A qualified success, at best. But there’s no doubt that Yoshimura is a very considerable talent. One looks forward to seeing...
A Japanese war veteran’s ordeal as a fugitive from American justice—in an ambitious though curiously uninvolving early (1978) novel by the bestselling author of Shipwrecks (1996) and On Parole (2000).
Takuya Kirohawa, a former officer in Japan’s Imperial Army, is summoned to appear before US Occupation Army officers in Tokyo, shortly after the conclusion of WWII. Having participated in the executions of captured American bomber pilots, Takuya knows what fate awaits him—and goes into hiding, traveling throughout his destroyed country to the homes of one relative or friend after another, before finally finding a compassionate host family who (without knowing either his true identity or his circumstances) find him work as a laborer in a rebuilt match factory. Yoshimura writes feelingly of Takuya’s understandable bitterness: he had (under strict orders) beheaded a single enemy soldier, while US pilots had wreaked unprecedented havoc on nonmilitary targets, climaxing with the decisive bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Unfortunately, this personal dimension is swallowed up in thinly dramatized summaries of historical fact—presented both as Takuya’s detailed memories and as information he gleans, piecemeal, from newspaper stories. The result is that the novel’s focus on Takuya’s embattled mind and heart is continually distracted, and the reader’s identification with this otherwise quite fully realized character waxes and wanes erratically. Nevertheless, Yoshimura’s depiction of postwar Japan as a hollowed-out landscape marked by poverty, famine, despair, and passive “fraternization” with unrepentant conqueror Americans, has real power. And the closing pages, which focus on Takuya’s capture, nine-year-imprisonment, and unexpected release (in 1957), rise to a level of very nearly tragic irony—and also, incidentally, sow the seeds of Yoshimura’s superb On Parole (2000).
A qualified success, at best. But there’s no doubt that Yoshimura is a very considerable talent. One looks forward to seeing more of his scrupulous, intense fiction in English translation.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100639-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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