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Publishers Weekly
Somewhere within this fashionably fractured narrative, a based-on-real-events murder mystery is struggling to get out. The second work of fiction from historian, poet, playwright and novelist Watada revolves around the 1940 deaths of 16-year-old Mariko Miyamoto and her degenerate gambler father, Jin. Although the official story is that Jin murdered his daughter and was shortly thereafter killed by his gangster creditors, Watada imagines a more noir scenario, focusing his attention on Mariko's mother, Yoshiko, and local crime boss Etsuji Morii, tracing their respective journeys to and sojourns in Canada from 1905 to 1940. Yoshiko is determined to create the life she had always imagined in the New World, persevering despite the abuses heaped on her by her husband and the disappearance of her lover, a Morii associate, after her husband's death. Morii, meanwhile, already suspected in the murder by the police, is further drawn in when Yoshiko comes to him for help. Though the prose sometimes feels like it belongs in a history text-there are numerous digressions on the situation of the Japanese in early 20th-century Canada-the novel at its best recalls the works of Hammett or Cain. (Mar.)
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Overview
The Kuroshio is the “Black Current,” which Japanese immigrants believed brought them safely across the Pacific Ocean to a new life in North America. This vividly imagined novel explores the dark reaches of Issei (Japanese immigrant) life in North America prior to World War II. A picture bride from Japan, disenchanted with her loveless marriage in her adopted homeland, turns to an Issei crime boss for help in dealing with a senseless tragedy. Full of unexpected twists and flashes of narrative color, Terry Watada’s...