Mas kept tending his lawns even when his wife was dying of cancer. He couldn’t stop, so tenuous was his living, and now he is widowed with his only child far across the country. But one night she calls asking for his help. He never spent much time with anyone sometimes with a few friends, also survivors, who might spend a few hours gambling and having a beer. He loved his wife and daughter but never really told them so and never became part of the non-Japanese portion of American life. His vocabulary is limited but his mind is still shrewd even as he nears eighty. Now his “gasa-gasa girl” needs him. He gave her the pet name because she was always going, going, going, and now she needs him.

Arriving in New York, Mas is bewildered by the coldness not only of the weather but of the people rushing by in a flow of human bodies scarcely acknowledging one another. It echoes his own behavior but he is unaware of that. No one is home when he reaches Mari’s basement flat as Mari has fled with the baby and her husband went after her. When at last Mas meets his son-in-law, Lloyd, he learns that he is a gardener, too, and his current project is a Japanese garden on an estate in the area. However, when they visit the site a body turns up in the newly re-dug pond.

And now the game is afoot. Mas is on his own as the young parents spend their hours in the hospital. There is an unusual flower under the corpse and Japanese kanji on the pond which the police dismiss. Mas is troubled and calls his fellow survivor back in California to check up on the flower. His good friend, Tug, also Japanese and a decorated veteran of the Italian campaign, is visiting his own daughter who has dumped her medical studies to launch a career in the New York art world. The two old men are soon tracking clues in the city and over in New Jersey trying to solve the murder and what really happened in over fifty years ago.

A great deal of the dialogue is in Japanese and requires much concentration for the reader unfamiliar with the language. One wonders why Mai knows so little English despite his many decades in the country. How much is due to his choice and how much to society ignoring that generation who lived during the war some of whom were forced into internment camps? Is he simply a man of few words? For the reader who is willing to live in another skin for a few pages the reward is great.

--Jane Davis