By Brian Dunlap

For Asain/Pacific American Heritage Month, Los Āngeles Literature is recommending books about Asian L.Á. written by Asians and books written by Asian Angeleños. This history of the city’s Asian American literature extends at least as far back as the 1920s, as historian Valerie J. Matsumoto chronicles in the chapter “Sounding the Dawn Bell: Developing Nisei Voices” from her book City Girls.

“Nisei women were active and influential in all spheres of creative expression, especially in literary circles. They wrote passionate poetry and humerous ditties, penned romantic and social realist fiction, reviewed new books and music, composed analytical essays on literature, and aired their opinions in a plethora of newspaper colums,” in the Japanese American press, as they were almost completely shut out of the mainstream literary world.

Today, Asian Americans continue to impact the city’s literary community. They are open mic hosts such as Arianna “Lady” Bosco and Eddy M. Gana Jr. and Stephanie Sajor. They’ve founded or host open mics such as Sunday Jump in Historic Filipinotown and Tuesday Night Project in Little Tokyo.

The following are Los Angelés Literature’s recommendations. There are many great books about L.Á. penned by Asian Americans that are not listed below. Use these recommendations as an entry point into reading and exploring L.A.’s Asian American literature.

• City Girls by Valerie J. Matsumoto

Even before wartime incarceration, Japanese Americans largely lived in separate cultural communities from their West Coast neighbors. Although the Nisei children, the American-born second generation, were U.S. citizens and were integrated in public schools, they were socially isolated in many ways from their peers. These young women found rapport in ethnocultural youth organizations, that flourished in Los Angelés during the 1920s and 1930s, then home to the largest Japanese American population. This is a forgotten world of female friendship and camaraderie that Valerie J. Matsumoto recovers in this book

• Lament in the Night by Shoson Nagahara

Lament in the Night collects two novellas by the author Shosun Nagahara, translated from the Japanese for the first time. The title novella, originally published in 1925, follows itinerant day laborer Ishikawa Sazuko as he prowls the back alleys and bathhouses of Los Angeles, looking for a meal, a job or just someone to hold onto. The second novella follows a young mother working her way through bars and nightclubs after being abandoned by her gambling-addicted husband. Written in a deadpan tone, his novels combine the gritty sensibility of Los Angeles noir with elements of Japanese traditional storytelling and epistolary techniques.

• On Gold Mountain by Lisa See

Out of the stories heard in her childhood in Los Angeles’s Chinatown and years of research, See has constructed this sweeping chronicle of her Chinese-American family, a work that takes in stories of racism and romance, entrepreneurial genius and domestic heartache, secret marriages and sibling rivalries, in a powerful history of two cultures meeting in a new world.

• Seventeen Syllables by Hisaye Yamamoto

Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together nineteen stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto’s forty-year career. It was her first book to be published in the United States. Yamamoto’s themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei, and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

• Terminal Island by Naomi Hirahara and Geraldine Knatz

Few Angeleños have visited Terminal Island, a sheltered spot in the Pacific Ocean that once served as a resort for wealthy Southern California landowners and as a refuge for its artists and writers and scientists, all in need of a respite from the heat of the city. Not long after the rich and creative were driven away by a greedy throng of industrialists and railroad magnates and the politics they wrought, Terminal Island became home to another thriving community, this time a small world of Japanese families, people whose link was their lineage and their amazing ability to capture the most and biggest fish the Pacific had to offer.

• Summer of the Big Bachi by Naomi Hirahara

In the foothills of Pasadena, Mas Arai is just another Japanese-American gardener, his lawnmower blades clean and sharp, his truck carefully tuned. But while Mas keeps lawns neatly trimmed, his own life has gone to seed. His wife is dead. And his livelihood is falling into the hands of the men he once hired by the day. For Mas, a life of sin is catching up to him. And now bachi—the spirit of retribution—is knocking on his door.

• Follow Her Home by Steph Cha

Juniper Song knows secrets–how to keep them and how to search them out. As a girl, noir fiction was her favorite escape, and Philip Marlowe has always been her literary idol. So when her friend Luke asks her to investigate a possible affair between his father and a young employee, Juniper (or “Song” as her friends call her) finds an opportunity to play detective. Driving through L.A.’s side streets, following leads, tailing suspects-it all appeals to Song’s romantic ideal of the noir hero. But when she’s knocked out while investigating a mysterious car and finds a body in her own trunk, Song lurches back to the real L.A., becoming embroiled in a crime that goes far beyond role play.

• The Yellow Door by Amy Uyematsu

Sansei Amy Uyematsu’s The Yellow Door celebrates her Japanese-American roots and the profound changes that have occurred in her lifetime. As a woman born after World War II, her six decades in Los Angeles are captured in verse that link Hokusai woodblack paintings, her grandparents’ journeys to California, church parties playing Motown music, and Buddhist obon festivals. With the color yellow as a running theme, Uyematsu embraces “the idea of being a curious, sometimes furious yellow.” A genuine product of the sixties, she adds her own unique LA Buddhahead twist to Asian American identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.