Naomi Hirahara  turned to the mystery genre to tell the story of a grumpy old LA gardener and reluctant sleuth who is also a Hiroshima survivor. It’s a story that is central to her life, because it is also her Father’s  story. And as Naomi explains, mystery enabled her to tell the closely personal story of the atomic bomb survivors who were  American citizens, without the danger of polarising views.

Six things you'll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

How a grumpy Japanese gardener became a voice for his time

The secret of "telling lies to tell the truth"

Why she speaks for people who found they belonged nowhere

How a 20 year old woman writer got inside an old man's head

The downtown LA 'renaissance' that's transforming her 'burb'

The exciting new Chicago series that's her next big project

Naomi  can be found at www.naomihirahara.com

On Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/NaomiHiraharaBooks

For more details, a full transcript follows:  Note - this is a "close as" rendering of our full conversation with links to key points. (Not word for word)

Jenny:  Hello there Naomi, and Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Naomi: Thank you for having me Jenny, and my dog Tulo is here, so just ignore him if he gets excited!

Naomi Hirahara with Tulo and the last Mas Arai book, Hiroshima Boy

Jenny: Of yes I have seen pictures of him on line he is very much part of the family isn't he?

Naomi: Yes he gets in on most things.

Jenny:   So, Naomi, before you wrote the first book in your award winning mystery series centered on Mas Arai, an elderly Japanese gardener, you were a journalist for 15 years and published a number of  more academic works - Japanese American social and business histories.

What was the"Once Upon a Time” process that led you to turn to fiction as a better way to tell your story?

Naomi: Well actually, always in my mind I wanted to write fiction.  The way I say it, is " I tell lies to tell the truth." Even when I was working as a journalist during the day I was writing fiction at night or early in the morning.

I had one of those old fashioned Toshiba laptops with a dot matrix printer? And then after work I would go to UCLA to workshops to hone my craft. I just think there is much more freedom to write about what people are really going through in fiction,

Those two worlds, journalism and fiction - well some people think journalism is fiction, but no, if you are a very committed practitioner of that you want to get the facts in, you want to get it right, and sometimes it's very hard to write from a very committed point of view, with a subjective voice.

Many journalists have problems in capturing that in writing a novel, writing a mystery, writing fiction. That's a process.

Jenny: And you have been praised for the wonderful intimacy of Mas Arai's voice. We really do feel you know  this elderly, slightly curmudgeonly, widowed Japanese gardener working in LA;  we understand the feelings and experiences he is going through. That's a real tribute to you.  I gather he may have been based on your own Dad.  Can you tell us a little about that?

Naomi: Definitely in terms of his chronology, it is very like much my father. He was born in California, raised on a farm and then because of circumstances in the family they had to return to Hiroshima and that became by father's new home.

He was relatively young during World War II and so he was in Hiroshima when the bomb went off and he was a bomb survivor. As soon as he could - as soon as he turned 18, he got on a boat and came back to his birthplace and he returned to the US.