Summer of the Big Bachi

This is the first in a series of books by Naomi Hirahara that feature protagonist Mas Arai. I would almost say, the anti-hero, Mas Arai, because at least in this first book, I did not find much to like about him. He was 15 years old and living in Hiroshima the day the bomb was dropped. He survived physically but many around him did not and he lives with the images of the dead and dying and with the things the survivors did that are hard to reconcile. Some people did overtly bad things, others--like Mas--just failed to do things that in retrospect they wish they had. Bachi is a little like karma and Mas' has come back to bite him one fateful summer in his 69th year. He lives in Altadena and has made his living as a gardener, marrying Chizuko, and then sending their only daughter, Mari, to Columbia. But he is neither a very good husband or father, since he keeps secrets, hides his earnings and spends them on the races, and is generally emotionally unavailable to either spouse or child. His wife has since died of stomach cancer and he hasn't heard from his daughter in a long time. In fact, it is only through a friend, who has a daughter the same age, that he learns his daughter is married and pregnant. The big secret that Mas has kept all these years is that his pal Riki Kimura left their friend, Joji Haneda, to die and stole his papers so he could escape to the U.S. at the end of the war, and has been living under that name ever since. Now someone is looking for Joji Haneda and bad things are starting to happen. When a young Japanese man, claiming to be the grandson of Riki Kimura and Haneda's sister, Akemi, also comes to town and starts snooping around, Mas is reluctantly dragged into sorting things out to prevent an even greater miscarriage of justice. This is an intriguing glimpse into the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation Japanese American culture in southern California.