Naomi Hirahara
@gasagasagirlNaomi Hirahara is the author of the Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai mystery series, which features a Kibei Nisei gardener and atomic-bomb survivor who solves crimes, Officer Ellie Rush series, and now the new Leilani Santiago mysteries. A former editor of The Rafu Shimpo, she has written a number of nonfiction books on the Japanese American experience and several 12-part serials for Discover Nikkei.
Updated October 2019
Stories from This Author
Chapter Nine—The Last Selfie
April 4, 2015 • Naomi Hirahara
Read Chapter Eight >> “I’m a private investigator. Kevin Shirota,” I flash my license as if it really means something to a woman sitting behind a clear desk in the lobby of Fine Bank. This place is not like any financial institution I’ve ever been in. First of all, there are no tellers perched on high stools, but men and women dressed in high-tone suits that probably cost more than the SUV I had to sell to afford my defense attorney in …
Excerpt from A Grave on Grand Avenue: An officer Ellie Rush Mystery
April 2, 2015 • Naomi Hirahara
I get on the Gold Line light rail—I may be missing my car but unlike some Angelenos, I know how to use public transportation; my dad is an engineer with the Metro—and get off at Little Tokyo. Two blocks east from the station is our hangout, Osaka’s, the best ramen in the neighborhood. Inside, I find my friends—Nay, my ex-boyfriend Benjamin, and the fourth member of our little posse, Rickie, the ultimate Mohawked diva—right where I knew they’d be. “You …
Chapter Eight—She Cleans Houses, Doesn’t She?
March 4, 2015 • Naomi Hirahara
Read Chapter Seven >> “She was my friend. Perhaps my only friend.” Mrs. Yokoyama carefully enunciates each syllable. My fourteen-year-old daughter Maddy and I sit on a pure white fabric couch as we listen to the Japanese woman speak. Maddy, as usual, can’t stay still and I am worried that one of her muddy Doc Martens will leave a brown footprint on the bottom of Mrs. Yokoyama’s spotless couch. In a middle-class Buddhahead household, our shoes would be off and left on …
Chapter Seven—Do You Know the Way to Hancock Park?
Feb. 4, 2015 • Naomi Hirahara
Read Chapter Six >> I stare at the message a second time. It’s printed out on a regular white letter-sized paper, the standard offering of any office store. The font is Helvetica, also totally nondescript. The content, however, is not anything typical. It’s a blatant threat, telling me to stop investigating the murder of a seventy-something Japanese woman in Little Tokyo. Or else. If it’s just me, I’d wad up the paper and say, “What the hell.” But I’m a dad …
Chapter Six—Noguchi Verses
Jan. 4, 2015 • Naomi Hirahara
Read Chapter Five >> As I make my way to the Koban Visitors Center, First Street in Little Tokyo is hopping. And I don’t mean just the millenials lined up at Daikokuya ramen house. Couples pushing strollers and teenagers in cosplay. It’s a weekday evening in August. Those attempting to revitalize Nisei Week Japanese Festival, an annual shindig since the 1930s, need a pat on the back. Whatever they are doing, it’s working. I text my fourteen-year-old daughter Maddy to make …
Chapter Five—Sansei Anonymous
Dec. 4, 2014 • Naomi Hirahara
Read Chapter Four >> The Sansei guy standing in front of us is the same guy in the photo in my wallet. A little bit skinnier, a little more buff. (He’s obviously been working out during his recovery, while my paunch only gets softer.) I’m convinced that he’s Eric Fujii, the suspect in a Little Tokyo murder that I’m investigating. Right now, he’s confessing, Narcotics Anonymous style. “She was always on my case, comparing me with my sister, saying that …
Chapter Four—Waru Bozu
Nov. 4, 2014 • Naomi Hirahara
Read Chapter Three >> A seventy-eight-year-old Japanese woman from Fukushima is found dead from a blow to the head in an alley next to Japanese Village Plaza in Little Tokyo. Her fifty-year-old Sansei son, described as a “loser” by his very uptown sister, walks into the mother’s senior housing unit with a hammer in his pocket immediately afterwards. Yup, it did sound suspicious. Yes, it could be incriminating. But, in my thirty years of detecting, I’ve learned that you can’t make …
Chapter Three—If I Had a Hammer
Oct. 4, 2014 • Naomi Hirahara
Read Chapter Two >> Some people read palms. Others read tea leaves. I like to read teeth. No, I’m not one of those weirdoes with strange fetishes. My younger sister, Traci, is a dentist in Yorba Linda and also my only sibling who still talks to me. During the early days of her practice, she hired me to shake down people who wrote her bounced checks. I told her just to deal in cash or credit cards, especially for uninsured services, …
Chapter Two—All in the Family
Sept. 4, 2014 • Naomi Hirahara
Read Chapter One >> It turns out that the dead body discovered near the parking lot of Japanese Village Plaza in Los Angeles was not my fourteen-year-old daughter’s. It was of a much older Asian woman in her seventies. Name not released. At least that’s what it says in The Rafu Shimpo, the local newspaper that usually would be my last source of information, other than the obituaries. That was until I temporarily moved my business and home here to J-town, …
Chapter One—False Confession
Aug. 4, 2014 • Naomi Hirahara
“I did it,” I tell them. I sit in a back room of the Little Tokyo Koban, a visitor’s center and community police outpost on First Street in downtown L.A. Standing in front of me are the Koban manager; my best friend, Cesar Soto; and Officer Doug Brenner, my main contact in the LAPD. Half of the room is covered with balls covered in tissue paper in preparation for the upcoming Tanabata Festival, something related to star-crossed lovers. Strangest place …
