Crown City

Set in 1903 Pasadena and told through the eyes of 18-year-old Ryunosuke “Ryui” Wada, who has recently arrived from Yokohama, Japan, this novel is rich in dualities. An orphan, Ryui is fascinated by the world around himself—including Jack, his talented roommate and photographer and Gigi, a beautiful seamstress. Trained as an artist, Jack manages to find work in Pasadena’s art community as an apprentice, a job that takes him all over town. “In America, or perhaps especially in California, people could be transformed into anyone they dreamed of being.” Pasadena is rife with cultural appropriation; one of the personas Ryui encounters involves young white women re-creating Japanese culture, “which made me feel uneasy and confused,” Ryui notes. But when he and Jack are hired by Toshio Aoki, Pasadena’s best-known Japanese artist, to recover a missing painting (“I could be the first Nipponese detective in this country,” crows Jack) they willingly enter a world where danger abounds and real historical figures have a role. Poignant, marvellously well imagined, and deeply moving, this latest from Hirahara, author of the Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai series, and more recently the writer of Clark and Division and Evergreen, is sure to engage fans of historical fiction.