Her historical projects have given her hundreds of pages of material for her fiction. Fiction.” Hirahara’s bibliography shows a similar trajectory, alternating publications of fiction and nonfiction. “In my own cycle,” he writes, “it goes: Fact. In his book of essays, Stranger Than Fiction, he describes the nonfiction he writes between novels. In many ways, Hirahara’s process is like that of Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and several other novels. “I need to do both fiction and nonfiction,” Hirahara says. Her nonfiction books have tackled seminal Japanese-American history topics like Terminal Island, the flower industry, Japanese-American gardeners, the Japanese-American concentration camps, and survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hirahara is in many ways a one-woman Japanese-American history project. This essay looks back at the entire Mas Arai series and highlights how her many nonfiction projects inform her fiction. What’s more is that she read specific passages from her work pertaining directly to every site we visited.

On a cold March day just after the rain, Hirahara took me on a walking and driving tour of Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights spotlighting seven sites featured in her Mas Arai books. Her newest Mas Arai mystery title and the final one of the series, Hiroshima Boy, was just published by Prospect Park Books in March 2018, and in April her latest nonfiction title, Life After Manzanar, was published by Heyday.

Best known for her Edgar Award–winning seven-book Mas Arai crime novel series, she has also authored several nonfiction titles on Southern California Japanese-American history. NAOMI HIRAHARA IS one of the most prolific Los Angeles writers of the last few decades. It was a huge task, but I believe he succeeded. Mike the Poet, bard and historian of contemporary Los Angeles, to go on a walk with Naomi and write a profile that would do her justice. To commemorate her final Mas novel, I asked Mike Sonksen, a.k.a. Editor’s note: Naomi Hirahara has been a pillar of the mystery community since she published her first Mas Arai novel in 2004.

Murder on Bamboo Lane by Naomi Hirahara