas, always make for a compelling read.”

  — Mystery Scene

  “Hirahara has a keen eye for the telling detail and an assured sense of character.”

  — Los Angeles Times

  “Mas is a hyperobservant, methodical sleuth—a blend of Columbo and Hercule Poirot—but what makes this award-winning series shine is the way Hirahara takes readers inside her character’s head. A winner.”

  — Booklist

  “A thoughtful and highly entertaining read.”

  — Library Journal (starred review)

  “The series is one of my favorites, and though Mas’s circumstances change with each installation, the books all stand alone, on the shoulders of one gruff, aging Japanese American gardener and Hiroshima survivor with an unfortunate tendency to wander into complex murder mysteries.”

  — Los Angeles Review of Books

  “Hirahara’s complex and compassionate portrait of a contemporary American subculture enhances her mystery, and vice versa.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “What makes this series unique is its flawed and honorable protagonist.… A fascinating insight into a complex and admirable man.”

  — Booklist (starred review)

  Copyright © 2018 by Naomi Hirahara

  The fictional Ino Island is historically based on the very real island of Ninoshima, just outside of the city of Hiroshima. While the geography is very similar, the characters in Hiroshima Boy are indeed completely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Prospect Park Books

  2359 Lincoln Avenue

  Altadena, California 91001

  www.prospectparkbooks.com

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

  www.cbsd.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hirahara, Naomi, 1962- author.

  Title: Hiroshima boy: a Mas Arai mystery / Naomi Hirahara.

  Description: Altadena, California: Prospect Park Books, [2018] |

  Series: Mas Arai series; 7

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017040325 (print) | LCCN 2017042432 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945551093 (Ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.I76 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.I76 H57 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040325

  Design by Amy Inouye, Future Studio

  TO THE HIBAKUSHA

  More Mas Arai Mysteries

  Sayonara Slam

  Strawberry Yellow

  Blood Hina

  Snakeskin Shamisen

  Gasa-Gasa Girl

  Summer of the Big Bachi

  More Fiction by Naomi Hirahara

  Grave on Grand Avenue (an Officer Ellie Rush mystery)

  Murder on Bamboo Lane (an Officer Ellie Rush mystery)

  1001 Cranes

  Selected Nonfiction by Naomi Hirahara

  A Scent of Flowers: The History of the Southern California Flower Market

  An American Son: The Story of George Aratani, Founder of Mikasa and Kenwood

  Green Makers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California

  Life after Manzanar (cowritten with Heather Lindquist)

  Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor (cowritten with Geraldine Knatz)

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Mas Arai was worried that the customs officer at Kansai Airport would find his best friend, Haruo Mukai, inside his suitcase. Mas had wrapped him in an old plastic bag, tied the top with green gardening twine, and stuffed the package in one of his worn socks. If Mas’s wife, Genessee, had not been in a convalescent home, recovering from knee surgery, everything would have transpired so differently. For one, he would have had a proper suitcase, not one with a broken roller wheel. And two, she would have consulted the authorities with the airlines to discover the proper way to transport ashes of a dead man. But all that was mendokusai for Mas. A hassle. An inconvenience. If you need to get from point A to point B, you just draw a straight line, he thought. Talking always wasted time.

  He had been remarried for six years. Remarkable for an old retired gardener who was now pushing eighty-six. Love had sucker punched him, blinded him when he wasn’t looking or expecting it. His marriage to his first wife, Chizuko, made much more sense. He was a thirtysomething bachelor in Los Angeles and it was time. His family in Hiroshima suggested that he return to Japan to get a wife, which he did. That was the last time he’d stepped foot in Japan. That is, until now.

  Back then there had been no airport here in Kansai, about 250 miles from the area where he’d spent his youth. He was no expert on airplanes or airports, but this one looked similar to LAX, at least behind the scenes. Sure, here the officers were all Japanese men and women, some we
aring white masks to prevent the spread of their sick germs, but they had the same steely stare. Looks that could strip him down in an instant. Whether it was in the US or Japan, uniformed officers knew that he didn’t quite belong.

  The man in front of him had a big black mole on one cheek. Mas wondered if the officer had had it as a child and whether it was always the same size or had grown as he aged. If it was the former, he must have endured much bullying.

  “Are you American?” the officer asked in English, as if the blue passport cover was a fraud.

  “Yes,” Mas answered back in Japanese.

  The officer’s gaze remained on Mas. Mas, on the other hand, could not take his eyes off the giant mole.

  “Fine.” The man gestured that he could proceed.

  He had made it through.

  Mas had heard that Kansai Airport had been built on a man-made island. Just the thought of that made him feel a bit queasy, as if he couldn’t depend on the integrity of the land.

  In terms of land transportation, he attempted to read the instructions from Genessee, who had looked up all the information on her cell phone from her hospital bed and had even written it down. The only problem was that he could barely read her handwriting, which was loopy and imprecise. Chizuko’s, on the other hand, had been picture perfect from a missionary’s instruction in Hiroshima. She brought that perfection with her to America.

  His and Chizuko’s only child, Mari, had also tried to help by showing him train and bus schedules and sightseeing stops on her laptop. Of course, he had retained nothing and had even forgotten her printouts on his kitchen table. This trip was not about seeing the sights anyway. It was about wham, bam, getting things done. All he knew was that he was to meet someone at Hiroshima Station later that afternoon.

  Seeing the blue sky through the wall of windows, Mas instinctively headed outside. The minute he left the artificially cooled airport, he was hit with a wall of heat. He had noted on an airport clock earlier that it was eight o’clock in the morning in Japan, and the humidity pressed down on his face, entering his ear canals, nostrils, and throat. The tail end of July, he’d heard, was the absolute worst time to travel in Japan, and, of course, Haruo had to die in the summer. Even in his death, Haruo wasn’t doing Mas any favors. And Mas knew that if he waited until fall, he himself might not be alive, not to mention Haruo’s older sister, the recipient of the ashes.

  There were some buses lined up in a row and he figured he would head south. The bus driver attempted to take the broken suitcase and place it in the bottom storage unit, but Mas didn’t want to be separated from it. He wrestled it away and took it into the bus. It careened into the knees of irritated passengers as it bounced behind him through the narrow middle aisle. He finally found an open spot and stuffed it into an overhead shelf.

  He swore as he settled in his seat. And to the suitcase above, he said silently, Haruo, see. Youzu make me come all the way ova here.

  This trip was the most mendokusai thing that he had ever done in his life, other than perhaps flying to pick up Chizuko from Hiroshima. Somewhere in his garage was a remnant of that inconvenient trip, a Pan Am flight bag covered with decades of dust, sticky grime, and even droppings from a mouse that had certainly lost its way.

  “Excuse me, excuse,” someone was speaking to him in Japanese.

  Mas blinked hard and tried to remember where he was. The bus felt different. It was plusher than the hard seats of the Metro back in Los Angeles. The driver had taken down his suitcase and placed it in the aisle. Why couldn’t he keep his hands off of my private property?

  He almost stumbled down the stairs to the curb and gazed up to see a white, modern building that resembled a giant humidifier. “Where are you going?” the driver asked him. Mas took out his wife’s illegible notes, and the driver directed him inside. The suitcase bumping sideways behind him, he made his way down the platform and into the modest station. There was a wall of ticket machines with grids of some cities that he hadn’t heard of. What had happened during the more than fifty years that he had been away?

  Passersby ignored him, probably assuming that he knew where he was going. He looked a hundred percent Japanese, after all. He finally approached a window next to the rows of ticket gates. A young man in a black railway hat and blue uniform appeared in the window, holding some kind of metal tool in his right hand.

  “Ah, I’m going to Hiroshima,” Mas managed to say in Japanese.

  “You can get your ticket from the machines there. Or go to the Green Window.”

  Green Window? What the hell was a Green Window?

  Just then a group of five teenagers pressed behind him, holding up some kind of pass in their wallets. He stepped aside with his broken suitcase, feeling more lost than he ever did in America. Even though there were rules in the US, there always seem to be rule breakers. People looked different and acted differently from each other. Here, people seemed to be programmed similarly. Sure there was the random Japanese bohemian with dreadlocks carrying a surfboard, but he moved in concert with the flow of Japan. Mas, on the other hand, was a knot in the middle of the smooth silk string, the scratch on the vinyl record. Even though he had lived in Japan from age three to eighteen, his birthplace, America, where he spent the past almost seventy years, had made him a stranger here.

  He wandered in a circle, hoping to seize upon anything that could direct him to where he needed to go. And then he saw it. A sign with the Japanese writing, Midori no Madoguchi. Literally Green Window. And then an arrow.

  It turned out there were no green windows in this ticket office, just a green image of a stick figure sitting back in a reclined seat. But there were workers—again not wearing anything green—who seemed to be solving problems and issuing tickets to a line of people. Waiting in the line was a hakujin, a white man with unruly hair, a smelly backpack at his side. This could have been his own son-in-law, Lloyd, maybe twenty-five years ago. If the Green Window people could help the backpacker, they could surely help him.

  Once he finally reached the counter, the clerk didn’t bother to look at his face and seemed unfazed by his rough-and-tumble Japanese. She obviously had dealt with a wide range of gaijin travelers and had no expectations of him. For a few glorious minutes, Mas felt free to be himself—an ignorant outsider who was not being judged. Then an envelope with the ticket was placed in his hand, and he was released to the wilds beyond the Green Window.

  Even trying to find the correct place to stand on the platform was a challenge. There seemed to be random numbers and he couldn’t quite find where he needed to be. He felt embarrassed to approach the hakujin backpacker, but it would be worse to bother the slick salarymen and polished office ladies who were focused on their newspapers or cell phones.

  “Ah, I stand here?” He asked lifting his ticket to the man’s eye level.

  The backpacker seemed flattered to be approached by an old Japanese man. “This is for assigned seats,” he replied in an accent that wasn’t American. “You should stand there.” He pointed to a row on one end of the platform.

  Truth be told, Mas was curious about riding in a bullet train. High-speed rail had come after he and Chizuko had gotten married. Would it indeed shoot forward as fast as a projectile from a gun? Although he was not one to get carsick, he braced himself for a new experience. First a fake island and now a train traveling two hundred miles per hour.

  Just then the train arrived, its front shaped like a dolphin’s nose. Everything about the bullet train was sleek and silent. Mas stepped forward, almost bumping into the old woman standing in front of him, but no one moved. A line of women in pink uniforms rushed in with rag bags and turned the seats around, wiping them down and replacing doilies on the headrests with new ones.

  He was transfixed with how the cleaners worked with such purpose. In a few minutes they were finished and appeared at the entrance of the trains with smiles on their faces. The train was now ready for its passengers to make their way down the spine of the archipelago
.

  The train was not crowded, and he opted for a window seat. Again, he pushed the suitcase with Haruo’s ashes up into an overhead shelf. Luckily, it was low, not like the high shelves in America.

  Sitting down, he glanced at his Casio watch, which was nowhere close to the correct time in Japan. Most people, he noticed, had already ordered a lunch box before entering the bullet train. They placed their elegant purchases on the pull-down tray in front of their seats. Even though these bentos were the Japanese equivalent of American takeout food, at least monetarily and conveniencewise, they were nothing like the greasy and messy paper sleeves holding hamburgers and fries, his go-to food back in Southern California.

  No, instead these containers were filled with marinated carrots cut like maple leaves, rice balls formed in perfect triangles and dressed in spiffy suits of nori, and beautifully grilled and glazed pieces of fish.

  Mas’s mouth watered. He, of course, had eaten in the airplane, better food than he had anticipated. Everything was wrapped and had its own compartment or container. Even the water came in a bag that you could pour into a plastic cup.

  Usually such organization eluded and frustrated him, but as soon as he left LAX to travel across the Pacific, he felt something happen to him—like a cord had been pulled, freeing the defensiveness he had felt all those years that he lived in the US. California was his home, his birthplace. But in some places, even on his customers’ lawns, he had to be on guard. He belonged, yet he didn’t belong. Perhaps he would feel differently in Japan?

  A female worker pushed a cart filled with box lunches, drinks, and souvenirs. Mas chose a small one with three rice balls, each one flavored a little distinctly. If anything could clear his head, it would be rice with the sour tang of pickled plum.

  He also ordered a Coke, and was amused to be handed a can much skinnier than he was used to. He could completely wrap his fingers around this one—and when he was in the height of his gardening days, could probably have finished it off in one gulp.