For more than 200 years, the Japanese government enforced sakoku, a foreign relations policy that dictated neither foreigner nor Japanese could leave the country on penalty of death. This policy of isolationism that was instituted in the 1630s and not revoked until the opening of Japan in 1853, kept millions of people in pre-industrial Japan tied to the land in ancient feudal arrangements. When the Meiji Restoration introduced modernization to the island nation in the late 19th century, freedom of movement captured the imaginations of many forward-thinking Japanese, who ventured in search of new lands and new ways of living. Many of these voyagers were led to the Americas, carried along by the Kuroshio Current, the black stream leading from Japan to North America and towards a deeper kind of isolation.

Terry Watada’s novel Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes, explores the intersecting lives of a group of these early emigrants, focusing largely on the story of Yoshiko Hayashi's arranged marriage. When the young woman agrees to marry wealthy expatriate Miyamoto Jinsaburo, said to own a boarding house in Vancouver, she believes herself set to lead a life of wealth and privilege. Upon arriving in Canada, she is shocked to find her promised husband to be much older than he has claimed — a tenant in the boarding house rather than its owner, and a cruel, abusive drunk. The girl, who left Japan almost ridiculously naive, quickly becomes hardened as she sees the prospect of wealth and status fade quickly into a life of pain, drudgery and anonymity. When her situation becomes unbearable, she is forced to seek the aid of Etsuji Morii, the shadowy leader of the Black Dragon Society.

Told in a literary style that draws upon Watada's background as a historian and poet, Kuroshio takes readers across continents and generations in search of the truth of the immigrant experience. Whether he's depicting San Francisco's Little Tokyo circa 1905, or Vancouver's Powell Street in the 1940s, Watada's deft use of description allows him to evoke times and places with considerable skill. Letting the story unfold at a leisurely pace, the author makes good use of fractured chronology to maintain tension and create suspense. At times, however, this book suffers from an identity crisis, not knowing if it is historical fiction or crime noir. While such combinations can work to great effect, the same rich details that make historical fiction so enjoyable can drag down a murder mystery with their weight. Nobody wants to read a story whose plot twists meander. Fortunately, Watada succeeds for the most part in keeping up interest in his tale, largely based on the strength of his characterization.

Reminiscent in many respects to Kerri Sakamoto's The Electric Field and Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Kuroshio differentiates itself by focusing on Vancouver's pre-Second World War Japanese community. Insightful in his portrayal of a society ruined by the enforced evacuation and internment of its citizens, Watada deserves credit for shining a light on a time that has remained shrouded in a fog of indifference.