Blood Hina Read online

  Praise for Blood Hina

  A Hot Picks Selection by the Hawaii State Public Library System

  “Edgar-winner Hirahara once again provides a sensitive insider’s view of the Japanese American subculture in her fourth Mas Arai mystery.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Written with heart and depth, and starring an Everyman for our time.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Mas Arai is a true original and one of my favorite characters in crime fiction. I love spending time in his world and I’m thrilled that he’s back—and at the top of his grumpy game.”

  —S.J. ROZAN, Edgar-winning author of The Shanghai Moon

  “Naomi Hirahara has done it again! It’s wonderful to see reluctant detective Mas Arai back in action.”

  —LISA SEE, New York Times bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

  “Blood Hina is even better than Hirahara’s Edgar Award-winning Snakeskin Shamisen.”

  —DENISE HAMILTON, author of Damage Control and the Eve Diamond series

  Praise for the Mas Arai Novels

  STRAWBERRY YELLOW

  “The complex interrelationships of this multigenerational Japanese American community and the fierce competition for control of the California strawberry industry make this a thoughtful and highly entertaining read.”

  —Library Journal

  “Mas’s fifth case has both depth and an intricate whodunit.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “His obdurance, his skill as a listener, and even his broken English are charming in a quirky, uncomplicated way.”

  —Booklist

  “Hirahara again wisely makes her unusual lead—and most unlikely sleuth—the focus.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mas, less an amateur detective than a cranky, accidental one, is what makes the story work.”

  —Booklist

  SNAKESKIN SHAMISEN

  Winner of the 2007 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original

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

  —Kirkus Reviews

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

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “In an age in which too many books are merely echoes of previous books, Naomi Hirahara has the distinction of writing a mystery series that is unlike any other. As her latest novel, Snakeskin Shamisen, proves, she is truly one of a kind.… Mas Arai is one of the freshest, most realistic and fascinating characters in the mystery genre. Every book featuring him is a joy to read.”

  —DAVID J. MONTGOMERY, Chicago Sun-Times

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

  —DICK ADLER, Chicago Tribune

  “Hirahara has created in Arai a protagonist who arguably is one of the most unique characters in contemporary mystery fiction.…A haunting and compelling work.”

  —JOE HARTLAUB, Bookreporter.com

  “The cadence of the book is all music and past rhythm; what will be in store for Mas next? I can’t wait.”

  —SARAH WEINMAN, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

  “A winning series.”

  —Seattle Times

  GASA-GASA GIRL

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

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “The endearing, quietly dignified Mas, supported by a cast of spirited New Yorkers, as well as the distinctive Japanese-flavored prose, makes this a memorable read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Hirahara] brings heart and elegance to a nifty whodunit.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A compelling grasp of the Japanese American subculture… absolutely fascinating.”

  —Asian American Press

  SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI

  A Publishers Weekly “Best Books of 2004” pick Named one of “The Ten Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2004” by the Chicago Tribune

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

  —Los Angeles Times

  “An intriguing mystery [whose] plot and characters are as fresh as a newly mown lawn.…A unique voice in a genre cluttered with copycats.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “A seamless and shyly powerful first novel.…Peppered with pungent cultural details, crisp prose and credible, fresh descriptions…this perfectly balanced gem deserves a wide readership.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Learn more about author Naomi Hirahara at www.naomihirahara.com.

  More Mas Arai Mysteries by Naomi Hirahara

  Strawberry Yellow

  Snakeskin Shamisen

  Gasa-Gasa Girl

  Summer of the Big Bachi

  BLOOD HINA

  NAOMI HIRAHARA

  PROSPECT

  · PARK ·

  BOOKS

  Copyright © 2013 by Naomi Hirahara

  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

  969 S. Raymond Avenue

  Pasadena, California 91105

  www.prospectparkbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress. The following is for reference only:

  Hirahara, Naomi, 1962—

  Blood hina: a Mas Arai mystery / Naomi Hirahara. — paperback ed.

  p.cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-93884-920-6

  1.Japanese Americans—Fiction.I.Title.

  Published originally in hardcover by Minotaur Books in 2010

  Designed by Amy Inouye, Future Studio

  Cover illustration by Ted Meyer

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Sonia and Joyce

  Akari o tsukemasho bonbori ni

  Ohana o agemasho momo no hana

  Gonin bayashi no fue daiko

  Kyowa tanoshii Hina Matsuri

  Under the light of lanterns

  Peach flowers are blossoming

  Five musicians playing flutes, drums

  Today is a joyful Hina Matsuri

  — “Hina Matsuri Song,” first stanza

  CHAPTER ONE

  And do you, Sutama Hayakawa, take this man to be your husband?” the minister asked, the third time that night.

  Mas Arai, his hands shaking and wet, wasn’t going to miss his cue again. He pulled out the simple gold band from the pocket of his windbreaker and, pressing hard, as if he had captured a sand crab from a California beach, held it toward his best friend, Haruo Mukai. And then, before it could be successfully transferred to the groom, the ring slipped from his sweaty fingers and plopped into the fish pond below them.

  “Ah, oogoto!” screamed an old Japanese woman holding a clipboard and standing on a concrete walkway on the ot
her side of the pond. “I think that koi is going to swallow it!”

  Before Mas could take any kind of action, Haruo’s grandchildren had jumped into the pond, followed immediately by the grandchildren of Sutama, who was better known as Spoon. Fish tails of milky white and neon orange thrashed through the water in between soaked pant legs. Would Haruo’s or Spoon’s side of the family take the prize?

  Spoon, Haruo’s pear-shaped bride, whose bulky sweater was no benefit to her ample oshiri, held onto the railing of the bamboo bridge, shell-shocked. Haruo, his skunk hair carefully arranged to cover the keloid scar on the left side of his face, tried to smile. “Howsu one more try, Mas?”

  The wedding rehearsal was a disaster from the very start. Spoon showed up forty-five minutes late, saying her youngest daughter had taken her car without telling her, so she had to wait for another daughter to pick her up. All the grandchildren, meanwhile, had arrived, pulling at mondo grasses, terrorizing the koi, running through the bamboo, and hopping on the worn bridge. Mas could just imagine the reaction of his fellow gardeners who tended the Japanese garden in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo for close to nothing. The Gardeners’ Federation was big on “volunteer”—but Mas didn’t believe in it, because you usually ended up losing more than you put in. And for what? A pat on the back and maybe a photo in the federation’s newsletter. Mas preferred that his charity be less visible, if visible at all.

  As the bridge shook from all the commotion below, the minister, dressed in slacks and a blue sweater, desperately held on to a stack of three lacquered bowls that were part of the san-san-kudo. Three, three, nine—fortuitous numbers, eternal numbers. Both Haruo and Spoon had sipped from the empty bowls two times each during the rehearsal. Tomorrow the bowls would be filled with sake—Mas wouldn’t mind imbibing some rice wine right now.

  Why was Haruo, at seventy-one years of age, even thinking of getting remarried? Might as well just buy two cemetery plots right next to each other and put a bow tie on one headstone and a veil on the other.

  The two of them had met at the flower market, and their romance had bloomed while Mas had been answering an exceedingly rare call for help from his daughter in New York City. Perhaps if Mas had stayed in L.A., Haruo and Spoon’s relationship would have never ignited. Because if anyone could put a damper on love, it would definitely be Mas.

  Spoon was all right, Mas guessed. She was pretty quiet for a Nisei woman, the second generation to be in America, and when she talked, she was assari, a plain speaker who didn’t bother to smooth out rough edges like those straight from Japan tended to do. Mas remembered how his late wife Chizuko could shuffle and arrange Japanese words like a master magician so the unsuspecting wouldn’t even realize that they were being rebuffed or insulted. She would have thought Haruo’s remarriage was kurukuru-pa, plain-out crazy, but if she was here at the wedding rehearsal, a perpetual smile would have been plastered on her face.

  Even the men at the Eaton Nursery last week seemed mystified at Haruo’s upcoming nuptials. “Why don’t he just go to Vegas?” asked Stinky Yoshimoto, examining the sharp teeth of one of the metal racks for sale. Stinky was the king of bad ideas, and he was fortunate that most in their circle didn’t bother to listen to him. “There he could sneak in a game of pau gow and poker between the ceremony and honeymoon.”

  Except that Haruo was a former gambler, a recovering one, as he liked to say. Gambling fever had ruined his first marriage, and he sure wasn’t going to let it grab hold of his second.

  “So you some kind of big shot in the wedding, I hear,” Wishbone Tanaka chimed in. Wishbone, the former owner of his own lawn mower shop, was always concerned with status, even in the puddle of a world that they all inhabited. “Best man—oshare, ne.”

  “Best man” did sound highfalutin. Mas had never been best at anything in his life, other than perhaps regrets. Haruo could have easily selected Tug Yamada—a medalladen veteran who was trustworthy and dependable and would never do anything like lose the bride’s wedding ring to a giant fish. Or even Wishbone, who limped around with a walker, its back metal legs protected by two neon-green tennis balls, would perhaps have been a better choice.

  But Mas and Haruo shared something that none of those men did—the Bomb. While the experience was written all over Haruo’s scarred face, it remained hidden in Mas’s heart and mind. The two men hadn’t known each other in Hiroshima, but when they learned that they both had been in the city during World War Two, their connection was forever fused. Haruo talked too much, but his overflowing words often greased Mas’s disjointed emotions.

  So when Haruo asked him to serve as his best man, Mas hemmed and hawed, but they both knew he would eventually give in. He always did.

  Haruo now must have been regretting his choice, after Mas had presented him with the ring at the wrong time two times at the rehearsal, and now it might be lost forever. The children were soaked, and their parents, including two of Spoon’s daughters, crossed their arms, their anger ricocheting from the hubbub onto Mas.

  Haruo’s grandson stood up in the knee-deep water. “I got it, I got it,” he said, holding up a glint of gold like a prospector with a lucky find.

  “Ah, yokkata,” the old woman, the wedding coordinator, said in relief. She then studied the sky, weighed down by gray. “It’s going to rain tomorrow,” she predicted. “That means good luck.” Mas hoped the wedding coordinator was wrong. Good luck, in Mas’s experience, seemed to always be followed by bad.

  From Little Tokyo, the three generations of Spoon’s and Haruo’s families—with Mas and couple of others tagging along—headed deeper into the city toward downtown L.A.’s industrial Four Corners, where the Garment District, Produce Market, Toy Town, and Flower Market all collided. It was amazing that so much down-and-dirty commerce happened in downtown, merely blocks away from the svelte high-rises and fancy hotels. Some of the business—at least at the produce and flower markets—happened before the crack of dawn, when trucks and forklifts moved bunches of gladiolas and carnations, boxes of strawberries and tomatoes, in the transfer of goods that would continue onward to Des Moines, Iowa, or even foreign countries.

  It was a secret world, where only nocturnal men and a few women like Spoon and her daughters dared to tread. At night, outside the aging and sometimes crumbling concrete buildings, the human residents of Skid Row, as well as rats and cockroaches, ruled the streets. Those fooled by superficial appearances might think that Four Corners L.A. was only for the impoverished. But scratch deeper and there was money to be had.

  Some of these deals were forged inside nondescript diners that seemed to date from the beginning of time, or at least the beginning of Los Angeles. They had plain-Jane faces and sometimes bars on their windows, but insiders felt as drawn to their counters and tables as they did to their own mothers’ kitchens.

  If old-fashioned breakfasts, mounds of hotcakes, melting butter, and swollen sausages were the king in this neighborhood, then chop suey, a mishmash of tastes from the Old West and Far East, had to be the queen. So it was no surprise to anyone that Haruo and Spoon’s rehearsal dinner was held at one of the standard chop suey houses in the neighborhood. This particular one was even a favorite of a former manager of L.A.’s baseball team.

  Mas’s own mouth was salivating as the oval plates of tomato beef, egg foo young, and crunchy chow mein arrived on the lazy susan on their table. He was sitting between Haruo and Debra, Spoon’s oldest daughter, a middle-aged woman who seemed destined to droop in the same places as her mother. Debra was distracted by her teenage sons horseplaying at the next round table, so Mas could ladle his chicken soup to his mouth in peace. As the plastic plates of food arrived, the boys calmed down, allowing Debra to sink her teeth into both her food and Mas.

  “So, Mr. Arai, are you still working?”

  He removed a chicken bone that was caught in between his dentures. He hated that question. Seemed like once you hit seventy, everyone expected you to be good for nothing anymore. “Yah, gotta work.” Eve
n if it just meant a handful of customers.

  Debra proceeded to ask question after question—Mas felt like he was the target of a firing squad, only here the shooter kept going, even though he was dead. Did he have any children? Yah. Boy or girl? Girl. Mari. Did she live close to him. Nah, New York. East Coast? Why so far? It went on and on and on.

  In desperation, Mas surveyed the table. He knew that Spoon had three daughters, the three Ds. There was Debra next to him, Donna across the way, and Mas tried to remember the third D. He’d run into a van full of Spoon’s girls and grandchildren at Haruo’s Cracker Jack box–sized apartment in the Crenshaw District. The third daughter didn’t look like the others, Mas remembered. She was skinny, but there was something else. Mas remembered that she was some kind of black sheep of the family.

  Mas knew that the only way to stop Debra’s prying was to ask some questions of his own. “Where’s your sista?”

  “Donna, she’s right there.” Debra gestured her fork toward the pear-shaped woman across from her.

  “Nah, the otha one.”

  Debra’s distaste for her youngest sister was apparent. “She couldn’t make it.”

  She then bit down on her teeth, even though nothing was in her mouth.

  Mas’s strategy worked, because the middle-aged girl promptly turned her attention to the person seated on her other side—Haruo’s daughter, who was as sweet and gentle as her father.

  Mas felt bad, but only for a minute, as he scooped another helping of the fried rice drenched in soy sauce. He remained blissfully alone with the sound of the crunching of his food until someone began clanging his water glass with his fork. Others joined in and soon all the guests were focused on Haruo and Spoon.

  “Kisu. Kisu,” he heard someone, most likely an old gardener who had drunk too many beers, chant from a corner.

  Mas covered his face with his right hand. He’d already witnessed his friend kiss his fiancée on the mouth three times at the rehearsal. Did he have to be sitting right next to him when he did it again?