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piperhudsburn's review
4.0
"But who could say for sure that if she crossed the ocean, that happiness would be waiting for her on the other side?"
This is an excellent read. I'm working on a project for school on the history of Los Angeles and I wanted to read a diverse array of perspectives . To read Lament In The Night is to to discover a part of Los Angeles that has been erased and looked over. It's a compilation of two of Shoson Nagahara's novels- one a long-form novella, and the other originally written as a serial, translated brilliantly by Andrew Leong. Today, the works serving primarily as a window into the past and to the mind of a young author who has been profoundly changed by his experience as an immigrant in America.
Lament in the Night is the name of the first novella. It's a short, yet extremely vivid tale of the dark underbelly of Los Angeles in the 1920's. Nagahara doesn't paint a pretty picture, but it's an interesting one nonetheless. The second novella- The Tale of Osato, is much more depressing and much less entertaining, but the valuable clues about city-life, immigration, and culture are not to be missed.
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