book #8

[realthog]

I confess that if I'd spotted the unobtrusive print on the cover of Naomi Mirahara's Gasa-Gasa Girl (2005) saying "A Mas Arai Mystery" I'd probably not have begun reading the book. This isn't a matter of snobbery -- I've enjoyed many mysteries in my time, and for a while swithered about the notion of writing a book on the classic detective novels of the Carr/Queen/Sayers/Marsh/Allingham/Watson/etc. era -- but simply that I'm going through a phase where my reading interests don't really include traditional-style mysteries. I was thirty or forty pages into this one before I noticed the tiny red message tucked away beside the title on the front, and found it was the second in a series. I'm not really into book series at the moment, either. Oh, well  . . .

 

Even so, would this turn out to be one of those tales of happy error? (You know: "I thought from the title that Lady Chatterley's Lover was going to be an innocuous romance. Coulda knocked me over with a feather when I found it wasn't. Honest, Mum. But I'm jolly glad I made the mistake because I really enjoyed the book.") Well, no. The book was moderately good fun, but by the end I was becoming increasingly impatient to be done with it. As I say, this isn't the book's fault . . . except insofar as Hirahara could perhaps have tried, as the best of genre writers do, to create something not so circumscribed by the conventions of the genre.

 

Mas Arai, who's an appealing enough character, is a Japanese-American Hiroshima survivor, resident since the aftermath of the blast in California, where he works as a gardener. The girl of the title is his daughter Mari, described as gasa-gasa by her deceased mother because as a child Mari never stilled -- gasa-gasa meaning roughly "busy-busy". Mari is now married and a mother herself in New York, where she and her Anglo-Saxon gardener husband Lloyd are involved in the creation of a Japanese garden in Brooklyn. She calls on Mas to help them, and more or less as soon as he arrives he discovers the body of their murdered employer. And so on.

 

There's a lot of well handled material here, and I'm sure I was learning the easy way a fair amount about Japanese-American culture, but for far too much of the extent of the book I was overly aware of the mystery-genre cogwheels slowly turning according to the author's predetermined plan: in other words, the narrative was being driven by the puzzle and its solution rather than by the human circumstance. If I'd been reading Gasa-Gasa Girl on a long train journey or a transatlantic flight this'd probably not have bothered me -- indeed, I might have been by now recommending the book to all and sundry -- but reading it at home was a different matter.

Comments

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Last night I mildly amused Vaquero by remarking as I closed the covers of the first and very likely only John Sanford "Prey" novel, "Another best selling author taken care of."

Love, C.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"the first and very likely only John Sanford "Prey" novel"

Yes. I read one of his a decade or more ago, and concluded there was no pressing reason to read anything more by him. It wasn't as bad as many; just a bit, well, nothing. I thought, though, there were whole scads of his Prey novels.

It is a bit sad that the state of modern commercial literature is such that we can pretty safely judge an author's entire oeuvre on the basis of a single book. Time was when the ideal in an author was to be constantly surprising the readers. Today what's in demand is the author who'll forever dish up to the readers exactly what they're expecting from that "brand name".

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I meant to say the 'first and last' prey novel I'd ever read. There are scads of them. This was the latest one, touted as the most amazing of them all.

Man, that protag needs some serious bitch slappin. Talk about post mid-life crisis male fantasies about oneself!

Love, C.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"I meant to say the 'first and last' prey novel I'd ever read."

Ha! I wondered if that might be what you were meaning, but then reflected that, typos aside, you're normally pretty precise with language, so it couldn't be.

"Man, that protag needs some serious bitch slappin."

As I recall, he rushes around killing people, often quite sadistically, then determines afterwards whether or not they were actually baddies. This being a novel, of course they always are -- unlike, say, in the Texas judicial system.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

This is Minneapolis and Minnesota and the Midwest, his beat, the beat of da man, St. Paul -- or is it Minneapolis -- Detective of Crime Scenes, Lucas Davenport.

What he does is go around making all the women of whatever age, even those 60 years younger than he, pant. Including his gorgeous, perfect wife.

Give me Dave Robicheaux, James Lee Burke's guy, New Orleans and related locations, any day.

It's like he does these by paint-by-numbers, or some MS Access program, plugging in the popular elements of all the actually good and original crime writers out there, but as far Sandford goes, he has no heart in heart, just his bank account. How much you want to bet that John Sanford isn't his baptismal name either?

Whatever faults you might find with James Lee Burke, and I can, his heart is in his business.

Love, C.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"What he does is go around making all the women of whatever age, even those 60 years younger than he, pant."

Oh. Doesn't every middle-aged man do that?

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I recall very well how my girlfriends and I thought of anyone older than us by FOUR years, back when we were 14.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!

OLD!

Love, C.