86
and moved to California, where he later received a
B.A. in creative writing from California State Uni-
versity, Long Beach, and earned an M.B.A. from
UCLA. He worked at both Mitsubishi Motors and
Nissan Motors as an independent consultant and
has served as CIO for Edmunds.com since leaving
Nissan. Furutani has published fiction, nonfiction,
and poetry. On three occasions, Furutani had been
invited to speak at the U.S. Library of Congress as a
mystery author and as an Asian-American author.
According to the Library of Congress, Furutani has
the honored distinction of being the first Asian-
American author to win major mystery writing
awards. He has received the Macavity Award for
Best First Mystery Novel and the Anthony Award
for Best First Novel in 1997 for Death in Little
Tokyo: A Ken Tanaka Mystery, which also garnered
an Agatha Award nomination.
Furutani’s 1996 mystery novel, Death in Little
Tokyo, considered “the very first Japanese-Ameri-
can amateur sleuth mystery written by a Japanese
American,” maps the eponymous Japanese-Amer-
ican enclave as a space that displays a political,
economic, and social interconnectedness with the
surrounding communities and to the larger city as
a whole. In addition to the Little Tokyo area, the
main character’s dealings take him to geographi-
cal spaces in outlying LA suburbs, such as Silver
Lake, West LA (UCLA), Pasadena, and Culver City,
as well as to businesses in the Wilshire district and
to the Boyle Heights area in East Los Angeles.
In this first-person point of view narrative, the
protagonist, Ken Tanaka, a second-generation Jap-
anese-American amateur detective in between jobs,
becomes the filter through which readers encoun-
ter and understand aspects of Japanese-American
history and culture. The novel introduces Obon
festivals both in Hawaii and on the mainland, the
internment camps, the coercive legalities regarding
immigration quotas and citizenship status, and the
1970s controversy over razing parts of Little Tokyo
to make way for the investment of Japanese na-
tional capital for tourism.
In Death in Little Tokyo, the references to and
explanation of Heart Mountain and Manzanar
internment camps serve to show World War II
as a historical event that was not discrete. Rather,
important plot turns and character development
rest upon the unconstitutionality of this govern-
ment action. In the novel, the nisei and kibei nisei
(Japanese Americans born in the United States
but raised in Japan) are polarized as a result of the
internment camps and the army’s loyalty ques-
tionnaire. Thus, the present-day murder mystery
involving yakuza (gangster) ties and fraudulent ac-
tivities that must be solved is inextricably linked to
the Japanese-American dislocation more than 50
years ago. By the novel’s end, Ken Tanaka exposes
a yakuza-based fraudulent crime scheme and ul-
timately discovers the true motive for the murder
of a kibei nisei (with ties to the yakuza), who was
hacked to death in his hotel room by the killer
using a samurai-type sword. The development of
this nonexotic Japanese-American detective by a
Japanese-American writer delightfully subverts
any stereotypical or flat qualities that may have
cropped up in past novels with Asian detectives.
To date, Furutani has published five mystery
novels. The Toyotomi Blades is a 1997 follow-up
to Death in Little Tokyo, with Ken Tanaka visiting
Tokyo due to the publicity he received for solving
a crime in the previous novel. Furutani has also
published a Los Angeles Times best-selling histori-
cal mystery trilogy involving Kaze Matsuyama, a
samurai whose master has been killed: Death at the
Crossroads (1998), Jade Palace Vendetta (1999), and
Kill the Shogun (2000). This trilogy follows the pro-
tagonist’s adventures as he searches for the missing
daughter of his slain lord. Set in 1603 Japan, these
novels give readers a strong sense of the period’s
atmosphere and the protagonist’s physical and
mental cunning as a skilled samurai.
Furutani and his wife, Sharon, spent several
years living, traveling and working in Japan and
presently live in the Pacific Northwest. Called “a
master craftsman” by Publishers Weekly, Furutani
is currently “working on books set in 1550 Japan
and modern Los Angeles, featuring new lead
characters.”Bibliography
Dale Furutani Web site. Available online. URL: http://
members.aol.com/dfurutani. Accessed April 25,
2006.86 Furutani, Dale