Clark and Division (book)

Edgar Award winning mystery novel by Naomi Hirahara set among Japanese Americans who have resettled in Chicago in 1944.

Clark and Division is written in the first-person voice of Aki Ito, a twenty-three year old Nisei woman from Tropico, California (a neighborhood in Los Angeles), who has moved to Chicago from Manzanar with her parents to join her sister Rose, who had moved there first. But when they arrive in Chicago, they learn that Rose is dead, killed by a subway train in what the authorities claim was a suicide. While adjusting to the new world of Nisei Chicago—a world where poverty and overcrowded conditions intersect with dreams of a better life—working at a job in a library, and finding romance, Aki tries to seek out answers to Rose's mysterious death.

Though the author, mystery novelist and historian Naomi Hirahara, had published numerous prior novels set in the Japanese American community—most notably the seven novels featuring Kibei protagonist Mas Arai — Clark and Division was her first historical novel. The idea for the novel came as a by-product of of 2016 non-fiction book Life After Manzanar , co-authored by Heather Lindquist. In doing the research for that book, she came across accounts of Nisei life in Chicago , the most popular destination for Japanese Americans leaving the concentration camps prior to the reopening of the West Coast. "It became apparent to me that with the delinquency that was occurring in an already notorious place like Chicago, a mystery novel would be the perfect vehicle to explore the hidden truths of the struggling Japanese American community," she told Robin Agnew. The book's title comes from an intersection on Chicago's Near North side that was the center of a Japanese American residential cluster during and after the war. She was also inspired by the cheery photographs of Japanese American "resettlers" that the War Relocation Authority's Photographic Section took and wanted to explore the other side of those happy images. Hirahara visited key locations in Chicago as a part of her research. She also had Aki get a job at the Newberry Library as an homage to her friend, Nisei activist Sue Kunitomi Embrey , who had worked there after leaving Manzanar. ^[1]

Reviews for Clark and Division were uniformly positive, with reviewers highlighting the portrayal of the Japanese American community in Chicago along with the growth of protagonist Aki Ito. The novel received coverage in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and was named one of the best mystery novels of 2021 by the former. It also won the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award at the 2022 Edgar Awards.

The 2023 novel Evergreen is a sequel that follows Aki and her family back to Los Angeles in 1946.

Might also like The Floating World by Cynthia Kadohata (1989); Why She Left Us by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (1999); Pineapple White by John Shirota (1972)