cover image Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes

Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes

Terry Watada, . . Arsenal Pulp, $18.95 (268pp) ISBN 978-1-55152-233-3

Somewhere within this fashionably fractured narrative, a based-on-real-events murder mystery is struggling to get out. The second work of fiction from historian, poet, playwright and novelist Watada revolves around the 1940 deaths of 16-year-old Mariko Miyamoto and her degenerate gambler father, Jin. Although the official story is that Jin murdered his daughter and was shortly thereafter killed by his gangster creditors, Watada imagines a more noir scenario, focusing his attention on Mariko's mother, Yoshiko, and local crime boss Etsuji Morii, tracing their respective journeys to and sojourns in Canada from 1905 to 1940. Yoshiko is determined to create the life she had always imagined in the New World, persevering despite the abuses heaped on her by her husband and the disappearance of her lover, a Morii associate, after her husband's death. Morii, meanwhile, already suspected in the murder by the police, is further drawn in when Yoshiko comes to him for help. Though the prose sometimes feels like it belongs in a history text—there are numerous digressions on the situation of the Japanese in early 20th-century Canada—the novel at its best recalls the works of Hammett or Cain. (Mar.)