Read Chapter Eight >> “I’m a private investigator. Kevin Shirota,” I flash my license as if it really means something to a woman sitting behind a clear desk in the lobby of Fine Bank. This place is not like any financial institution I’ve ever been in. First of all, there are no …
Read Chapter Seven >> “She was my friend. Perhaps my only friend.” Mrs. Yokoyama carefully enunciates each syllable. My fourteen-year-old daughter Maddy and I sit on a pure white fabric couch as we listen to the Japanese woman speak. Maddy, as usual, can’t stay still and I am worried that one of …
Read Chapter Six >> I stare at the message a second time. It’s printed out on a regular white letter-sized paper, the standard offering of any office store. The font is Helvetica, also totally nondescript. The content, however, is not anything typical. It’s a blatant threat, telling me to stop investigating …
Read Chapter Five >> As I make my way to the Koban Visitors Center, First Street in Little Tokyo is hopping. And I don’t mean just the millenials lined up at Daikokuya ramen house. Couples pushing strollers and teenagers in cosplay. It’s a weekday evening in August. Those attempting to revitalize …
Read Chapter Four >> The Sansei guy standing in front of us is the same guy in the photo in my wallet. A little bit skinnier, a little more buff. (He’s obviously been working out during his recovery, while my paunch only gets softer.) I’m convinced that he’s Eric Fujii, …
Read Chapter Three >> A seventy-eight-year-old Japanese woman from Fukushima is found dead from a blow to the head in an alley next to Japanese Village Plaza in Little Tokyo. Her fifty-year-old Sansei son, described as a “loser” by his very uptown sister, walks into the mother’s senior housing unit with …
Read Chapter Two >> Some people read palms. Others read tea leaves. I like to read teeth. No, I’m not one of those weirdoes with strange fetishes. My younger sister, Traci, is a dentist in Yorba Linda and also my only sibling who still talks to me. During the early days …
Read Chapter One >> It turns out that the dead body discovered near the parking lot of Japanese Village Plaza in Los Angeles was not my fourteen-year-old daughter’s. It was of a much older Asian woman in her seventies. Name not released. At least that’s what it says in The Rafu …
“I did it,” I tell them. I sit in a back room of the Little Tokyo Koban, a visitor’s center and community police outpost on First Street in downtown L.A. Standing in front of me are the Koban manager; my best friend, Cesar Soto; and Officer Doug Brenner, my main …
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