“Just as only James Ellroy could have written the Los Angeles Quartet and only Walter Mosley could have crafted Black Angelenos’ experiences into the Easy Rawlins mysteries, crime novelist and research maven Naomi Hirahara was destined to write Clark and Division . . . The beginning of a saga not unlike Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs mysteries.”

—Paula Woods, Los Angeles Times

Set in 1944 Chicago, this story of a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister's death brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II.

Chicago, 1944: twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, the California concentration camp where they have been "interned" by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier as a forerunner of the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family's reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train.

Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Rose's death a suicide, in part because the coroner's examination revealed Rose had recently had an abortion. Aki cannot believe her perfect, polished, and optimistic sister would end her life—nor can she imagine Rose carelessly getting pregnant. Her instinct tells her there is much more to the story, and she knows she is the only person who could ever learn the truth.

Based on a true crime that terrorized the resettled Japanese American community in Chicago, Clark and Division infuses an atmospheric and heartbreakingly real crime fiction plot with rich period details and delicately wrought personal stories Edgar Award–winner Naomi Hirahara has gleaned from thirty years of research and archival work in Japanese American history.