Hiroshima Boy
Series: Mas Arai Mysteries, Book 7
By: Naomi Hirahara / Narrated By: Brian Nishii
Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
Wonderful but not much of a mystery—
Rather, Hiroshima Boy is a story of characters, well-drawn, well-fleshed out. It’s ostensibly the last in the Mas Arai Mysteries, and Mas Arai is an 86-year old man, an old gardener who finds himself in all sorts of predicaments. He’s missing his teeth; he’s crotchety, and really, doing this: Bringing his best friend’s ashes back to Hiroshima is the craziest thing he’s done in a long time. He can’t believe he’s doing it, and he’d MUCH rather be back in LA, than here in Japan, going to Hiroshima where he grew up.
Where he was growing up when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city.
The book goes along with its “mystery”, a boy found drowned, plus the ashes of Arai’s best bud go missing, so there’s a bit of a Whodunnit to go with a Whydunnit. His friend, Haruo’s sister, wants those ashes, and she wants them NOW. She’s brusque, and she’s demanding, and she sends Mas running and scrambling to find the ashes. As he’s staying in the nursing home where the sister lives, Mas believes it was all the doing of another of the home’s residents… who just happens to get moved.
Add to that the drowning seems to be tied to rampant boy bullies and maybe to the area’s Godfather-esque type character, and you have the setting for many, many characters to be developed. Naomi Hirahara writes each of Arai’s interactions with all these characters in a very charming manner, and each individual is quite memorable. For such a small book, for so many characters, this is quite a feat. But she and narrator Brian Nishii (who was lamentable in If Cats Disappeared from the World) bring a lot of affection to the task.
And you’ve GOTTA love that Mas saves a beaten-up old cat from other feline tormentors, brings it to his side of town where the poor critter stands a bit of a chance. That he names the cat Haruo after his departed friend is adorable, and the cat makes many appearances throughout the book, charming and delighting and offending all who come in contact with it.
The atomic bomb becomes a character in its own right, leaving many, many scars and horrors that linger to Arai’s day, his current journey. The people of the area believe the bomb left a taint to the place, and NOBODY wants to be tainted. They’re batty about this and would go to great lengths to distance themselves from the horror show, as Mas does. He struggles with his memories of being one of those Hiroshima Boys, survivors of a fiery holocaust, one who witnessed the death and carnage firsthand but who somehow survived it and the radiation sickness which followed. Mas does NOT want to remember, but everywhere there are reminders. Like photos where masses of corpses were found, like tiny skeletons with major birth defects.
Though I can’t recommend this audiobook as an all-consuming Mystery/Thriller/Novel of Suspense, I can indeed recommend it for its charming stories of people who are doing the best that they can, living even as they hear the echoes of screaming, of dying. And as I don’t like neat little endings, I really appreciated the final couple of twists with the ashes that left me laughing out loud.
And little Haruo the cat’s fate?
Well, I’ll leave that for you to find out…!
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