First off I wouldn't categorize this as a Mystery as the publisher has done. Most of the mystery is about the reader finding out what the main character, Mas Arai, already knows.

What this book is really about is Mas, a 69 year-old Japanese-American who lived through the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, moved back to his birthplace, California, after the war and settled down into a "typical" American life in the suburbs of LA. But Bachi (sort of the Japanese version of Karma) seems to find him and he must come to terms with Hiroshima and the role he played in his friend's death.

Hirahara certainly knows the Japanese-American community in Southern California. This knowledge gives the book credibility and an insider's feel to it. She takes the reader to a predominantly Japanese cemetery, Little Tokyo, a Ramen House, even a Japanese Gentleman's Club. Her use of Japanese, and heavily accented English also lends authenticity to the story.

I agree with the blub on the back of the book by Denise Hamilton, "A novel about social change wrapped inside a mystery..." Hirahara does a nice job of doing just that, and most readers will finish this book knowing a lot more about the effects of the bombing on Hiroshima on the Japanese who lived through it and about subsequent generations of Japanese-Americans.
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The setting and characters were fine, even fresh. The plotting and editing were not. 40 pages in and I thought, "I am not buying in, for some reason." There were loose ends (what was on the tomb of the grocery owner which was pivotal? wasn't clear) and time warps - at one point it was 20 years since his daughter had been home and then it was 10 years since her bedroom had been slept in. There's a poker fight and one man decks another. Then he promptly goes to the hospital where he dies of cancer amid the blinking machines, although a man at his funeral still has a bruise from the fight on his face. I never could figure out who paid who for what.

So, those bits bothered me, although the deeper issues were poignant. The writing might have redeemed it but I was tired of the similes towards the end, which, one after another, were worded like this, like boxcars at a crossing where you're waiting endlessly. ( )

I completely failed to connect with the main character, Mas Arai. And that's really too bad, because this novel is more character-study than whodunit. His story is interesting. As a boy, he lived in Hiroshima -- during the second World War. Now an old man, he's a gardener in California. And people are poking around in a past he'd rather forget.

He should be an interesting character.

And yet. I don't know. Maybe it was partly the phonetic Japanese dialect. (Thatsu for that's, heezu for he's.) But I suspect the real reason I felt distanced from Mas is that early on, readers are made privy to how Mas ruined his family life, how much he cost them through... selfishness? Addiction? Machismo? Don't know, don't care. Nothing else I learned about him resulted in more than superficial, transient feelings of sympathy. ( )

The best detective novels are supposed to introduce you to a foreign world, and this one is fascinating: the strata of aging Japanese gardeners in Alta Dena and LA environs. The main character is in his '70's: a bitter, damaged, solitary old man whose survival of Hiroshima as a youth has left him scarred in body and soul. How he becomes the detective character, and how the mystery begins to unlock the bitter, sad secrets of his past are part of the fascination here. Written with an unrelenting eye toward disturbing detail that sets an unsettling tone throughout, this confident first novel by Naomi Hirahara shows great promise for the rest of the series, which I'm looking forward to. ( )

When I wasn't fully engaged with this book by the time I'd read at least a third of it, I thought about abandoning it. I thought it was a genre mystery, but I couldn't figure out what genre. It's not a cozy mystery; although it has very little sex, violence, or coarse language, there is a lot of gambling and drinking. It's not a police procedural, thriller, or legal mystery. It does have an amateur sleuth. While I could summarize the plot, I'm not sure I could identify what part of it is the mystery.

The central character is Japanese-American gardener Mas Arai, somewhere in his sixties, widowed with an estranged adult daughter, and a survivor of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. Mas has spent most of his life trying to not to think about the events in his life surrounding the bombing. When he does think about the past, he remembers his relationship with his wife and his daughter's childhood years. While going about his usual routine one day, Mas encounters a person from the past he has tried so hard to forget, and despite his best efforts, he is drawn into current events with a link to the war years in Hiroshima.

Even though I was puzzled by the plot, at some point I realized that I had grown fond of the old gardener. He is conscientious about his work. His interactions with other characters in the book show him to be a loyal friend. He thinks a lot but says little, and his wife and daughter seem to have mistaken his reticence for indifference. I don't know if there will be more of a mystery in the next book than there was in this one, but I plan to read it to see if Mas will be able to repair his relationship with his daughter now that he has resolved some issues from his past. ( )