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.