Today I met up with my sister Jocelyn and my bff Mary at the Japanese American National Museum. We were there for a meet and greet lecture given by author Naomi Hirahara. She spoke about her newest book "Evergreen". I love this book. It was gifted to me by a childhood friend who said when she read it all she could think about was that I needed to read this book. It is set in the post WWII days and centers around a Japanese family as they resettle in Boyle Heights. Though fiction the author uses some real characters and places in the area. The title Evergreen is a street in east Los Angeles where much of the story is centered. It happens that my bff Mary who attended the lecture lived on Evergreen just across from the "hostel" which is also featured in the story. The hostel was a property which housed some families who were resettling on the west coast after the war. Housing was hard to come by as the west coast Japanese Americans were interned in barbed wire camps during the war. Most internees came back to nothing, property and land taken. This hostel was operated by Los Angeles Union Presbyterian Church located in Little Tokyo. The pastor Reverend Kowta is named in the book as someone helping place families in the hostel. This really happened and this church was the church my grandmother and I attended. Reverend Kowta was a name I hadn't heard in decades and he was the Issei (first generation Japanese in America) and was my grandma's pastor. So many real people and places that I knew from my childhood are named in this story. This is a murder mystery but more than that presents a very real aspect of history in the Japanese community. The author had said she was an avid reader as a child but that the role models depicted in the stories did not look like her or depicted something that she couldn't wholly relate to. In her many novels (which she has published over the past twenty years) are Japanese american characters. This book Evergreen in particular feels very familiar with venacular I can identify with and people and places that are a part of my life. Thank you to Naomi Hirahara for giving us your many wonderful books. It was so interesting to listen to all the behind the scenes process and thoughts in writing a story.