Brains Benton

The Case of the Painted Dragon by by George Wyatt (Charles Spain Verral), 1961.

Jimmy and Brains are on their way to school when a strange man in a car stops and asks them if they know where he can find a Japanese kid. (He uses the derogatory terms “Jap” and “Nip”, and Brains disapproves. Also, the man is very unspecific about which kid he’s looking for. He offers no names, just that he’s looking for a Japanese boy about their age The town where the boys live is a fairly small college town, so I guess it’s supposed to be reasonable that there would only be one boy matching that description. I grew up in a larger university town, so the idea of there being only one person who could match any description and just expecting random people to know who it is seems really odd to me.) Brains just says that they don’t know anybody with Japanese ancestry, and the man drives away.

After the man leaves, the boy talk about how suspicious he was. They really don’t know who he could be looking for. The last Japanese family to live in their town was the Yamadas, but Mrs. and Mrs. Yamada were killed in a car accident the year before. (It was a point in the book’s favor that Brains doesn’t like derogatory racial terms, but the point is lost quickly when Jimmy is describing Mr. Yamada, who taught art at the boys’ school, and he says that Mr. Yamada “wasn’t one of those ‘inscrutable orientals’ you’re always reading about.” He says that Mr. Yamada was friendly and also coached the school’s swimming team. It’s nice that Jimmy liked Mr. Yamada, but the way he says it sounds a little back-handed. I suppose it’s a sign of the times when this book was written that the author thought it was reasonable for people, even kids, to “always” be reading about “inscrutable orientals”, but on the other hand, I’ve read other books from this time period and earlier that weren’t like that, so I’m inclined to think that it’s not really “always” and everyone.) However, the boys don’t remember the Yamadas having a son their age, so they doubt there’s a connection. They’re concerned because they think that the suspicious stranger might have bad intentions toward the kid he’s looking for.

After the boys get to school, Jimmy sees that stranger driving by the school, and he gets worried. Either the stranger is still looking for the Japanese boy, or he’s looking for Brains and Jimmy. Brains thinks that the best thing to do is try to find the Japanese boy before the man does. However, Brains doesn’t want to tell their principal or teacher about the stranger or the boy. Jimmy worries that maybe the stranger made up the Japanese boy as an excuse to get to him and Brain, and he decides to tell the principal about the stranger in the car, and the principal goes outside and demands that the stranger tell him who he is and what he’s doing, hanging around the school and scaring the students. Unfortunately, he confronts the wrong person in the wrong car, which is an embarrassing situation. (He did the right thing even if he confronted the wrong person. I give him credit for that, but they need to have a reason why the school authorities don’t do anything about the weirdo scouting the students.)

In the boys’ next class, they meet a new student, Mikko, who may be the Japanese boy that the stranger was looking for. The boys make friends with Mikko, inviting him to come to baseball practice with them. They want to warn him about the stranger, but before they talk to him about thr man who seems to be looking for him, they spot the car following them again. Mikko spots the car, too, and the boys ask him if he knows the driver. Mikko says, no, the man is a stranger. Aside from the people at school, the only people Mikko knows in town are Mr. and Mrs. Bevans, the people he’s staying with. Brains makes up a story about why the man might be following them because he doesn’t want to alarm Mikko too much and also because he doesn’t want anybody calling the police until he and Jimmy have had a chance to investigate the situation themselves. (This is a selfish move – Brains just wants a case to investigate, and he doesn’t want to share the case with the proper authorities. But, again, the story needs to provide a reason for Brains and Jimmy to handle the investigation without adult help.)

Jimmy’s mother knows about Mikko’s background and tells him about it when he gets home. It turns out that Mikko is the Yamadas’ son, but until recently, he had been living with relatives in Japan. Mr. Yamada was born in the US, but he worked in Army Intelligence during WWII, which is when he went to Japan and met his wife. Mikko had been born in Japan and was going to school there, but the Yamadas planned to move to the US permanently. Mr. and Mrs. Yamada had come first to get established, but they died in the car accident before they could bring Mikko to join them in the US. However, Mr. Yamada had wanted his son to become an American citizen, like him, and get an American education. The Yamadas had boarded with Mr. and Mrs. Bevans and became friends with them. The Bevanses’ have no children of their own, and they are considering adopting Mikko and giving him the American life that his father wanted him to have.

There is one adult who knows about the mysterious car following Mikko: Yama, an old family servant who accompanied Mikko from Japan to the US to make sure that he gets settled in his new home. Yama is a former sumo wrestler and a formidable man, and when Mikko tells him about the mysterious stranger in the black car, Yama says that he will protect him. However, when the Bevanses’ house is ransacked while the boys are playing baseball and they return and find Yama looking around Mikko’s room, they boys start to suspect that Yama may be involved with the mysterious stranger in some way. At least, he seems to know more than he wants to say about the situation because he refuses to call the police to report the ransacking.

After some further research, Brains and Jimmy learn that the Yamadas’ car accident might not have entirely been an accident, and Brains suspects that everything that has happened may relate somehow to Mr. Yamada’s former work in Army Intelligence.

My Reaction

This is the last book in the Brain Benton series, but it’s also more of a mystery than the previous books. In most of the books, it doesn’t take the boys long to realize who the villains are, and the mystery is more about how they’re going to prove it and stop the bad guys. However, in this book, Brains and Jimmy really do start off completely in the dark. First, they have to learn who the Japanese boy is that the strange man is looking for, and then, they have to learn the history of Mikko and his family. Brains and Jimmy do genuine investigative work, starting with old newspaper stories about the accident that killed Mikko’s parents. Little by little, they begin to reconstruct the past and learn why someone is looking for Mikko and what Mikko has that they want. Even when the boys know who the bad guys are and what they’re after, there is still the puzzle of where Mikko’s father hid it before he died.

I enjoyed the mystery in the book, but I didn’t like some of the ways Jimmy talked about Japanese people. I think it was good that he noted that derogatory terms are inappropriate, and I appreciated that he liked Mikko pretty quickly and pointed out good things about him. Those are good points. It’s just that, sometimes, even when Jimmy speaks favorable about some of the Japanese people in the story, it comes off sounding a little back-handed, like when he says that Mr. Yamada was actually a really nice and friendly guy and not “inscrutable” like characters Jimmy has heard about. I can see that it’s a positive point that someone who has been given a negative impression about certain types of people can consciously notice that the reality is both different and better than what he’s heard before. I think Jimmy is moving in a good direction in his attitudes. It’s just that compliments sound flat when they’re accompanied by a negative or implied negative. It’s like the difference between saying “He’s a really nice guy” vs. “He’s a really nice guy for being the kind of person I’ve always heard was really sinister.” It just adds an uncomfortable twist on the sentiment. I know that the reason Jimmy talks like this is because this book was written during the 1960s, when racial attitudes were changing, and the author probably felt like it was necessary to acknowledge old stereotypes, but I still don’t like it.