Crown City

In turn-of-the-century California, two Japanese amateur detectives uncover the dark underbelly of their multicultural city—from the Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author of Clark and Division.

Pasadena, 1903: Eighteen-year-old Ryunosuke “Ryui” Wada staggers off the boat from Yokohama, Japan, ready to reinvent himself after the untimely deaths of his parents. Though battling loneliness and culture shock, Ryui does his best to settle into his work as an art dealer’s apprentice while adjusting to his new home. From his enigmatic photographer roommate, Jack, to the beautiful seamstress living downstairs, Ryui finds himself surrounded by colorful characters and unbelievable opportunities and is soon utterly swept up in all “Crown City” has to offer.

But tensions are seething under Pasadena’s bustling prosperity. Ryui is the victim of an anti-Japanese attack, and a painting is stolen from the studio of Toshio Aoki, Pasadena’s most successful Japanese artist, who then hires Ryui and Jack to investigate. It’s not long before their sleuthing leads them into real danger. Ryui is a naive young man in a foreign country—has he bitten off more than he can chew?

In this fish-out-of-water mystery, studded with cameos by real historical figures, Edgar Award–winner Naomi Hirahara brings to life a little-known slice of California history. | Praise for Crown City

A Vroman's Bookstore Bestseller

“Engrossing.’’
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

“The language is evocative and immersive, lending weight to Ryui’s observations, and real people and events add historical credence and narrative depth to the mystery. Crown City is a measured coming-of-age novel in which a man ponders what must be preserved for the sake of one’s cultural identity.”
—Foreword Reviews

“Poignant, marvellously well imagined, and deeply moving, this latest from Hirahara is sure to engage fans of historical fiction.”
—First Clue Reviews

“A fascinating glimpse of turn-of-the century California, with a mystery kicker."
—Kirkus Reviews

“An immersive treat.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Crown City evokes a fertile collision of cultures at a moment in history, all wrapped up in a ripping good yarn.”
—Crime Fiction Review

“The author’s personal knowledge of Pasadena, its history, culture, and the Japanese community that grew and flourished alongside this beautiful city, combined with her extensive research, enhances the reading pleasure of this fine, must-read mystery.”
—BookTrib

“Crown City is a welcome addition to the series of Japantown mysteries that Hirahara is building, and I hope she continues to bring her research and insights to other neglected and richly fascinating aspects of Japanese American history.”
—International Examiner

“As in her earlier Edgar Award-winning work, Hirahara narrates with both insight to and acceptance of the confusion of America for people who have deeply longed to bring the nation their treasured strengths and talents.”
—Historical Novels Review

“Most literary critics label Hirahara a mystery writer and former journalist, but these descriptors fail to acknowledge her strengths as a social historian. . . Taken as a series, Hirahara’s Japantown books brilliantly underscore how the Itos, Wadas, and others contribute to an interconnected narrative of Japanese American trauma, resilience, and survivorship, while leaving open what fascinating historical chapter the author will explore next.”
—Paula Woods, Alta Journal

Praise for the Japantown Mysteries

Winner of the Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel
Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award
A New York Times Best Mystery Novel of the Year
A Parade Magazine 101 Best Mystery Books of All Time

“Hirahara humanizes the struggles of Japanese Americans rebuilding their lives from scratch. Her evocation of Little Tokyo haunts will bring a flood of memories for some Angelenos while introducing a new generation of readers to a pivotal period in L.A. history.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“Hirahara shows us a corrupt LA whose most endemic corruptions come steeped in racism. But she doesn't wallow in the self-indulgent cosmic nihilism that defines too much noir.”
—NPR's Fresh Air

“Absorbing . . . Vividly brings to life the experience of being Japanese American during World War II.”
—The Seattle Times | Naomi Hirahara is the Mary Higgins Clark Award, Edgar Award, and Lefty Award–winning author of Clark and Division and Evergreen; the Mas Arai mystery series, including Summer of the Big Bachi, which was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and the LA-based Ellie Rush mysteries. A former editor of The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, she has co-written nonfiction books like Life after Manzanar and the award-winning Terminal Island: Lost Communities on America’s Edge. She and her husband make their home in Pasadena, California. | Chapter I
Yokohama
1885-1903

1.

I tell people that I’m from Yokohama, but I was actually born in the countryside of Yamaguchi, just below Hiroshima. What should my birthplace mean to me if all of my memories are from Yokohama?

I wish that I could have taken my children to Yokohama at least once. Growing up, they viewed Japan as the old country, because many of their friends who actually traveled with their parents to family hometowns like Wakayama, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka would return with reports of dreary places with virtually nothing to do besides fish and plant rice.

My Yokohama was nothing like this. It was full of people, sounds, and smells from all around the world—China, the United States, Holland, England, Portugal, and Australia. There were diplomats, soldiers, merchants, sailors, entertainers, and, of course, us artisans. The port was expansive, the bay filled with ships of all sizes, bringing in or taking out passengers and goods of every kind imaginable. Motomachi, a shopping area with as many signs in English as Japanese, had streets lined with fancy photo studios selling postcards depicting watercolor scenes of Yokohama. Since Yokohama was a main port of departure to South America and the United States, many Japanese wearing their best clothing sat for a memento of life before leaving their native country.

My favorite spot to view Yokohama was at the top of the steep 102-stone steps that led to a famous teahouse. I’d come at the end of the day, when light was slipping away and docked ships were barely visible. With the sea’s expanse hidden, Yokohama seemed more compact and intimate. Below, on the right, I could see the laundry hung on the second floor of the humble house where my parents, our maid, and I lived. Electric lights from Yokohama’s Chinatown flashed on the left and beyond that was Kaga-cho, where my father’s carpentry shop was located. Shipbuilders and traders traversed dirt roads in their wooden geta, either to their wood-framed homes or to alleys where women of the night plucked on stringed instruments behind paper doors. The only disadvantage of the dusk was the reappearance of the buzzing mosquitos, but I had been bitten so frequently as a child that I had become immune to their poison.

In 1885, when I was born, Japan was in the middle of a transformation, adopting more of a western way of governing. That year, Ito Hirobumi became our first prime minister under what we call the Meiji—enlightened—restoration after the American naval officer commodore perry had forced his way into our archipelago fortress. We still had our Meiji emperor, but no longer did the shogun or samurai hold power. In Motomachi, I frequented a store that sold woodblock prints for art dealers. As I wandered through the stacked prints awash in bright colors, I ignored the ones depicting scenes of foreigners in Yokohama, opting instead to leaf through ones capturing Nippon of old—a shogun brandishing a skull as a warning to underlings who would attempt to unseat him, or horses galloping with samurai riders who hoisted bows to launch arrows toward targets.

I would be the first to admit that I was sheltered from a lot of turmoil that this Meiji government brought to Japan. Occasionally one of my father’s disgruntled workers called me a botchan, a Japanese name reserved for spoiled brats, specifically sons of the wealthy. My father was not rich, but our family was privileged in the sense that our positions as artisans were secured. We didn’t have to worry about our next meal or a roof above our heads.

Occasionally I would encounter beggars wandering the streets. My mother merely ushered me across the street, never explaining to me how these men became so desperately impoverished. When I was with my maid, however, she would sometimes stop to give them a rice ball that she was planning to eat later in the day.

“Why did you give the man your lunch?” I asked one day after the beggar scurried away.

“He reminds me of my father,” she told me. “He was a farmer in the country, but after the new leaders began to charge rent that we could not afford, my father came to the city to find work. We never heard from him again.”

This was the only time our maid shared details of her past with me. Thinking back, I believe she regretted being so honest with me. The encounter with this particular beggar engendered memories of her father, which caused her to speak without thinking. She didn’t make that mistake in my presence again.

*

Near my father’s shop in Kaga-cho was an enormous factory that produced various artworks; my father did business with the owner. I sometimes walked through the factory floor with my father, marveling at the women weaving table coverings on looms and men balancing large vases on rotating pottery wheels with their clay-covered hands. I went to school with some of the barefoot boys painting flowers on plates and they were my occasional playmates.

It was in this factory that I first met Victor Marsh, an arts dealer known to my father. Victor and his older brother, George Turner or GT, were Australian—an adventurous and unconventional people. My father had had more dealings with the British and the Americans. My father always seemed to be more at ease with the British. He liked sitting down with them, eating hard biscuits with black tea in fanciful painted teacups that sat on matching saucers. They, like us Japanese, seemed more controlled by rules and restraint. The Americans, on the other hand, seemed a bit dirty and uncouth. They liked to handle our artwork without asking for permission first. I was drawn to these Americans’ confidence, I have to admit. They had no tradition or national precedence to confine them. I wondered what it would be like to live life with that kind of freedom. As it turned out, I would learn for myself.

The Australians, specifically these marsh brothers, didn’t fall in either one of these broad categories. First of all, they could speak and even read Japanese fairly fluently. GT, the first white man to open a Japanese arts gallery in San Francisco, was especially skilled in language arts. His pronunciation was odd, having a rhythm like a rowboat going back and forth in choppy waters. But after you got used to his vocalization, you almost became hypnotized by his speech. It was as if he was speaking another language altogether, one that you could mysteriously understand but weren’t quite sure how.

Victor, whose eyes were the color of water, rested his gaze on me for so long that I had to look away. While his Japanese-language skills were not as strong as his brother’s, he seemed to be better at assessing a man’s strengths and weaknesses—perhaps mostly his own.

“Your son seems like a smart one,” he commented to my father.

“A little scaredy-cat,” my father replied. “This one’s always shaking like a leaf.”

“It’s all right to be afraid,” Victor said. “Actually, it’s a sign of great intelligence.”

*

My mother, highly educated for a woman, tutored me in Japanese literature after my public school classes. She loved to read and took me to used bookstores in Yokohama and even nearby Tokio to buy classical books written in the Tokugawa period when she was a toddler. Although the new Japanese government told us to abandon the old and issued us new textbooks, my mother told me to never let go of the past.

2.
In 1893, when I was eight years old, my father was sent to the Chicago world’s fair to help oversee the construction of the ho-o-den, modeled after a pavilion of the Byodo-in temple near Kyoto. I was only familiar with Chicago as the center of a train system that traveled all the way to the pacific coast. My mother had told me of a devastating fire a decade before I was born that had decimated many of the historic buildings, and said that Chicago was now creating new structures of steel frames and glass that stretched out to the heavens.

In contrast, Japan wanted to assert its world dominance by re-creating a treasured courtyard that went back to the Heian period. The ho-o-den was an homage to the phoenix, the mythical bird that descends from the sky to mark a new era. It would take my father months to complete the construction. I wish that I could say that I missed him deeply, but I barely noticed his absence until he returned at the end of the year.

*

Once safely home, my father, as usual, did not tell me much about the exposition, but he had brought back a couple of souvenirs for me. One was a small woven American Indian blanket, the size of the open palm of his hand, from a special exhibition heralding the artwork of the native peoples of north America.

The other was a pamphlet of the Japanese village at what was officially called the world’s Columbian exposition. It was all in English and written by Okakura Kakuzo, one of the most respected arts authorities in Japan, an expert of culture and languages whom my father had highly esteemed.

My mother and I sat and perused every centimeter of that publication. Together we read Okakura’s pamphlet only a paragraph a day because our grasp of English wasn’t as strong as my father’s. I could barely understand what Okakura was trying to illuminate about Japanese culture, but I knew what was being communicated was precious and needed to be protected.

I didn’t mind spending so much time with my mother while my father embarked on his construction projects. My father was exacting and demanding, expecting high performance from anyone under his employ. I would still be drawn to his presence, albeit from a distance. Through the open sliding door in the morning, I’d watch him carefully pull on his dark blue tabi, making sure that the big toe snugly fit in its hold while the rest of the toes lay flat in the rest of the sock. This was the standard footwear for all carpenters as it ensured their stability when climbing up ladders and rafters. He wore an indigo-blue kimono top that was cinched at the waist by an obi sash. Even the knot around his waist was tied with a sense of deliberate efficiency that I could never hope to emulate.

Even though I was still in adolescence, I should have noticed that my mother’s health was suffering. She would get out of breath often, usually instructing me to complete household errands on my own without her. Since her physical struggles worsened incrementally, I had tricked myself into thinking that nothing was wrong. One day, she could not get out of bed. I went to school as usual, but when I returned, she had been taken away to protect the household—mostly me—from her diagnosed disease, tuberculosis. She was sent to a sanatorium, its exact location unknown to me. My father still had to tend to his faraway construction projects, so at night I was usually alone with the maid. I started to turn to the huge bottle of cooking sake in the kitchen to relieve my sorrows, first in small sips and then large gulps. One evening I became so inebriated that I wandered outside only to collapse on the side of the road, almost lying in the gutter. The maid, who had been searching for me, found my drunken body and was able to help me get safely home. She insisted that I promise to swear off sake forever in consideration of my recuperating mother. I agreed, but my mother still died at the age of thirty-three. I had not gotten a chance to see her since I left for school that one day.