SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937 and French Indo-China in 1941, all part of Japan’s expansive efforts to establish the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere, the handwriting should have been on the wall for the colony of Singapore, one of Great Britain’s most important military and economic centers, located as it is between India and China. Hubris, and the sense that their military power could not be realistically challenged, however, led to Britain’s lack of military preparedness and the astonishingly quick takeover of Malaya and Singapore by the Japanese in 1942, handing the British what Winston Churchill called “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.” Author J. G. Farrell recreates these traumatic days in Singapore as the final novel in his “Empire Trilogy,” which, like Troubles (1970), about the Easter Rebellion in Ireland (1916) and The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), about the Muslim Mutiny in India in 1857, combines Farrell’s cynicism, black humor, and sense of absurdity with his uncompromising honesty about colonialism–Britain’s greed, its colonial “mission,” its superior attitudes, and its cruelty toward the local people they consider their “subjects.”

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Just after author Yukio Mishima finished the final novel in his “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy on November 25, 1970, he disemboweled himself in a ritual suicide—seppuku—committed in the presence of four members of his private army. He was then beheaded, in accordance with ritual. Mishima, aged forty-five, believed whole-heartedly in the strengths of the old Japanese emperors and in the strong, aristocratic culture that had evolved from the samurai. He never forgave Emperor Hirohito for denying his godliness at the end of World War II, and he despaired of the political wrong-headedness he saw on both the right and the left a generation after the war. Spring Snow, written in 1966, is the first of the four novels of what is generally regarded as his masterpiece, a series which explores the essence of life, the spiritual beliefs which make that life meaningful, the obligations of man to a wider society, the relationship of chance to free will, and the glory of dying for one’s beliefs. By using a historical approach, with each of these novels taking place later than the previous one, and by repeating his characters, Mishima allows the reader to see Japanese cultural and social history change over a fifty-year period. Spring Snow begins in 1912.

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When the atomic bomb dropped at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was a thriving city of two hundred forty-five thousand people. By 8:20, one hundred thousand of those people were dead. Combining the broad perspective of the absolute devastation of the city with the tiniest details of six individual lives, John Hersey provides a powerful closeup of a few survivors of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, giving the carnage a human perspective. The victims become human, and their concerns become universal, as Hersey shows them digging themselves out and helping their neighbors, filled with an “elated community spirit” in the days and weeks after the bombing. (To see the entire review, click on the title of this excerpt.)

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Written in 1929, Some Prefer Nettles is as relevant and fresh today as it was more than seventy years ago. Illuminating the conflict between the old, traditional ways of Japan and western, “modern” influences, obvious in Tokyo even in the 1920’s, this story of an unsuccessful marriage could be contemporary, except in the details. The social unacceptability of divorce in Japanese culture and the resulting tensions felt by three generations of a Japanese family allow the western reader to enter an emotional world, a world of conflict rarely shared with outsiders and almost never understood. Kaname and his wife Misako “do not excite each other,” but they are stuck, perhaps permanently, in their loveless marriage. If Misako leaves Kaname, she will have to return to her father’s home, a social outcast, without her son, who will stay with his father. Kaname will also suffer–he has failed as a husband. Considering himself “modern,” Kaname has allowed Misako to take a lover, while he finds satisfaction in geisha houses and with prostitutes.
(To see the full review, click on the title of this excerpt)

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