#if I was a frequent writer this would fuel everything I put to paper. every single thing i wrote

[rotisseries]

PAIN MADE ATSUSHI FEEL LIKE HIMSELF.

I FUCKING LOVE THIS BIT IT'S EVERYTHING TO ME

[jebazzled]

troubleshooting: common quandaries and thots to overcome

It's no surprise that people whose major hobby involves writing, the internet, and fandom are often people who carry a lot of anxiety and tension around with them. For many of us, writing is something we do to escape, relax, unwind, and flex creative muscles we might not get to use at work or school. I get it.

For many of us, however, it also seems like forum rp is a stressor, a cause of great anxiety and insecurity. We've all seen or known people who go through a major rp-related crisis.

Sometimes, these crises are truly major - catastrophic falling-outs and permanently damaging rumor mills and etc etc. But a lot of the time? Well. It's not that it's "in your head," because obviously what you are feeling is very valid. But I think sometimes the way we think of internet spaces fuels dysfunctional thinking.

This isn't quite a tutorial; it's more in the vein of my tough love re: writer's block. I'm going to talk through some common scenarios, anxieties, and other issues I see in the rp community, and offer my (fully unsolicited) thoughts and advice. As always, your mileage may vary, but I'm trying!

Topics covered, because this one is a LONGBOI:

Insecurity & thread reactions

Insecurity & completionism/ Being Liked

Jealousy (especially ship-related)

The server is not therapy.

So here's the thing about the internet: for better or worse, it's for everyone.

On the far end of the spectrum, this means that the internet is a great incubator for toxic garbage. See: right-wing radicals, etc. But for most of us, this means that there is room on the internet for weird little me and my weird little hobby. You can find a community to talk about virtually any interest. You, for example, found the rp community.

So here's the thing about the internet: for better or worse, it's for everyone. This means that while you can find a community to talk about virtually any interest, you are never going to find a community that is completely without flaws.

There will always be people who annoy you, rub you the wrong way, or who you think are mean-spirited and negative. There will always be someone you don't get along with. There will always be people who disagree with you.

I have been in servers where members come to me time and time again to complain about other members, as though I am going to boot someone for wanting to talk about x just because they, personally, are sick of hearing about x. I am not going to tell someone to change their personality because someone else, personally, finds it annoying.

Offline, you wouldn't tell your manager at Starbucks to fire Susie because you don't like talking to her. You would simply not talk to her outside of a professional context. You would simply not take your break at the same time as her. You would simply not make small talk with her when the store is quiet and would instead, like, read the liner notes on whatever CD is at the register. (Does Starbucks still sell CDs?)

There will always be people in your community who you do not like and whose logic does not make sense to you. If they are not doing anything genuinely abusive, they have as much right to be in your community as you do. There is, in fact, likely someone in your community who finds you somewhat annoying. C'est la vie.

A community is not an environment custom-curated to your exact specifications. It is a community. You are not entitled to it being perfect. You are entitled to a space free from harassment and bigotry. If the space is free from harassment and bigotry and you cannot enjoy the space because someone else in it is existing harmlessly in a way that you dislike or find irritating, you have the option to leave the community. Discord server links are not a binding contract!

This is all to say: I think a lot of us expect far more of our online communities than is fair. Remember that every single person in your server is an individual human being with an interior life as rich as your own, and a list of neuroses possibly as extensive. None of them, yourself included, are perfect.

Oh, speaking of that list of neuroses! Let's tackle it, babe.

Your neuroses are not anyone else's problem.

It is on you to work through and overcome your anxieties and insecurities.

It is kind of other people to accommodate your growth, or to modify their behavior so as not to trigger your anxieties and insecurities. They are by no means required to do so.

Note: they do need to respect your triggers, if you have them and list them.

So here we go: troubleshooting frequent freak-outs. Buckle up!!!

Insecurity & thread reactions (or lack thereof)

Some people experience a lot of anxiety and insecurity around how their writing partners react to their threads. This might surface in the form of feeling unappreciated/disliked if the thread partner doesn't drop an emoji react on the link in your server's tag channel, or in feeling like no one likes your writing because they aren't swooning over it in #affirmations/ #thread-shoutouts/ #quotables/ etc.

You are serving as both texters in this meme.

So... you don't actually know what's going on with your thread partner at any given moment, you know? Personally, here are some possible scenarios with me as your thread partner:

You tag me and I put a passage from your post in #thread-shoutouts: I am at my desk, on my computer, not engaged in active DM conversation with anyone, and your post either made me cackle or it made me emo

You tag me and I DM you to gush about it: there's a lot happening in the server right now/ I don't want to derail a public conversation

You tag me and I react with an emoji: I am at date night with my girlfriend and she is in the bathroom. I have had time to read your post. I probably haven't put it in my tracker and will try and remember later, when I find it in one of 100 tabs open on Safari on my phone.

You tag me and I don't react at all: I am swamped with work and read your post in between emails. Instead of taking a second to react I immediately jumped into my tracker to log your reply, and now I am back to emails.

You'll notice none of these rationales are: "I don't react at all because I dislike you as a human." "I actively chose to quote Susie in #thread-shoutouts and not you because I want to hurt you." "I don't DM you about our thread because I hate our thread."

It doesn't have to be that deep! Stop hurting yourself. Let yourself assume the kindest option. After all, don't you want people to assume the best of you, too?

If your thread partners know you value emoji reacts or thread shoutouts, it is kind of them to do them. But it isn't inherently unkind for them not to, either. You're better off trying to kick that need for public validation.

Overview for addressing thread reaction insecurity:

If your server has a thread shoutout/quotables/etc channel, mute it. Don't look at it. Stop giving yourself something to fixate on.

When you are worried that someone hates a thread because they aren't giving emoji reacts, instead of building a narrative in your head that may or may not be true - communicate! "What beats do you want us to make sure we hit in this thread?" is a good introductory question to see if a thread is doing something for either or both of you, and gives your partner a chance to say something if they do want it to go in a different direction and would be more excited.

If someone is continuing to write with you, regardless of whether they post an emoji, it is probably because they enjoy writing with you!

Be deliberate about your thread premises! In my experience, threads done "just because" without a specific purpose (e.g. building chemistry between ship partners, introducing a subplot about a cursed hairbrush, kidnapping a house elf) are the first to lose steam and lose interest. It's entirely possible that someone likes you, likes writing with you, and simply doesn't prioritize this thread above their others because there's nothing meaningful to prioritize!

Keep your eyes on your own paper and stop reading so much into what other people do or don't do. It's probably not that deep!

Insecurity & completionism/ Being Liked

You would not be the first person to exacerbate their own problems because of a sense of duty to the spirit of completionism. Here's the thing, friend:

You do not need to write with every member.

You do not need to plot with every character.

You do not need to be in every subplot.

You do not need to have a character in every member group.

People fall into this trap thinking that if they can be everything to everyone, it will make them popular/important/beloved/a truly included member of the site.

But quantity is not the same as quality. You might have a thread with every character onsite but if half those threads are under a "they're on the same bus" premise, then yeah, people aren't going to want to keep up with that thread, and it's going to contribute to your thread reaction anxiety!

Write characters you are excited about. But more importantly: write plots you are excited about. Write threads you are excited about. You can be friends with people in your server without writing with them! You are better off writing a smaller number of really well-plotted, juicy plots that everyone involved feels heavily invested in than in writing a lot of watery threads for the sake of writing with every single person. It's hard to believe, but many people would rather NOT have a thread and wait until there's a juicy reason to than write a thread that doesn't have any development relevance simply for the sake of it.

If you're finding that it's hard to find juicy or plot-driven reasons to thread with many people, that might be a hint to write different types of characters. While yes, people exist who are very self-contained and isolated, the purpose of rp isn't to be a direct mirror of real life. It's to have fun while writing with other people. If your character is not fun to write with other people, they are probably not a good fit for an rp setting.

RP is not a popularity contest. This is not high school. No one is voting for prom queen. Be kind and be open to ideas and collaboration and people will like you. People will enjoy writing with you! People might even go out of their way to write with you. And they will be writing things that matter to both of you. That's winning, dude.

You might be tempted to pinpoint a "popular group" in the server and fix your sights on becoming one of them. This is also a failing proposition: often the "popular group" you might first identify is incorrect, and you are mistaking "exclusivity" for "importance." Sometimes sites have a small, tight-knit group with intricate inter-group plots and a very visibly closed-off dynamic. Since that dynamic mirrors the popular girls you were raised watching in teen movies, I can understand why you would assume that these people are the most important people to befriend on a site. They're not. They're cliquey and exclusive, and trying to get them to make room for you when they have intentionally and performatively set themselves aside from many other members is like... lmao, dude, it's not going to work.

Not only that, but the fact that these people are hard to pin down? It's not a selling point! The most beloved members on any site are not the ones who make you beg for a scrap of their attention. The most beloved members are the people who are friendly and kind. THAT is who you want to Get In with.

Overview for addressing completionism tendencies and "what if I'm Left Out" woes:

This is not a popularity contest, and you are a grown up. Focus on having fun and enjoying writing. That is not something you can do if your first priority is Getting In with the people you think are a site's "Popular Crowd."

You do not need to be everything to everyone. You cannot be everything to everyone.

In fact, everyone will appreciate you more if you do less and you do it well.

Focus on the positive. Who cares if Susie and Sally won't write with you? Sarah and Sam love writing with you! Yes, it would make sense for Susie to plot with you because your characters work together - but again, this is a hobby, not real life, and if you and Susie don't vibe, your characters don't need to interact! Why write with people who make you feel insecure? Trick question; there's NO reason to!

I understand the drive to be well-liked. Trust! I, too, desperately want to be well-liked. You'll have better luck if you don't try so hard. Be yourself and make friends with people who genuinely like you. Stop worrying about what the site's yearbook will look like. There isn't going to be a fucking yearbook.

Jealousy (especially ship-related)

Do you ever find yourself feeling a spike of anxiety or resentment when one of your favorite writing partners writes with someone else?

This reaction is especially common where ships are concerned: when one partner writes AU ships with their character, or has a plot with their character's previous partners before their OTP, etc.

It's a bit territorial, and it's not a good look, friends!

Your writing partners get to write with other people. How much they enjoy writing with other people has nothing to do with how much they enjoy writing with you. How much they write with other people has nothing to do with you. What they write has nothing to do with you. It's not all about you!

It truly doesn't matter how anxious you feel when your writing partners write with other people. They are entitled to write with whoever they want! What makes you nervous about them writing with other people?

In a forum rp environment, the best way to secure fulfilling, satisfying character arcs for your character is to plot with multiple others. That includes you, on both fronts: your writing partner needs you for their character's development as much as you need them! They aren't going to just stop writing with you arbitrarily.

If they do stop writing with you, there is probably a reason! Are they still on the site? Are they still writing? Are they going through something in real life that might impact their muse? There could be a hundred reasons why they are writing more with Susie now than they were with you, and they could be anything from "Susie is out of town this week so I want to give her a lot of replies to come home to" to "a ladder fell on my head and I am recovering from a concussion" to, possibly, "your territorial behavior makes me uncomfortable, and I would rather write with people who do not make me feel bad about writing with other people."

This behavior is especially weird in a ship context, and is something worth unpacking. When you write ships, do you resent/get anxious about your ship partner writing AU ship threads? About their character having previous partners? About their character having crushes that they do not act on?

An AU ship is an alternate universe specifically because it is not real. Susie and Sally shacking up in a space AU has no bearing over whether or not Susie and Marco end up together as finals.

Just like human beings have romantic history, it makes sense for characters to have romantic history, and these plots give your writing partner an opportunity to write plots that they might not get with you. For example, your writing partner might want to write a breakup plot with weird friendship tensions, which might not be a relevant vibe for Susie and Marco. But your partner can explore that with Marco and Sally. Again: it's not all about you, and your writing partner gets to write what they want, and you do, too.

Sometimes I think we can trace the territorial side of ship-oriented plotting to toxic monogamy culture, as described here. Particularly relevant are the below:

the idea that you should meet your partner’s every need, and if you don’t, you’re either inadequate or they’re too needy

the idea that commitment is synonymous with exclusivity

the idea that your insecurities are always your partner’s responsibility to tip-toe around and never your responsibility to work on

the idea that your value to a partner is directly proportional to the amount of time and energy they spend on you, and it is in zero-sum competition with everything else they value in life

Your writing partner is not cheating on your ship by giving their character other ships. If it feels that way to you, you are getting too emotionally invested, and you should probably back off of ship-oriented plotting for a while to unpack why you are feeling this way.

That said, of course be clear about boundaries. This applies both to M-rated content and to parameters of plotting. For example, you might tell your partner that you are not interested in a plot whose core conflict is "will they or won't they." You want to write these characters with the longevity of their relationship never in doubt. You might not want a plot where one character is cheating on the other. You might want these characters to be monogamous. That's fair! It's not fair for you to expect your writing partner to limit the plots they do that do not actually involve your character to avoid triggering your insecurities.

Overview for dealing with jealousy:

It's not all about you! Your writing partners deserve to have a good time as much as you deserve to have a good time. They can enjoy writing with you AND writing with someone else.

Be very clear with your boundaries. If there are plots between your character and another character that you cannot write, let your partner know before they accidentally step in a minefield.

Be willing to step away from ships. There are plenty of plots that do not involve ships. If ships make you a jealous and anxious mess, you should stop writing ships and work on that journey. It is more important to be a good writing partner than it is to write romantic ships.

Writing is such a personal thing, and we all of course connect very deeply to our characters - it only makes sense that we be invested in their outcomes! But if your gut reaction is one of jealousy, this is something that you need to work on, not something your writing partners should need to tiptoe around.

The server is not therapy.

Because rp is an online hobby, it can be easy to forget that every person you interact with in the server or forum is also a whole ass person on the other side of the screen. Which is to say, your rp friends do not exist to be your emotional support.

Of course they can be supportive - some of my closest friends are people I have met through rp! But online as in real life, you need to remember that everyone is always going through something. You are never the only person in the world who needs support, and you need to be thoughtful in how you engage with your friends here.

Do you listen when they share their problems, or do you immediately change the subject to talk more about your own? Do they not share their problems at all - is this a one-sided close friendship? Are the majority of your DMs to them seeking comfort, advice, affirmation, validation?

If you need a text-based counseling service, BetterHelp can connect you with a therapist. A therapist is a person whose job is to listen and ask nothing from you for their own personal emotional needs.

Your friends - online as in real life - are not therapists. They will not always have the bandwidth to help you. They will not always feel comfortable helping you. The internet breeds a sense of intimacy, the idea that regular chat conversation makes for a deep knowledge of another person. And of course this is sometimes the case! But in many cases, the person you are asking for psychoanalysis in the DMs on Discord doesn't actually know you very well. And if you have been relying on them for emotional support, you might be wearing them out.

Overview for not treating your rp friends like therapists:

Be thoughtful. If you have something heavy you want to talk about, first ask if they have the bandwidth. For example: "Hi Susie! Do you have the energy to give me some advice on x work issue?"

Listen. If your friend wants to talk about their issues, stop thinking about how you can relate and it sounds just like that time you... and just LISTEN. If you want to offer advice, keep it about them. If you don't know how to help, commiserate. "That's rough, buddy."

Self-check. Look at your chat history as though it's between your friend and someone you've never met. What do you think of this person? Are they a good listener? Do they reciprocate the support they get from your friend? Do they remember things your friend tells them about their own life? Or is this a one-sided conversation? If you're realizing that you're leaning too much on this friend, give them some space. If you're realizing you've gone way overboard leaning on this friend, maybe apologize and promise to be more conscientious going forward.

Be considerate. Remember that every person you know from the internet is so much more than what you've seen - I don't mean that in a "all internet users are creeps" way, I mean that in a "even if you've chatted in a server with some every day for six months, you still don't actually know them super well." Think of other people you've spent Some Time with. Think of your lab partner in 8th grade bio. You shared a desk with them for an hour a day five days a week for two thirds of the year. How much of your life did you share with them?

This tutorial got LONG - sorry, friends! Lots to talk about. I'm always happy to give Real TalksTM like this one. Feel free to drop into my askbox if you have a topic you'd like me to cover. I'm full of thoughts and feelings, and it would give me great joy for y'all to ask for them for once.

I hope this is helpful, and wish all y'all the best. Happy writing!

[yes-these-obsessions-are-healthy]

Late-to-the-party disorganized reflection of Jessica Jones Season 1, sue me

One of the biggest things that bugs me about Jessica Jones Season 1 is... and this isn’t me attacking the writers.. but it’s the fact that Jessica is so dismissive of other peoples’ trauma at the hands of Kilgrave when she’s asked to include herself in the group therapy sessions. It’s a deep character flaw that I dislike but I’m still somewhat glad exists. It makes her more believable, but in exchange it makes me dislike her more than if she were to say nothing. She refers to them as “whiney”, which..no offense Jessica, but if what they’re doing is whining, then what are you doing when you bring up your trauma to Kilgrave? 

To him, she’s whining just the same as them, only being far more unreasonable, and she uses that sentiment as an excuse to not go to the talks. She says to Malcolm at one point the equivalent of “Someone will always have it worse, so why should I air my dirty laundry out when I probably had it better than someone else”, as if it’s a suffering contest. The nature of victimization, the quality of it, the quantity of it, is what Kilgrave, and ultimately Jessica, are overly-fixated on.

For Kilgrave, the suffering of another person is fine by him because he doesn’t give a shit, but at the same time he thought he was being a great lover to Jessica by taking her all over the world and letting her wear fancy clothes and eating in the finest restaurants. What girl wouldn’t be happy about that? She’s just being ungrateful, she’s just being hysterical, he could have been so much worse to her. It’s a chilling thought process. “I COULD, but I won’t, and you should be thankful.” It’s the threat of a bad time that gives him power, and it is his frequent demonstration of how much of a bad time he could give someone that keeps him powerful.

The very character of Kilgrave is someone who is preoccupied with his wants and needs, like any psychopathic man-child who is desperate for a hit of serotonin that comes from having his whims met or doing what he feels like doing in the moment. His perception of things is the truth, his opinion of someone is how it actually is, and anything to the contrary is just a way for people to try to cage him in and control him. Everything is semantics, negligible, unimportant. The man can feel bad, but it’s self-pity or shallow concern. I think he does tiptoe close to feeling remorse for what he’s done to Jessica, but he stopped just at the ledge, looked down, saw the words “Accountability” and “Responsibility” emblazoned on the trampoline, and went “lol nope”. Because that would mean feeling bad, that would mean changing his self-serving behavior, and that shit is lame. Why would he make himself feel bad? He felt bad in the past, he felt tortured and traumatized by his parents (whether a psychopath or not, the experiments forced upon him would have made any child his age feel like a lab rat, I think, especially since they were so painful-looking..).

Where am I going with this...Kilgrave hits that sweet spot of 1% tragic villain and 99% horrible. He’s a nutter, he may have always been a nutter, or the experiments messed up his head. Whatever the case, his obsession with Jessica is the first time he’s ever felt infatuation for another person. He could list off all the things that fascinate him about her, and in the police station he tries to explain why he can’t stop thinking about her. She represents a challenge that half of him hopes to conquer, and the other half doesn’t. An eternal struggle between them to keep him entertained as he floats through life getting everything he wants. She can be his fiery woman, but she is his woman. She is a weapon he uses as he likes. And somewhere down the road he decided he was genuinely fond of her, but fondness does not translate to kindness and compassion when it comes to guys like Kilgrave, it just means you are too valuable to murder. Most of the time.

What strikes me the most though, is that I don’t know where the manipulation ends and where the self-delusion starts.

The manipulative explanation: Kilgrave is genre-savvy and knows what to say to make him out to be a psycho with a crush--i.e., oh he can’t comprehend what he’s doing is wrong! he didn’t choose to be crazy! He's only just now realized that this thing he feels is love and it may be the thing that he needs to help him become a better person! He wants to love someone and this is how he thinks he should go about it! Jessica, why would you give up on a chance on rehabilitating someone by teaching him the error of his ways? uwu. And he’ll pounce on those doubts and reel her in the first chance he gets. If he has to, he’ll use any innocent bystander as a way of getting her to go along with his bullshit. Maybe he’ll ease up on the criminal bullshit just to get her off his back, but...

The self-delusion explanation: He didn’t mean to hurt Jessica. Well, he did mean to hurt her on numerous occasions, but he didn’t want her to get mad or upset over it. He just wanted her to obey him and do what he said. Everything would be better if she just did what he wanted. Granted, he might have been a bit too harsh on her, but he never did it out of hatred! He has no concept of the depths of pain someone might feel; he’s quite skeptical of the idea that someone could be suffering so much under the surface while displaying the opposite sentiment on the outside. His psychopathy fuels, informs, and reinforces his powers, and vice versa. He doesn’t care about empathizing with others, so he will freely use his powers in a way that disregards them. He will go so far as to use his powers to make someone do something because he knows they don’t want to do it. With Jessica, I think he used his powers to force her to be someone he wanted her to be, but because the very nature of his powers are so pervasive, it truly is difficult for him to determine if someone is doing something against their will because he ordered them to, or if they are doing something because they were willing to do so anyway/agreed with him.

 At some point Kilgrave, for whatever reason, came to believe Jessica was following his orders but had also internalized them. He probably thought Stockholm Syndrome had set in and she was happy. He saw what he wanted to see, because the alternative was ugly--someone he was really keen on didn’t truly like him back, and that revelation would’ve broken his underdeveloped heart. Yes, she was being controlled but she wanted to be controlled, she was fine with being compelled to do things because it was him giving the order. In his sad little head, he thought he had a chance to “Win” her back, and his efforts to not be a horrible human being in her presence for a day-and-a-half should have been enough for Jessica to realize he was serious. If anything else, he would try to ape the behavior of a “normal” human being for as long as he thought he would get rewarded for it in the end. He genuinely thought he was doing what she wanted while they were living in her house. He thought that he was truly on the path to redemption in her eyes, that his crimes could be forgiven or overwritten if he did enough good things (regardless if he did them for altruistic reasons). That was why he was so distraught and felt so betrayed. He didn’t understand that that is not how it works. Even if Jessica did forgive him, that still doesn’t change the fact that he hurt scores and scores of people throughout his life. The fact that he most certainly wouldn’t care says enough about how screwed up he is.

On a single, tissue-paper thin level I can empathize with Kilgrave when it comes to not understanding why people are making such a big deal about things like “peoples’ feelings”. When you are not in touch with your sense of compassion, or you do not know how to empathize with people, people berating you about your insensitivity and callous nature is like being berated in a foreign language. You hear the upset tone in their voice, but the points being made don’t make sense. While anyone who disregards someone’s bodily autonomy and displays a lack of remorse for their crimes (or fails to see why something is a crime) is repugnant, it’s a testament to the writers and David Tennant’s portrayal of Kilgrave that actually made me feel bad for the bastard for a few minutes. He’s so twisted, he’s done so much wrong, but he wouldn’t have done any of these things if he hadn’t been granted powers. He terrorized his parents until they abandoned him. If he had been a normal boy there might have been hope for putting him in an institution or something, but no, not with his powers of compulsion/persuasion. If you took either one of those features away--Psychopathy or Persuasion Virus--he would have not gone down the path he had. It was a perfect storm, it was inevitable he would have become a fully-fledged criminal after being abandoned by his parents before he even hit puberty. I truly believe that. You can pull up the “well not every psychopath is a criminal” but how many psychopaths have this sort of superpower IRL? I’m not talking the glib charm and persuasion, I mean forcing people to do things they don’t want to do as if they’re robots and he has a remote control.     

 His self-entitlement is off the charts, but it’s someone who didn’t choose to be crazy or choose his power but has come to be this way for whatever reason and  I really, REALLY don’t want to use the word “gaslighting” because that word is overused to shit on the Internet to just mean “trying to lie your way out of a situation”, but I think that Kilgrave was trying to delude himself. He’s good at doing that, since it is impossible to talk to him without him being able to shut you up and make you cut your tongue out with scissors for angering him. Jessica was potentially the only person in the world who could maybe possibly get through to him, or at least deflate his bubble a bit. I know that Kilgrave would only allow it if he thought it would lead to Jessica giving him “another chance”, and when it didn’t happen he would accuse her of lying and trying to lead him on, as if she owed him forgiveness. That’s the kind of man he is. Quid pro quo and all that.

Going back to the very first paragraph, though...I don’t cite this writing as a mistake, but rather a deliberate effort to write her as someone whose response to trauma is not nearly as often seen in media. The pervasive image of a victim that has suffered what Jessica has suffered is someone blubbering in a corner and essentially wrecked, afraid of men, afraid of people, afraid of life in its entirety. ‘Someone who cries is exposing weakness.’ is the underlying message. Jessica nearly cries on many occasions after suffering a flashback or a nightmare, but she centers herself and shakes herself out of it because doing so comes more naturally to her than it may for others. I don’t really know how to explain it, but it’s not that people who “allow” their trauma to affect them are weak, but rather some people are able to mentally shake themselves out of its hold if given the proper tools to do so at a steadier clip than others. Predisposed skill level at processing trauma, and it’s a skill you learn and develop as time goes on, hopefully. Not all minds react to trauma the same way. Jessica fears Kilgrave, but she also hates him, she hates him in a way that translates to “I would lay my hands on you to remove you from my presence”, i.e. physical, verbal confrontation and rebuffs,  whereas other forms of hatred that stem from trauma seem to be “I would do everything in my power to remove myself from your presence”, i.e. avoidance, hiding. Season 1 to me felt like a war between both instincts, and ultimately Jessica chose the former. 

This isn’t to say that one must always choose to directly confront the source of their trauma and terminate it, since I think people can recover   Jessica has shades of that, and it is a battle throughout the season of “Do I avoid him or do I confront him?”  

She is a very shut-off person, really compartmentalizes everything while trying to make it seem like what happened to her doesn’t affect her, but only in front of strangers. When she is with Kilgrave she goes out of her way to remind him “Hey, you fucked me up, did you know that? YOUR CRIMES AGAINST MY PERSON FUCKED ME UP.” And he doesn’t know how to comprehend that. He expresses his disgust for the word “rape” because he believes the myth that rapists are the kind of people that hide in dark alleyways or skulk around skeevy dive bars. They’re cowardly, pathetic little men that resort to force because they can’t seduce a woman properly. But he! He is a suave well-dressed man with refined tastes! Women fall head over heels for him (until they realize he’s a horrible person, then they try to leave only to find they can’t). How many rapists attract the number of women he does? How many rapists are able to get a woman to say ‘yes’ without laying a hand on her? How many rapists shower their victims with expensive gifts and attention? How many rapists love their victims? 

Zero! So that means he’s not a rapist, obviously! To be accused of rape is a big existential threat to him. It would mean challenging the nature of the relationship that he has created in his mind between him and Jessica. He came to think there was genuine love between them and he somehow lost her, or he failed to pick up on something and she ran away. He blames her for breaking his heart, but at the same time he comes close to admitting that maybe he did something wrong and it made her angry, so he should at least try to fix it to make her happy, as if she got fed up with him coming home late from the office one too many times. You know, something objectively minor but still considered important in her overdramatic female mind. I should note that Kilgrave does not come off as a man who thinks less of women for being women, but believes they are a bit different from men ala “Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars”. Women require different handling; they don’t always say what they want because they don’t want to admit that they want things. That ties into Jessica’s statement that she doesn’t flirt, she states what she wants. But Kilgrave demonstrates that even when a woman states in plain terms what she wants, men assume the woman is lying, in denial, means the opposite, or she can be persuaded... 

It’s the discounting and downplaying of Jessica’s claims that really sell how far up his own ass Kilgrave really is. 

So in short:

Psychopathy + male chauvinism + Unfettered infatuation + Persuasion virus = The Biggest Recipe for Disaster in the History of Gender Relations Ever

[everlarkficexchange]

Feast Your Eyes

Written by: @savvylark @lovely-tothe-bone @ra3lynn3

Prompt 91: Peeta as the tatted, ex-rocker owner of bakery chain (like in in DC-Balto area called dangerously delicious pies). Katniss is an attached (engaged or otherwise unavailable) food critic or reporter doing a piece on him but she and P can’t deny the attraction. Angst and such ensue. [submitted by Anonymous]

Rating: M; later change to E Warning: Vague references to child abuse, sexual innuendos, eventual smut

A/N: Through random chance the three of us came together to do this prompt justice and somehow have been on the same wavelength, fueling one another’s ideas. Dreaming up this universe has been such a joy. Having multiple authors, it just made sense for us to beta one another’s work, I am really grateful to @savvylark and @ra3lynn3 for their patience, encouragement, time, and hard work. They’ve taught me so much. Thank you to the lovely anonymous who submitted this, wish we knew who you were! We hope this surpasses your expectations! This will be multi chapter so lots to look forward to Everlarker’s, the first one is by the ever fun @savvylark

Katniss tapped her pencil nervously on the desk, impatiently waiting for her boss. She was supposed to start on this human interest piece which, as a fairly new writer, was entirely outside of her comfort zone.

Katniss was the writer for the dessert portion of foodie magazine, The Feast.

“I would much rather taste and describe the delicate nuances of liver and haggis than write a human interest piece.” She muttered to herself, her face contorted in disgust at the thought of haggis and liver.

Katniss had been in an especially dark mood all day, still fuming over her recent weekend with her boyfriend Thom. It was as if he had done a complete 180 on Katniss. He was once so loyal, and stable with a well paying job; not to mention tall, dark, and handsome. Thom was everything she had been looking for now that Katniss decided to settle down. The discussion of their future, with pretty suggestive hints, seemed to have worked. Their weekend away seemed like it would have been the perfect time, only to be left-

Katniss’s thoughts were interrupted by the knock on her door. Her long dark braid flipped over her shoulder when she stood, she expected her boss. Instead it was Johanna, her friend and superior here at the magazine, who entered.

Small but menacing, Johanna had a powerful stance. Her cropped brunette hair fell just below her jawline in a tapered bob, while shorter and spiky at the nape of her neck.

“Hey brainless, so what happened this weekend? That text was pretty vague.” Katniss’s brash friend asked.

Covering her face with both hands Katniss answered, “Oh my gosh! No! I don’t even want to talk about it. Ugh! I don’t know how to feel about Thom or where our relationship stands.”

Johanna narrowed her chocolate brown eyes in curiosity, so Katniss continued, “It seemed like Thom was going to propose. All the signs were there: romantic getaway, candlelit dinner, an entire weekend to relax. Madge thought so, I thought so, you did too, right?”

Johanna nodded her head in agreement.  

“A few times in the past month I could have sworn that he had a ring box in his pocket. He was not that happy to see me, if you know what I mean?” Katniss suggestively raised her eyebrows with a saucy smirk, her silver eyes were alive with mischief.

Johanna flashed a wicked grin. She was familiar with Katniss’s wild side. Even if she’d kept that part of her self separate, stored away from her clean-cut, straight laced, more conservative boyfriend. That wild side always slipped out in the presence of Johanna Mason.

The look she gave Johanna turned more serious, Katniss spoke vulnerably, “You know what my parents were like… I can’t, I can’t. I don’t know how to feel. I was left alone in a hotel all weekend, while he ran around for his boring job doing… What does he do again? Professional bank paperwork?” The two women were slightly allergic to sappy situations, so before Johanna started breaking out in hives they made light of the topic.

“Being professionally boring… at decrepit banks?” Johanna answered, her eyes narrowed, “but he doesn’t work at the bank?”

Katniss had been dating Thom for nine months. She kept forgetting what he did for work so much so that over time it became a joke. Thom was essentially the grim reaper of banks. He worked for the FDIC shutting failing ones down, the most boring job Katniss had ever heard of. It was all paperwork and involved some travel.

Katniss had an unstable childhood that involved negligent wild parents. She was drawn to Thom because he had been a calm, consistent, reliable presence. To Katniss, Thom meant stability. Thom had no student loans, owned his own home, had no car payment because he was able to buy his car outright. She had yet to see Thom use a credit card to pay for anything. Katniss knew date night would never have been on the 2nd of the month, that night was designated for paying bills. He read about planning for his retirement, reliable financial strategies, and unrisky business investments. Thom’s weeks were structured and predictable. Katniss found it comforting. Just what she thought she needed in her life.

Katniss explained to Johanna that Thom was constantly on his phone the whole weekend, left to fax something, interrupted their conversation during dinner to reply to emails. Katniss was so disappointed when she was abandoned in the hotel room while Thom disappeared yet again, because “Something came up from work, you don’t mind do you?”

His concern was false, he didn’t really ask.

Katniss was not amused and decided she had enough. They cut the weekend short and parted ways with little conversation. Thom flew to one location for work, while Katniss had flown back home.

Madge arrived at the airport and had found a seething, curse-muttering Katniss on fire. Her childhood best friend embraced the scowling dark haired woman and sped off to the nearest ice cream shop to cheer her up. Something decadent always seemed to lighten Katniss’ mood.

Johanna listened intently and shook her head. Not in pity, but frustration with what a terrible weekend her friend had endured.

“Well screw him, let’s go out tonight?” Johanna offered.

Katniss smiled at the idea, but her face fell when she remembered, “I have to work on this big story first, raincheck?”

Johanna nodded.

Upon hearing the familiar footsteps down the hall, Johanna decided to make her exit and headed out of Katniss’s office.

Her boss arrived with an arm full of research for Katniss.

The blond woman appeared every bit the classic professional, put together in a feminine fitted gray pants suit and low heels. Unexpected is the innovative rebel that embodies Cressida’s very nature, that is until she turned her left side into view.

Katniss smiled as she took in Cressida’s profile, ¼ of her head was shaved in a dramatic undercut intricate and beautiful green vine designs were tattooed on her scalp, and the edge of her hair that met bare skin was french braided thinly down her head.

“Right on time.” Katniss remarked sarcastically.

Cressida laughed at her quip, dropping a pile of papers and pictures on the desk.

Katniss scowled, expecting her boss to explain.

Cress, so used to the frequent scowl stared back unperturbed. They called her the boss for more reasons than her talented writing, her shrewd business sense, and excellence in advertising. Cressida could handle any personality type.

Everything dropped on Katniss’s desk included positive and delicious reviews about the bakery owner’s breads, cakes, pastries, and desserts.

Describing food and writing about it was what Katniss excelled at. Cressida knew this.

After reading every word about the most delicious, mouth-watering desserts, all Katniss could think was “I’ve GOT to get my mouth on one of these things!”

One particular review claimed his cakes to be “simply orgasmic.” Her dirty mind contemplated the thought, wondering what a cake induced mouth orgasm was like…

Katniss was left so intrigued by this baker, by the time she had reached the end of the stack she was left salivating, stomach groaning.

And strangely aroused.

Katniss snatched up her phone, immediately dialed her best friend, “Hey Madge, let’s do an early lunch? I’m starving!”

——-

Katniss once again called the bakery owner, Peeta, to confirm their meeting. He had a deep timbre to his voice, a kindness in the way he spoke. Peeta was efficient and quick to the point over the phone, which Katniss appreciated.

It was a short 45 minute drive to Capitol Hill, a small district in the heart of Seattle. Lost in the song Katniss let loose and belted out lyrics along with the radio. Sometimes she missed this side of herself.

She admired the modern updates throughout the area, an artisan bistro, colorful boutiques, various ma and pa shops that had been rejuvenated for a younger crowd. Even the bars were modernized yet still held older, small town elements. Industrial and historic buildings met modern and artistic designs.

She pulled up to the bakery and vaguely remembered wanting to attend it’s opening.  Thom insisted they attend one of his work functions instead. Which, in hindsight, should have been a red flag. He hadn’t been paying attention to the things she was interested in for a long time.

Katniss took in the outside of the bakery before stepping inside. The awning and structure of the building gave a nod to a generational family bakery while the black and industrial accents gave the appearance of a hard edge. The front of the sign was a nod to tattoo artistry and the logo of the bakery was decidedly masculine. For some reason this made Katniss smile.

A bell chimed as she entered. Soft rock music was playing. Studying the photos on the wall she could tell this is no ordinary baker.

[shirlleycoyle]

Netflix’s ‘The Great Hack’ Misses The Big Picture

“Who has seen an ad that has convinced you that your microphone is listening to your conversations?” David Carroll asks his students at the beginning of The Great Hack, Netflix’s new documentary about data privacy and online disinformation. Carroll chuckles nervously as almost every hand in the classroom shoots up.

The response is unsettling, but maybe not so surprising—a fitting introduction to a story about Cambridge Analytica, the now-infamous firm that provided the Trump campaign with ad-targeting data during the 2016 election. The company, as we now know, scraped Facebook quiz data to construct millions of psychographic profiles, which it then used to hyper-target voters with custom-made campaign ads. As whistleblower Christopher Wylie succinctly puts it later in the film, Cambridge Analytica isn’t a data science firm, but a “full-service propaganda machine.”

But while The Great Hack’s narrative about privacy and information warfare will be eye-opening to many, it largely fails to illustrate the bigger picture. The real “great hack” isn’t Cambridge’s ill-gotten data or Facebook’s failure to protect it. It’s the entire business model of Silicon Valley, which has incentivized the use of personal data to manipulate human behavior on a massive scale.

*

A few years before anyone had heard the name Cambridge Analytica, former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff coined a term for this phenomenon: Surveillance Capitalism. As she defines it, Surveillance Capitalism is an economic “logic of accumulation” that involves extracting personal data in often-unrecognizable ways, creating “new markets for behavioral prediction, modification, and control” that exploit this data as its primary resource.

In other words, it’s the entire M.O. of companies like Facebook and Google, which depend on users providing a constant stream of photos, likes, and other useful data that can be used to map relationships, measure emotional responses, and yes, serve ads. And when it comes to ads, the holy grail of advertising is having the ability to predict peoples’ behavior—and thus, manipulate it.

Consider this quote from Zuboff’s 2015 paper, which is attributed to an anonymous data scientist at an unnamed Silicon Valley company:

“The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us.”

As a writer and educator who has covered privacy for over a decade, I consider this quote the perfect summation of the Silicon Valley mindset. It’s my go-to reference when someone tells me that they’re creeped out by government surveillance, but totally fine with corporations like Amazon and Facebook collecting their data. Nefarious government programs like face recognition and predictive policing don’t just come out of the ether. They are an inevitable consequence of a system that incentivizes the endless accumulation of data for profit, which in turn fuels the machinery of government surveillance that is frequently wielded against immigrants, activists, and other marginalized groups.

When Cambridge Analytica came under the media spotlight, I hoped that maybe it would start a conversation about the surveillance industrial complex and the underlying capitalist structures that drive it. But The Great Hack focuses most of its running time on dissecting the symptoms: Specifically, how a company came to possess the terrifying power to sway elections, and how Facebook failed to stop it.

In one sequence, Brittany Kaiser, a dubiously-motivated former Cambridge executive and one of the film’s main subjects, explains how the company’s propaganda machine worked. It would first target “persuadables,” people whose psychographic profiles suggested they were open to suggestion. Once their specific triggers were identified, content was tailor-made to target their deepest fears and insecurities. “We bombarded them with ads,” Kaiser says in a voice-over, “until they saw the world the way we wanted them to. Until they voted for our candidate.”

The Great Hack / Netflix

Naturally, the film’s main antagonist is Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix. He’s an undeniably sketchy dude, and the film shows him giving statements that are later contradicted by Kaiser and others, dodging media questions, and caught on hidden camera bragging about his conquests—including offering to use sex workers to entrap and discredit political opponents. We watch him squirm in hearings before the UK Parliament, where he is grilled about how his company’s manipulations scored victories for both the Trump campaign and the far-right Brexiteers, who first set in motion the U.K.’s tortuous departure from the European Union.

We then see brief clips of members of Congress tsk-tsk’ing Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s failure to prevent the whole debacle—to which Zuckerberg offers his standard, now-meaningless lines about being “very sorry” and promising to “do better.” But unlike Nix, the film seems to assume some amount of good faith in Zuckerberg, and in the tech industry as a whole.

In one scene toward the end of the film, Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who reported heavily on the Cambridge Analytica story, takes to the TED stage to confront Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and other tech leaders. Addressing “the gods of Silicon Valley,” she pleads with them to consider the harm they’ve done, and change their ways for the sake of democracy.

“This technology that you have invented has been amazing, but now it’s a crime scene, and you have the evidence,” says Cadwalladr. “And it’s not enough to say that you will do better in the future.”

The clip is intended as an empowering moment. We see a journalist speak truth to power and demand accountability from the tech platforms that mediate our world. But Cadwalladr doesn’t seem to consider that Silicon Valley titans like Zuckerberg—now a veteran of countless privacy scandals and subsequent apology tours—simply don’t care.

Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission hit Facebook with a $5 billion fine for a long history of privacy violations dating back to 2010. While unprecedented, the “punishment” was actually a great deal for the company, which made roughly four times that amount in revenue last quarter. When the judgement was announced, Facebook’s stock price didn’t even take a dent—it actually went up.

Even better for Facebook, the fine effectively absolved the company and its executives for nearly a decade’s worth of privacy debacles and deceptive practices—including allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest data from 87 million people.

Surveillance Capitalism is the business model of Silicon Valley. If endless accumulation of data is the central logic of the industry, can we really expect anything to meaningfully change? Instead of asking how Facebook should be punished, shouldn’t be asking whether Facebook should exist at all?

At the conclusion of The Great Hack, it’s ironically Julian Wheatland, Cambridge Analytica’s former CEO, who touches on what should be the film’s central tragedy: that this whole disaster was hard-coded into the very system that gave birth to modern day Silicon Valley in the first place.

“There was always going to be a Cambridge Analytica,” he confesses to the camera. “It just sucks for me it was Cambridge Analytica.”

Netflix’s ‘The Great Hack’ Misses The Big Picture syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[ntrending]

12 tips for organizing your work space

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/12-tips-for-organizing-your-work-space/

12 tips for organizing your work space

The following is an excerpt adapted from Tips and Tales from the Workshop: A Handy Reference for Makers by Gareth Branwyn.

Some studies suggest that organization leads to clearer, more productive thinking and creating, while others claim the opposite. You likely already have your own work and organizational style, and not much is going to change that. I’m basically a mildly messy person with periodic bursts of organizational energy. For years, I beat myself up over my chaotic ways, but then I decided that this was my basic organizational style and that I have still been able to be productive and successful.

One thing I’ve found that helps motivate me to be organized is really clever, thoughtful, and time-saving ideas. Reading a great organizational tip or about some cool organizational technology can inspire a burst of reorganizational energy. Here are a few of my favorite ideas.

1. Organize for first-order retrievability

This tip can help reduce the time it takes to find and grab your tools and materials. Arrange your workspace so that the more commonly used the tool or material is, the closer it is to you. Conversely, put more occasional tools farther away. This way, the shop is designed so that you can easily find what you need as you need it. Via Adam Savage

2. Arrange cords with binder clips

Use a row of binder clips on the edge of your desk as a cable organizer.

3. Take advantage of equipment dead space

Jay Bates shared this useful shop-organizing tip in one of his YouTube videos. For most of us, space is always at a premium. When setting up a shop, you want to carefully think of the workflow around the machines and how you can optimize operational efficiency and tool and material retrievability. Jay suggests that you plan to use the dead space of each machine (the side that you never interact with) to your advantage by grouping these edges together.

4. Keep track of small parts

Use double-sided tape to hold small parts in place while you disassemble or reassemble something. Affix the tape to a piece of paper and write where each part goes.

5. Apply stretch wrap to organize straps

If you have toe straps and ratchet straps in your shop or in your truck, you can quickly bundle them using stretch wrap. Just use a few loops of wrap and your rolled straps are good to go. You can even reuse the wrap for multiple strap-wrappings. Via Jay Bates

6. Mark your tools

From Caleb Kraft: “My grandfather was handy with tools (weren’t they all?). He had a small woodshop and a collection of miscellany that had been acquired through years of working on various machines. At some point he worked on trains; at another, he repaired vacuums.

“When you’re working in shops with other people, it is always smart to mark your tools so that you know someone else won’t end up with them. My grandpa’s mark was five little notches or slashes.

“I inherited many of grandad’s tools when he passed away. They’ve outlived many of the cheap, modern versions I’ve acquired during my workshop explorations. Those five marks have become something of a sign of quality in my mind.

“Maybe I should begin marking my favorite tools. How would a CNC mill look with five notches on the side?”

7. Label cables with bread tags

Here’s a tried and true method of cable labeling that I have used for years: plastic bread-bag tags.

8. Make your own pocket notebooks

I’ve been using Moleskine Cahiers pocket notebooks every day since 2006. I have dozens of volumes of them filled with article ideas, design sketches, notes on my day, and various other scribblings. They’re fun to go back through to see where my mind has been over the years. I often find buried gems I can use today. As much as I love Cahiers, they aren’t cheap. And while I customize mine with cover art, stamps, and stickers, it’s just not the same as if I’d made them myself.

Bob Clagett of I Like to Make Stuff makes his own (see his Pocket Notebooks how-to on YouTube). When you make them yourself, you have something that’s infinitely customizable using your preference of cover paper stock and design, internal paper (or combination of paper types), pockets, size, and so on. I’ve made a few of my own over the years and they definitely hold a special “inspired object” status in my collection.

9. Give your notebook a keyword index

I was so thrilled when I ran across this notebook hack, allegedly from Japan, on Instagram. I fill up lots of notebooks and frequently use a single journal for work ideas, personal projects, and domestic planning (trips, meals, shopping, and so on). Finding things in makers’ notebooks across volumes, and within volumes, can be a real chore. The only real way of fixing this access problem is taking the considerable time to index everything.

The following simple approach allows you to fairly quickly build a back-of-book index of significant content as you go (you could build it in the front of the book, too).

Here’s how it works:

First you start off with your content. In this example, Adam, who runs the blog High Five, is making a recipe book. Here’s his first recipe.

He creates a listing of recipe types on the final page of his recipe notebook.

Based on his index of recipe types, he puts the appropriate marking on the outside edge of the page for this Chinese recipe.

Next, you can see that by placing corresponding marks on the edges of the pages that map to the recipe index in the back, Adam has organized his recipes for much easier access.

I’m definitely going to start doing this in all of my notebooks. Via Adam at High Five Blog

10. Order cables with toilet paper tubes

Use empty toilet paper rolls to hold bundled personal electronics cables and other cords together.

11. Hold cables with zip ties

This trick is from Donald Bell of Maker Project Lab: “This is an easy, useful way to stand-off cables across a length of conduit using zip ties and cheap vinyl tubing. It’s a way to tidy up electrical wiring, fuel lines, data cables, pneumatic tubes, and bicycle brake lines.”

Cut off a ¾-inch section of clear vinyl tubing. You can get this stuff cheap as aquarium air pump tubing.

Run your zip tie through the small section of tube, leaving it sitting midway down the zip tie like a ring.

Take the pointy end of the zip tie and wrap the smooth side around whatever you’re trying to wrangle.

Shoot the pointy end back through the ring of vinyl tubing. You should now have a looped cable on one side of the tube. On the other side, you should have the two ends of your zip tie with the smooth sides facing each other.

Cinch up the loop by adjusting the vinyl tubing ring toward the cable, creating enough length for the ends of your zip tie to be secured around whatever you’re fastening it to.

Zip it up, trim off the extra, and repeat as needed.

Also from Donald Bell: “I came across this tip as a way to harness spark plug cables in your engine. It’s a great way to gather up any group of thick cables, while simultaneously keeping them separate from one another.”

Lay your cables down parallel to one another and count them. The number of zip ties you’ll need is equal to the number of cables.

Loosely attach one zip tie across the entire bunch of cables like a collar, leaving plenty of slack.

Tie loose, perpendicular rings completely around the first zip tie between each cable, parallel to the cables.

Tighten the first zip tie, and then move on to the small rings. Now, trim the excess.

12. Manage your cords

On his YouTube channel, homesteader Dirt Farmer Jay offers a tip for a superior, less kinky way to store your heavy-duty power cords.

The basic steps are:

Plug the male end into the female end.

Grab the doubled cord below the loop that marks the halfway point and flip it over so the loop is facing down.

Push the doubled cord through the loop and grab it with your other hand.

Repeat to form a chain.

Gareth Branwyn is a well-known writer and editor, and a pioneer of both online culture and the maker movement. He is the former editorial director of Make: Magazine, was a contributing editor to Wired for twelve years, and a senior editor of Boing Boing (in print). Gareth is the author and editor of over a dozen books, and is currently a regular contributor to Make, Boing Boing, and other online and offline publications.

This excerpt was adapted from Tips and Tales from the Workshop: A Handy Reference for Makers by Gareth Branwyn, June 2018 Maker Media. Published with permission.

Popular Science is delighted to bring you selections from new and noteworthy science-related books. If you are an author or publisher and have a new and exciting book that you think would be a great fit for our website, please get in touch! Send an email to books@popsci.com.

Written By Gareth Branwyn

[topmixtrends]

Editor’s note: Naomi Hirahara has been a pillar of the mystery community since she published her first Mas Arai novel in 2004. To commemorate her final Mas novel, I asked Mike Sonksen, a.k.a. Mike the Poet, bard and historian of contemporary Los Angeles, to go on a walk with Naomi and write a profile that would do her justice. It was a huge task, but I believe he succeeded.

¤

NAOMI HIRAHARA IS one of the most prolific Los Angeles writers of the last few decades. Best known for her Edgar Award–winning seven-book Mas Arai crime novel series, she has also authored several nonfiction titles on Southern California Japanese-American history. Her newest Mas Arai mystery title and the final one of the series, Hiroshima Boy, was just published by Prospect Park Books in March 2018, and in April her latest nonfiction title, Life After Manzanar, was published by Heyday.

On a cold March day just after the rain, Hirahara took me on a walking and driving tour of Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights spotlighting seven sites featured in her Mas Arai books. What’s more is that she read specific passages from her work pertaining directly to every site we visited. This essay looks back at the entire Mas Arai series and highlights how her many nonfiction projects inform her fiction.

Hirahara is in many ways a one-woman Japanese-American history project. Her nonfiction books have tackled seminal Japanese-American history topics like Terminal Island, the flower industry, Japanese-American gardeners, the Japanese-American concentration camps, and survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I need to do both fiction and nonfiction,” Hirahara says. “They feed each other.”

In many ways, Hirahara’s process is like that of Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and several other novels. In his book of essays, Stranger Than Fiction, he describes the nonfiction he writes between novels. “In my own cycle,” he writes, “it goes: Fact. Fiction. Fact. Fiction.” Hirahara’s bibliography shows a similar trajectory, alternating publications of fiction and nonfiction. Her historical projects have given her hundreds of pages of material for her fiction. She pulls the nonfiction narrative out and reconstructs it into fiction because “it is not my story to tell with real names.” Furthermore, she says, “in fiction you have more freedom to tell secrets.” Her combined fiction and nonfiction illuminate the Japanese-American experience not only in Southern California but in the United States at large.

The Pasadena-born Japanese-American poet Amy Uyematsu has known Hirahara for over two decades. Uyematsu says:

Naomi Hirahara is one of our most gifted and passionate Japanese American writers — whether she’s telling the stories of Issei and Nisei on Terminal Island or documenting the histories of the Japanese-American gardeners, farmers, and nurserymen of Southern California. In her Mas Arai mystery series, I love how skillfully she weaves Japanese-American culture and community into her plots; by the end of the novel, the reader finds out “who-done-it” along with an insider’s view of everything from baseball to strawberry farmers, spam musubi, a snakeskin shamisen, and more.

Uyematsu also notes that Hiroshima Boy “will be especially poignant because Naomi’s own father was a Hiroshima survivor.” This makes sense because her protagonist Mas Arai is partially based on her father. Masao Arai, better known as Mas for short, is a lovable curmudgeon, a Japanese-American gardener who was born in the United States on the eve of the Depression, grew up in Japan, survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and then moved back to America in 1947. Mas is not a carbon copy of her father, but there are several similarities. “The personal history is the same,” she says, “although my father was much more in tune with his emotions. He was emotionally very intelligent; I learned a lot from him.”

  Little Tokyo’s Laureate

This essay will focus primarily on Hirahara’s Mas Arai mystery series, but excerpts from all her titles, both fiction and nonfiction, go a long way toward breaking down history, geography, and culture for Japanese Americans, Angelenos, Californians, and beyond. The Pasadena-born Japanese-American scribe began as a reporter in the 1980s at the Little Tokyo newspaper the Rafu Shimpo and was later promoted to head editor of the paper for six years in the 1990s.

Her training as a journalist exposed her to many incredible stories that began to fuel her interest in writing fiction. Hirahara not only weaves Japanese-American history into her novels, but she also interjects ample Los Angeles neighborhood history and culture.

Like earlier storied Angeleno fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes and, more recently, Walter Mosley, Gary Phillips, and Nina Revoyr, Hirahara maps the social relationships of each neighborhood the protagonist passes through. Essentially every time Mas Arai travels to a different neighborhood, a few historical facts and elements about the area will be woven within the text. For example, in Sayonara Slam, Hirahara writes: “Montebello used to be a flower town; it even had a generic flower featured on banners drooping from light poles on its main streets.”

The wide-ranging insight dropped by Hirahara demonstrates what an expert she is on Southern California’s geography, history, and culture. Another example, from Sayonara Slam exclaims:

Mas was in a sense a Valley man, but his valley was the San Gabriel one, the valley held in by purple-tipped mountains. Old money — grand estates and libraries — had first attracted Japanese gardeners, domestics, and laundries to this valley, but now the area was a magnet for new Asian immigrants, not from Japan but from China, Taiwan, and Korea.

While most of the books are about somewhere around Los Angeles, like Pasadena, the South Bay, San Gabriel Valley, West Los Angeles, or the Crenshaw District, there are sections of a few of the books in Hiroshima, New York City, San Diego, and Watsonville.

Hirahara is so prolific that she does not even know how many books she’s written. According to the list, near the front of her latest book, the number is somewhere around 15, 10 fiction and five nonfiction. A graduate of South Pasadena High School and then Stanford, she’s been freelancing since 1997. Many of the nonfiction titles she has completed are history projects for organizations like the Japanese American National Museum, the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, and the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC), among others. She is so steeped in the culture, that her process feeds itself and sustains her creativity. Like many writers, she is a perfectionist. Her first novel and the first book of the Mas Arai series, Summer of the Big Bachi, was published in 2004. “It took me 15 years to write the first one,” she says.

A week after our all-day city excursion, I went to Hirahara’s book launch for Hiroshima Boy at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. The performance area of the bookstore was packed, standing-room only, with well over 100 people in attendance. She read excerpts from the new book and reflected on the seven-book series. The audience included a core group of fans that were devoted followers of Hirahara and Mas Arai. Some of the questions during the Q-and-A session demonstrated her readers’ intimate knowledge of the series and their fervor for her work.

Walking around Little Tokyo with Hirahara means stopping every half block or so to talk with other pedestrians because she is constantly running into old friends and local associates. We started the walk at the JACCC along San Pedro between 2nd and 3rd.

  James Irvine Garden

Immediately after meeting up we walked down a set of stairs to the James Irvine Garden on the eastern edge of the JACCC site. The hidden Japanese garden with a koi pond and exquisite landscaping is a location most Angelenos are unaware of; even many who visit Little Tokyo frequently are not aware that a world-class Japanese garden exists within the dense blocks of concrete.

Featured as a wedding location in Blood Hina, the fourth book in the series, Hirahara read the following passage while we were there:

The wedding rehearsal was a disaster from the very start. Spoon showed up forty-five minutes late, saying her youngest daughter had taken her car without telling her, so she had to wait for another daughter to pick her up. All the grandchildren, meanwhile, had arrived, pulling at mondo grasses, terrorizing the koi, running through the bamboo, and hopping on the worn bridge.

Looking around at the bamboo and the calm koi pond after Hirahara read that scene, it was easy to laugh because the garden’s tranquil setting epitomizes a Zen spirit in complete opposition to the chaos she described in the passage. Hirahara also told me the garden’s three-part watercourse represents three generations of Japanese-American gardeners and the three generations of Japanese Americans that have called Southern California home.

The next few sentences following the above quote led to the next location Hirahara walked us over to. “Mas could just imagine,” Hirahara writes,

the reaction of his fellow gardeners who tended the Japanese garden in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo for close to nothing. The Gardeners’ Federation was big on “volunteer” — but Mas didn’t believe in it, because you usually ended up losing more than you put in. And for what? A pat on the back and maybe a photo in the federation’s newsletter. Mas preferred that his charity be less visible, if visible at all.

  Southern California Gardeners’ Federation

Mas’s stoic and laconic nature is more about action than words. Before talking about the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, it’s important to address Mas’s disposition. Gasa-Gasa Girl, the second book of the Mas Arai series, explains that he is a “Kibei — ‘ki’ meaning ‘return,’ ‘bei’ referring to America.” Kibei, she writes, is “a word made up by Japanese Americans to explain their limbo. So, while America was actually home for the Kibei, many of them weren’t quite comfortable with English; on the other hand, they weren’t that comfortable speaking Japanese, either.” The stoic essence of Mas Arai provides a perfect lens to view Japanese-American Los Angeles and the social changes occurring in the city during the early 21st century.

The second stop on our walking tour with Hirahara was the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation because they have been an important institution in the Japanese-American community, and because the federation has been mentioned in a few books of the Mas Arai series. The federation is a small building located a block and a half south of JACCC on San Pedro on the southwest edge of Little Tokyo. It is housed in the liminal area between the Toy District and Little Tokyo, and some have called this block “Skid Rowkyo.” On our approach to their tucked away office we sidestepped several tents and an encampment of homeless on the sidewalk along the west side of San Pedro Street.

Originally founded in 1955, the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation has been a critical organization for the Japanese-American community. Once inside their building, Hirahara showed me a book she edited for their 45th anniversary in 2000 titled Green Makers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California. After seeing the exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum a decade ago about the historic role of Japanese-American gardeners in the development of Southern California’s landscape, this book caught my eye. I ended up purchasing it on the spot. The fascinating book includes text printed in both English and Japanese side by side.

The book’s introduction, authored by the Publication Committee, asks:

Why did so many Japanese Americans — reportedly up to 8,000 in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s — enter the field of gardening? Why did some college graduates choose this grueling work, especially during the 100-plus degree summers, before and after World War II? Who are these men and women? And how were they able to make a desert green for the next generation?

The same introduction also states:

But there is more to the story: these same individuals were also the economic backbone of a whole ethnic community. They created community-based credit unions, cultural centers, and Japanese-language schools. Through their efforts, their children were able to gain college degrees and pursue professional careers.

The essays, photographs, timelines, glossary, and excerpts of poetry in Green Makers spotlights the three generations of Japanese-American gardeners along with profiling the early gardening districts: Hollywood, Sawtelle (West Los Angeles), and Uptown (where Koreatown is now).

Uptown is where Mas’s second wife Genesse lives when he meets her in the second half of the series. Hirahara references St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, a well-known house of worship just north of Olympic Boulevard on Mariposa. St. Mary’s has been an iconic church for the Japanese-American community that lived in the Uptown area for over three generations. A passage in Green Makers quotes an oral history interview with the deceased Father John Yamazaki explaining the intricate stained-glass window at St. Mary’s that paid tribute to local Japanese Americans.

The excerpt states:

[T]he flowers in the lower left-hand panel commemorates those who worked in the flower market. The fish marks the achievement of fishermen, specifically those of Tottori Prefecture in Japan. The horn of plenty represents the produce market, where many Japanese American labored. Finally, in the lower right-hand panel we have a push mower, symbolizing the work of Japanese immigrant gardeners. The stained-glass window is believed to be the only one on the United States to feature a lawnmower.

I went by St. Mary’s recently and though the congregation is no longer Japanese-American, the stained-glass window with the lawnmower, flower, and fish remains intact and the Los Angeles Zen Center is a block north. A few of the old craftsmen bungalows in the surrounding streets still have Banzai trees and emanate a Japanese influence.

Looking at her work as a whole, it’s obvious how Hirahara’s years of historical research feed her fiction. She uses historical data to create compelling narratives and educate her readers. Mas Arai’s occupation as a gardener is a big part of his genius, and it makes him an iconic protagonist. In Summer of the Big Bachi, Hirahara writes:

The thing about gardening was that you had plenty of time to think. Mas figured that’s why so many gardeners turned out to be gamblers, philosophers, or just plain crazy. The younger ones who dropped out said that the work was just too darn hard on their bodies, but Mas knew better. They didn’t know how to fill their heads.

Mas is an occasional gambler and humble philosopher. He does not brag or show off with his words, but he is always quietly surveying the situation and mindfully assessing what’s really going on. He is a street philosopher who knows his own strengths and weaknesses. His garage is his sanctuary. “It was musty with the smells of grease, oil, and rusty metal,” Hirahara writes in Summer of the Big Bachi. “While surgeons had their operating tables, Mas had his own version, crowded with glass jars of nails, screws, and even fishhooks.” After so many years as a gardener, father, and husband, Mas has his perspective and belief system firmly in place.

In the next paragraph, Hirahara reveals that the garage is where he

prayed for the first and last time, when Chizuko had had another relapse of stomach cancer, There, in between his broken-down lawn mower and his oily pliers, he had prayed: “God, Kamisama, I know that I’m a good-for nutin’. But save my wife. Not for me. She needsu to enjoy. Enjoy life. Neva gotsu the chance.” But God didn’t answer his prayers. And from that point on, Mas swore that he would never make a fool of himself again. His heart would be closed to both religion and doctors.

And though this quote addresses his lack of faith, there is an inherent Zen spirituality in Mas’s straightforward honesty and dependability. This simplicity and reliability is another reason Mas is such a lovable character.

  The Koyasan Buddhist Temple

After visiting the Japanese Gardeners’ Federation, Hirahara walked us north up San Pedro two blocks to First Street. Walking east a half block on First, Hirahara walked us past the Miyako Hotel where the character Yuki Kimura stayed in Sayonara Slam. Kimura is a Japanese reporter from the Nippon Series and he works closely with Arai in two of the books. Just a few feet beyond the hotel, Hirahara walked us down a small alley to a small Buddhist Temple that is easy to miss if you don’t know where to go. The Koyasan Buddhist Temple is a small temple tucked between First and Second Street and only accessible from the alley on the side south of First Street. Koyasan is one of the best-known Buddhist temples in Southern California, a place with a long, storied history.

Originally established in Los Angeles in 1912, the current location is their third site and was built in 1940, just before the start of World War II. In 1989, then–Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley brought over the Hiroshima Peace Flame from Japan to Koyasan. Hirahara told me that it is an eternal flame and Koyasan was chosen as the keeper of the Hiroshima Peace Flame for their long and deep connection to the Japanese community in Los Angeles. Within the narrative of Sayonara Slam, Mas and Yuki Kimura enter the temple after leaving Kimura’s adjacent hotel room and along the way, Mas tells Kimura that the Hiroshima Peace Flame is inside.

Yuki put his hands together and bowed toward the light. This moment of reverence both touched and surprised Mas. The boy then stepped back and waited, as if he expected Mas to do the same. But Mas had experienced the flames of the Bomb firsthand. He felt no need to bow to it now.

  The Daimaru Hotel

Next, we crossed over to the north side of First Street to go up into the Daimaru Hotel. This small hotel is another location that could be easily missed if you are not looking closely. Lodged between the 10-plus eateries along North First Street between San Pedro and Central, you enter the hotel from a small staircase off the street. After climbing up to the second floor, you find an office and small rooms stretching down the halls and up the next three floors. It is similar to one of the old residential hotels, like a Single Room Occupancy from the era of John Fante and Charles Bukowski. There are two other similar small hotels on the same block above other eateries.

The Daimaru Hotel holds 50 small rooms in the three floors. Along First Street, there is a timeline in front of each address from Central to San Pedro that tells what each site was over the years. This timeline is better known as “Omoide Sho-Tokyo,” which translates into “Memories of Little Tokyo.” Created as a public art project by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Sonya Ishii in 1996, the entire block is a national historic landmark. This timeline according to Yosuke Kitazawa at KCET, “traces the history and memories of the neighborhood with a timeline of landmark events and businesses embedded on the sidewalk. Juxtaposed with the historic yet still-thriving surroundings, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the past, while planted firmly in the present.” Commemorating events like the Japanese internments camps and Little Tokyo’s temporary status as an African-American neighborhood called “Bronzeville,” the Omoide Timeline is a fitting tribute to one of the most historic blocks in all Southern California.

In front of the Daimaru, the timeline reads “Union Hotel, 1914.” In Summer of the Big Bachi, Hirahara called this space the Empress Hotel and one of the characters, an elderly Japanese woman, stayed in a room there. “There was nothing imperial about the Empress Hotel,” Hirahara writes. “In fact, they should have called it Hole Hotel or Dirty Inn. Even Mas himself felt apprehensive about entering a place that rented rooms by the week.” The hotel has recently been lightly renovated to have a fancier front door and a few subtle touches, but it is essentially still the same as it’s always been. On the way down from the hotel back onto First Street, Hirahara pointed out where the Far East Café Restaurant was for many years.

  The Far East Café

Though the sign still reads Far East Café, this space is now the popular Far Bar. Far East Café closed after the Northridge earthquake in 1994. She explained further that the site was “repaired and reopened in 2006 as Chop Suey Cafe and Lounge. Closed in 2008 and then became Far Bar.”

In any event, Hirahara had eaten at the Far East Café hundreds of times with her family for over four decades. In the same passage where she describes the hotel, she notes that Mas “parked the Honda at the meter in front of the boarded-up chop suey restaurant. How many times had he, Chizuko, and Mari eaten off their thick ceramic plates? The entrance to the Empress Hotel was on the side, up a narrow flight of stairs.”

Earlier in the same book, Hirahara describes Mas Arai and his family’s connection to the now-gone eatery:

When Mari was growing up, they went to only one restaurant: Entoro in Little Tokyo. Entoro was also known as Far East Café, a chop suey house, the old kind before the new Chinese came to town. There, you got greasy homyu, looking like day-old Cream of Wheat in a tiny bowl; almond duck, slippery, fat, and buttery, with a crunch of fried skin and nuts; and real sweet and sour pork, bright, stinking orange like the best high-grade motor oil.

The passage continues that everyone in the Japanese-American community always went here no matter the occasion. “Someone married, go to Far East,” she writes. “Someone dead, go to Far East. It was simple and predictable.”

This section is also an ideal example of the many moments through the series where Mas Arai’s internal dialogue is revealed. In the same above quoted excerpt from Summer of the Big Bachi, Mas pontificates further about contemporary new hip eateries:

Mas hated to eat out, especially now. He didn’t like to talk to strangers. He didn’t like to look at a long list of food items with foreign, fancy names. He didn’t like multiple pieces of silverware, two forks, two spoons. All you needed were a pair of chopsticks and a pair of hands to wrap around a hamburger or a carne asada taco.

Mas Arai’s diction is a patois of colloquial English and select specific Japanese words. The occasional italicized Japanese words sprinkled throughout the text add layers of meaning and character to the narrative. In addition to Mas’s great dialogue throughout the series, his cynical interior monologue and way of thinking make him an endearing character despite his moodiness and reticence. Here’s a great excerpt from Hiroshima Boy demonstrating his thoughts: “Waiting in the line was a hakujin, a white man with unruly hair, a smelly backpack at his side. This could have been his own son-in-law, Lloyd, maybe twenty-five years ago.”

After walking through the hotel and discussing the Far East Café, we then walked east down First Street to head toward the Rafu Shimpo, the Little Tokyo–based newspaper where Hirahara served as an editor. The paper is located at Third and Alameda. While walking south along Central, Hirahara pointed out another example of public art in the neighborhood.

  Poets in Little Tokyo

On the southeast corner of Second and Central, there is a gray marble rectangular sculpture surrounded by foliage that could be easily missed. This sculpture is about five feet tall and seven feet wide and it has a poem inscribed on it in both Japanese and English from Bun’ichi Kagawa, a pioneering Japanese poet, essayist, and critic that lived from 1904 to 1981. The poem, “The Sea Shines,” laments Kagawa’s journey to the United States.

Writer Rio Imamura reports in an essay published at DiscoverNikkei.org that Kagawa studied at Stanford in the 1920s and started concentration camp magazines in the Japanese language during World War II. After seeing this sculpture, I discovered that Kagawa was even published widely in venues like Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine Poetry in the 1930s.

One more fascinating detail revealed on the sculpture is that Kagawa’s poem was translated into English by someone named Masayuki Arai. The translator’s name could be abbreviated as Mas Arai. This specific, unexpected coincidence further cemented the synchronicity of the day. This was the first I had ever heard of Kagawa and the first time I had seen the sculpture, though I have been at that intersection hundreds of times. Hirahara hadn’t noticed this other Mas Arai before.

After seeing the Kagawa sculpture, we also talked about the pioneering Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, father of the famous artist, sculptor, and designer Isamu Noguchi. The younger Noguchi is more internationally known, but his father was the first Japanese poet to be ever published in English in the late 19th century. Isamu Noguchi is famous for furniture design, and he also created the stone sculpture in the courtyard of the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center where we started the tour.

  The Rafu Shimpo

Founded in 1903, the Rafu Shimpo is an English-Japanese-language newspaper. This publication is mentioned in almost all the Mas Arai books, but the office is specifically cited in Snakeskin Shamisen. Hirahara began her writing career here in the 1980s after graduating from Stanford. After a few years as a reporter, she became the editor of this Los Angeles institution from 1990 to 1996. The day we visited their office, Hirahara introduced me to their longtime photographer Mario Reyes. Reyes has worked at the paper for over 25 years, and he has also been in two of the books.

In Snakeskin Shamisen, Reyes appears a few times, most prominently taking a group photo in a location soon to be the scene of the book’s first murder. Reyes is described as wearing “a safari vest and red-framed glasses.” In the following paragraph, Hirahara states, “Mas narrowed his eyes. Didn’t look Japanese, but then who said he had to be? Mas remembered that the photographer’s byline in The Rafu Shimpo had a Latino name. They were all touched by Latinos in California and the rest of the Southwest.” Reyes is an award-winning photographer and has taken thousands of published photos over the last three decades, including many in critical Los Angeles moments like the 1992 Rodney King Uprisings and other equally iconic times.

Our final two sites on the tour required we get in the car and drive to Boyle Heights. Hirahara drove us east on First Street. First is a thoroughfare connecting several important Los Angeles microcosms in just a few miles from Historic Filipinotown, Bunker Hill, the Disney Concert Hall, City Hall, Little Tokyo, the Arts District, the Los Angeles River, and Boyle Heights. Before we crossed the river, she pointed out the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple on the northside of First in the area some call the Arts District. This temple is one of the best-known Buddhist houses of worship in Southern California.

In Gasa-Gasa Girl, a sculpture at Nishi Hongwanji is mentioned. Construction on First, east of Alameda, prevented us from visiting the temple, but as we drove past the temple, Hirahara explained how Little Tokyo originally stretched east all the way to the Los Angeles River and west past San Pedro Street and even to the edge of Los Angeles Street. When the Parker Center LAPD headquarters was built in the 1960s, close to 1,000 Little Tokyo Residents were evicted from a few buildings that were demolished for the then-new police building. The rise of the northern section of the Arts District in the last three decades has also been the erasure of the eastern edge of Little Tokyo.

  Evergreen Cemetery

After we crossed the Los Angeles River and the First Street Bridge, we continued east on First, passing Mariachi Plaza and headed toward the Evergreen Cemetery. For many years, dating back to the mid-19th century, Evergreen was one of the only places people of color could be buried in Los Angeles County. Located between First Street and Avenida Cesar Chavez and Evergreen Street and Lorena Avenue, there are over 300,000 bodies buried in Evergreen, including thousands of Japanese Americans. Evergreen is also just a few streets west of the boundary of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, which is along Indiana Avenue.

Boyle Heights is a district in the City of Los Angeles, and the area called East Los Angeles is actually a section of Unincorporated Los Angeles County, just east of Boyle Heights. As much as everyone conflates Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, they are not the same thing. There is a similar misunderstanding like this around Watts and Inglewood in South Los Angeles. Only dyed-in-the-wool, old-school Angelenos like Hirahara know these specific designations. Most recently, Evergreen has become known for a paved path around its perimeter where thousands of Eastside Angelenos jog and walk around it.

When we got to Evergreen, we parked and then walked over to the northwest corner of the cemetery where a large monument pays tribute to the Japanese-American soldiers from the 442nd Infantry Regiment in the United States Military who fought in World War II. Hirahara describes this location in Summer of Big Bachi: “A tall monument stood in the back next to a patch of grass. It was skinny and pointed; at the top was a concrete man, helmet on his head, hands at his sides, and a rifle hanging from his shoulder.” There is a plaque with a verse from Dwight Eisenhower.

In the following few paragraphs, Mas Arai is looking for his wife’s tombstone, and he searches for almost 10 minutes to find her grave. Eventually he sees “[a] headstone, short and squat, shaped much like his late wife herself. The letters were filled with dirt, and Mas felt a pang of shame. He should have come earlier, he thought, trying to scrape the letters clean with the edge of a matchbook.”

Hirahara’s description of Evergreen captures the cemetery perfectly. “Beyond the soldiers,” she writes,

were more graves of mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, all Japanese. Beyond that were black families, even a good number dating back more than a hundred years. Some tombstones had oval photos of older black women wearing corsages, and black men in felt hats. There were cement angels looking over the graves of babies, born and dead within the same year. The markers weren’t lined up straight and perfect, like at some of the high-tone cemeteries in the hills. Instead, the ground had shifted, causing some to rise like crooked teeth.

The dry grass is no longer evergreen, either.

By the time we left Evergreen, the sun was setting through the clouds. The mood was solemn, and the verisimilitude of her description was uncanny. Most of the grass was dry and brown, and many of the old tombstones were chipped and did indeed look like crooked teeth. When we got back in her car and drove toward the exit, the front gate was closed. We laughed for a moment before one of the employees came and let us go.

On the drive back to Little Tokyo, Hirahara spoke more about how so much of her research, life experience, and nonfiction work fueled the Mas Arai series and her other fiction. Whether it be mentioning restaurants that she’s eaten at hundreds of times like the Far East Café or her final Mas Arai book taking place in Hiroshima, where her father was on that fateful day in 1945, Hirahara’s fiction is rooted in believability and that stems from her deep knowledge of her subject matter.

After reading all seven of the Mas Arai books, I still cannot pinpoint one being better than the rest. They are all equally compelling with plot twists, unexpected surprises and reversals, and lucid dialogue. At the same time, you can read any one out of the series on its own and it still stands up. She has a way of filling in the details without being repetitive or excessive. One interesting detail she did tell me is that although the entire series is murder mystery or crime fiction, she made each of the seven a different subgenre as a way of keeping it interesting for her as the writer.

The first book of the series, Summer of the Big Bachi, was a crossover of mystery with a literary bent. The second title, Gasa-Gasa Girl, is a smaller world, and the third, Snakeskin Shamisen, is political. Blood Hina is about drug espionage, and Sayonara Slam is international and about baseball. The fifth book, Strawberry Yellow, is a bio-thriller, and the final book of the series, Hiroshima Boy, is an island mystery.

I ended up reading all seven because the series is a true tour de force and Mas Arai is an incredible protagonist. Award-winning L.A. author Nina Revoyr says, “Mas Arai is a wholly original sleuth — reluctant, curmudgeonly, and irresistible.” Like Revoyr and Hirahara’s legion of fans, I found myself not only getting attached to Mas as a character, but even feeling a sadness about the series ending. Some consolation can be provided in that Hirahara will be writing some Mas Arai short stories. She’s not sure chronologically where they will be set in the 15 years of his life she has already composed, but she does plan to write some one-off stories with Mas.

  Life after Manzanar

Before finishing this retrospective on Hirahara, a quick word needs to be said about her other new book, Life after Manzanar. Co-authored with Heather C. Lindquist, this nonfiction work examines the “resettlement” of the Japanese Americans who had been detained in the Manzanar concentration camp during World War II. The book mixes both archived oral history and new testimonies to create an illuminating narrative about their lives after the internment camps that is both tragic and triumphant. Multiple generations of voices are included in the text.

One of those voices is poet and activist traci kato-kiriyama. Hirahara published a poem by traci in the book titled “No Redress.” Both of kato-kiriyama’s parents were in the concentration camps in their youth. Her mom, Iku Kato-Kiriyama, became the senior class president at North Torrance High in 1957 and later went on to become an educator in LAUSD for almost 40 years. traci’s father was also in the internment camps as a child and he went on to become a longtime local educator and a member of the district’s school board. Together, her parents co-founded the Japanese American Historical Society of Southern California.

traci grew up making annual pilgrimages to Manzanar with her parents. She tells Hirahara in the book that:

It was on the way to Manzanar, that I vividly remember my parents instructing me to pay attention to the places they were taking me as a form of education. As the years passed and I stepped onto the grounds of Manzanar each year during pilgrimage, I also came to understand the connections we had to other communities — from the indigenous/Native American peoples […] to […] immigrants and migrant workers from Mexico and Central and South America, to the institutional racism and oppression of black folks for the duration of this country.

traci’s poem in the book further explicates her connection to Manzanar, her family’s history with it, and how it connects to the contemporary United States.

kato-kiriyama first met Hirahara in the early 1990s while she was in college. Hirahara published kato-kiriyama’s first poems and essays in the Rafu Shimpo when she served as the editor. After kato-kiriyama graduated from school, she started Tuesday Night Café in 1998, a poetry open mic in Little Tokyo. Two decades later, the event is still going and kato-kiriyama has become a seminal figure in both Little Tokyo and literary Los Angeles.

traci credits Hirahara for being an early mentor:

I wonder if Naomi realizes the kind of impact she has had on community as well as countless writers. She was the editor of the Rafu Shimpo when I was first starting to write, and she gave so many of us a platform to process our ideas and create intergenerational conversation through the publication. She’s like a big sister for whom I carry a lot of gratitude.

Most recently, in late April, the pair appeared together at the Torrance Library for a reading celebrating the book.

Life after Manzanar also covers the journey of many former Manzanar internees, including Jeanne Wakatsuki, who went on to write the 1973 book Farewell to Manzanar, and dozens of others who were there, like Shigetoshi Tateishi, Shinjo Nagatomi, Sangoro Mayeda, Jack Takayanagi, Paul Bannai, and his grandson Sean Miura. There is even coverage of the ongoing court cases that eventually led to surviving internees receiving redress and reparations in 1989. The stories of their lives after Manzanar are equally inspiring and tragic. Moreover, these stories are especially relevant in this moment where immigrant children are being detained in cages at the United States southern border.

It is easy to see how nonfiction projects like Life after Manzanar feed Hirahara’s fiction. In recent years, she has also been selected to curate several Japanese-American historical exhibits in museum sites for the National Park Service, the Manzanar History Association, and, most recently, for the Maritime Museum about the Japanese-American fishing community that was in Terminal Island near San Pedro. These exhibits must be visually engaging, so they feature rare photos and artifacts rather than being too text heavy.

Hirahara is truly prolific. She’s even started another mystery series in 2014 with a female protagonist, Ellie Rush. Two titles have already been published in this series, Grave on Grand Avenue and Murder on Bamboo Lane. Ellie Rush is a young LAPD bicycle cop and aspiring homicide detective. Though Rush is an entirely different character from Mas Arai, she also navigates Los Angeles with the same veracity. The history and geography of Los Angeles are an endless reservoir for Hirahara in both her fiction and nonfiction. Her extensive bibliography covering Southern California puts her in the upper echelon with the best of the best in the pantheon of L.A. letters.

¤

Mike Sonksen, is a third-generation L.A. native whose prose and poetry have been included in programs with the Mayor’s Office, the Los Angeles Public Library’s “Made in LA” series, and Grand Park.

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