If It's Not One Thing It's Your Mother

One of the rites of spring that I always enjoy is the opening day for Little League baseball and softball.  My town begins the season with a parade down the main street, and while there are many more marching in the parade than there are watching, it it is fun to see such happy faces on the kids and their parents. Just the names of the teams––like River Bandits and Sand Gnats––are enough to lift the spirits. Hats off to all the Little League dads and moms who are great volunteers.

Mothers and their influences have been a topic in my reading lately as well.

Will Schwalbe was working in the publishing world when his mother received the grim diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Mary Anne Schwalbe had always lead a very active life, which at this point in time revolved around the treatment of refugees in war torn countries. It was not unusual for her to arrive home in poor health, after having contacted some kind of infection from living in poor sanitary conditions.

This time, when she arrived home from Afghanistan in early 2007, she was obviously ill. Despite seeing doctors, it took several months to pinpoint the cause of her symptoms, as is often the case with this particular malignancy. When she was given her final diagnosis, her condition was too far advanced for surgery, and her hope was for successful chemotherapy to prolong her life––but not save it.

Mary Anne's family rallied around to keep her company during the chemo infusion sessions that could last for hours. Will and his mother had always enjoyed reading and talking about books, and these discussions now morphed into a book club meant for two. There was no particular pattern in their reading choices; one or the other would mention a book they were reading or wanted to read and they both read it and shared their thoughts about it.

The End of Your Life Book Club (Knopf, 2012), written by Will Schwalbe, is the chronicle of the last months of his mother's life and how reading eased her way through a difficult time.

Over the course of the next year, this pair read books of varied genres, from mysteries like Brat Farrar to books with a psychological bent, such as John Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living. Most of the books seemed to fall into the category that exemplifies the triumph of the human spirit over adversity, whether it was by cancer, imprisonment, war or other deprivations. No subject was too forbidding, too depressing or too violent for Mary Anne.

Mary Anne did not like silly books, however. One of Mary Anne's peculiarities was that she always read the end of the book first and then started at the beginning. In this way, she could get through the difficult and horrifying parts of books because she already knew how everything turned out.

One of their favorites was Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner, about the lifelong friendship of two couples, which was being changed because one of the women was dying of cancer. Another was The Savage Detectives, an ambitious novel by Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean poet and novelist, who died from liver disease before his book was translated to English. A book I would also like to read was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which is a narration by John Ames, an elderly preacher who has lived almost all of his life in Gilead, Iowa. He is writing a letter to his seven-year-old son, summing up the blessings of his life. Robinson writes the story as a meditation on fathers and children, particularly sons, on faith, and on the imperfections of man.

The Painted Veil, by W. Somerset Maugham, is another I added to my TBR. It is about the realization that finally comes to a self-absorbed young woman, that there are better goals in life for a woman than focusing on personal appearance and catching a mate.

Most of the books the pair read are covered cursorily in The End of Your Life Book Club, because the story is actually about the journey a son takes to become close to the mother who seemed at times to neglect her own children in her attempt to improve the lives of those children in other worlds of misery.

Mothers are a big influence in a person's life not only in the real world, but in fiction.

For Ellie Rush, the main protagonist in Naomi Hirahara's first of a new series, Murder on Bamboo Lane (Berkley, April 1, 2014), the problem is that she has been a big disappointment to her mother. Despite her mother's grand expectations, Ellie has joined the LAPD.

Ellie is half-white and half-Japanese, and she accepts the fact that she is never seen as white by whites or Japanese by the Japanese. Currently, just off probation, she has a very unglamorous job as a bicycle cop taking complaints, writing up tickets, and hearing more complaints.

While patrolling the porta-potty area during the Chinese New Year parade, Ellie is one of the first officers to come across a dead body in an alley. She is dismayed to find that the experience much worse that she thought it could be, and it was made more shocking by the fact that she recognized the body as a girl she knew in college.

Ellie has the ambition to be a detective in the homicide division, and she doesn't mind taking on menial duties that will help her career. She eagerly helps the homicide detectives, who appreciate her inside information of the suspects in the case.

This case is one that will really test her loyalties, because her friends now see her as one of "them." She has an aunt who holds a very high position in the LAPD and who expects her help, but her co-workers resent her assignment to the murder investigation.

This is an enjoyable story about a young woman at the beginning of her career who is torn over how to be a good friend as well as a good officer. She is also trying to be a good family member, but she still feels compelled to bring her pothead brother to task. Of course, in the end, Ellie's mom is beginning to take pride in her daughter's choices.

Naomi Hirahara is better known for her Mas Arai series. Arai is a Los Angeles gardener in his seventies who, as a boy, survived the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima. Blood Hina is the fourth of this series, in which Arai is aging and financially struggling, but the main problem in his life is that he is supposed to be best man at the wedding of an old friend, Haruo, and Haruo's fiancée, Spoon. Arai takes his responsibilities quite seriously. He has known Haruo for a long time and he bonded with him because they both survived Hiroshima, which left Haruo disfigured. Aside from fumbling and losing the wedding ring in a koi pond, Mas foresees trouble in this new marriage, especially between Haruo and Spoon's daughter. His foreboding is on the money because the wedding is called off when some Hina dolls are stolen from Spoon's home and Haruo is blamed.

What drew me to this mystery is that it revolves around some old and interesting Japanese customs. Rather than celebrating mothers and fathers in a festival, they honor children.

Girl's Day is a special day in Japan, celebrated on March 3, the third day of the third month. It is called Hinamaturi and it is also known as Doll's Day because the tradition of displaying Hina dolls on a tiered stand, covered by a red carpet, at the top of which are the Emperor and Empress.

It is some of these sometimes quite valuable dolls that are missing in Blood Hina, and Mas Arai knows he has to find them if his friend Haruo is to be happy. Arai must juggle his amateur sleuthing with the demands of multiple gardening clients while trying to solve a few murders at the same time.

May 5 is Boy's Day in Japan, and it always falls on the fifth day of the fifth month. Also known as the Feast of Banners, it is celebrated by banners symbolizing the family. One of the themes for the day is that of respect for the individual personalities of children.

In 1948, the government decreed this day to be a national holiday called Children's Day. It celebrates the happiness of all children and expresses gratitude to mothers.

Konnichiwa (Hello)

The National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington DC is a celebration of early spring, commemorating the March 27, 1912 gift of Japanese cherry trees from the mayor of Tokyo, Yukio Ozaki, to the city of Washington. The purpose of the gift was to promote the growing friendship between two countries on opposite sides of the world. For 24 years, Eliza Scidmore, the first female board member of the National Geographic Society, had been urging the planting of cherry blossom trees along the Potomac. She must have really regretted young George Washington's ax-ident. But, finally, she got her point of view across.  The arboreal gift was initially planted ceremonially by First Lady Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda, the wife of the Japanese Ambassador, on the north bank of the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park.

I have had the pleasure of seeing the cherry trees many times along the Mall and the Reflecting Pool behind the Capitol building and it is an incomparable sight. This year, as we have been enjoying a warmer spring than usual, it should be an excellent experience to walk under the trees and appreciate the wonders of nature.

For my reading at this centennial of the cherry blossoms, I headed toward Naomi Hirahara's small gem of a series featuring Japanese-American gardener Masao ("Mas") Arai. The story begins with Summer of the Big Bachi. Arai is in his seventies and his life is a wreck. His wife has recently died of cancer, he is becoming estranged from his only daughter and, finally, his job of landscape gardening in Los Angeles is threatened by young illegals from the south.

Japanese-Americans are a unique group. As far as I know, they are the only people who have names for the different generations within their group.

The SOB (straight off the boat) are the Issei; their children, the second generation, are the Nisei; and their grandchildren, or third generation, are the Sansei. There is a subgroup, the Kibei Nisei, who were born in America and raised in Japan. Mas Arai is one of these young men. He was a youngster of school age when he and his buddies were playing hooky in 1945 Hiroshima in an underground train station when an atomic bomb was dropped on the naval base. He was knocked unconscious and when he came to, he emerged from the station to see sights so horrific they were burnt into his memory forever. Slightly less than half of the population was killed. Of the survivors, more than 500 eventually returned to their birthplace––the USA. Most of Arai's group of friends also survived, and it is about them that this first mystery revolves. Bachi basically means what goes around comes around, and Mas Arai's past has come to the present and he is equipped to deal with it. Summer of the Big Bachi was a finalist for the 2005 Macavity Award for Best First Novel.

Mas Arai's personality and history are explored more deeply in Gasa-Gasa Girl. Mari Arai was always known to her parents as being gasa-gasa, an into-everything kind of girl; just the opposite of laid back. Mas Arai, her dad, tells her she takes after her mother. Mari retorts that her mother claimed it was a trait taken from her father. This may be the closer to the truth. Mas Arai had dreams of becoming an engineer, but his life took another path. Established in his routines, Mas Arai knows that retirement is not a word for him, but he is willing to take time out for a trip to New York because Mari, his daughter, has called for help.

He is just getting his feet accustomed to concrete sidewalks when he discovers the dead body of his son-in-law Lloyd's boss in a koi pond. The victim was Kazzy Ouchi, a magnate in the silk garment industry and the son of a humble gardener at a big New York City estate. He was planning the development of a new Japanese garden in Brooklyn. Mas becomes enmeshed in the complex affair because Mari and Lloyd are in the middle of this imbroglio and both are suspected of being the killer. Mas investigates so that he can exonerate them. In this story, Mas is revealed as a taciturn man who may appear to be a grumpy old man, but that is just a facade for a quiet philosopher who suffers fools badly. It is amusing to read about Arai's views on how East Coast and West Coast Nisei are different.

In Snakeskin Shamisen, Mas Arai is still a part-time gardener, now getting a reputation for solving murders. In this story, he gets involved in the death of a recent lottery winner. The situation is complex and reaches back to Okinawa and World War II, as well as to the Red Scare in the 1950s, and highlights some of the bad things men do for what they think are good reasons.

Shamisen

There are a lot of characters to keep straight in this story, and convoluted motives, but you won't regret reading this book, both for the history and the mystery. Japanese-Americans are resilient people who suffered great indignities and hardships in the course of their history in the Western Hemisphere. It was not until the 1950s that they were allowed to become naturalized American citizens. Despite being interned during the war, losing their property and more, they elected to look to the future rather than to the past.

The tidbit I took home concerns the history of the Japanese in Peru.  Peru recruited Japanese laborers beginning at the end of the 19th century but, over time, resentments grew against Japanese residents, similar to the resentments against Asian immigrants to the United States. After World War II broke out and the US began interning its own Japanese residents, the US government also sought to take control over the Japanese in Latin American countries.  In part, this was a security effort, but there was also a plan to trade these Japanese for US prisoners of war held in Japan; the idea being that it might be too controversial to use the US's own Japanese residents for this purpose. Peru sold their Japanese citizens to the US in effect, because they received large loans from the US for agreeing to round up their Japanese and send them to the US. Thousands of Japanese from Peru were imprisoned in internment camps in Texas and New Mexico. At the end of the war, only a few dozen returned to Peru, because Peru refused to take most back. Those who did manage to return found that their assets and properties had been confiscated. Many of the internees were sent to Japan after the war, but several hundred languished in an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas, for two years after the war while they fought an eventually successful battle to stay in the US.

The last in the Mas Arai series is Blood Hina, published in 2010. I am really looking forward to reading this book. I ordered it two weeks ago but it is coming to me via slow boat from Japan.

I have several other favorite authors who have books based in Japan or are written by by a native of Japan. I. J. Parker writes about 11th century Japanese life and she chronicles the adventures of Sugawara Akitada, a nobleman/detective. This series is engrossing. The later books in the series are hard to find, except on Kindle, but at least they are finally reaching their fans.

Akimitsu Takagi's The Tattoo Murder Case is an interesting mystery that takes place in 1947 Tokyo and was originally written at that time and in that terrible immediate postwar period. It is an interesting bird's-eye view into the recovering Japan. Akimitsu Takagi, who died in 2005, was a popular and prolific writer in Japan, but has only two other books published in English. In fact, it took nearly 50 years for The Tattoo Murder Case to be translated. I have also enjoyed Sujata Massey and Laura Joh Rowland. John P. Marquand's Mr. Moto books are new to me, but I did enjoy the first, Your Turn, Mr. Moto.

Cherry Blossoms