A vivid and unusual era and setting help this wartime love story stand out.
In this novel, a young woman searches for her missing father in Tokyo—only to fall in love with an American soldier on leave from the Vietnam War.
It is 1969, and even Japan has not escaped the Vietnam War controversy. Emiko Ozeki’s father, Hiroji, has disappeared in Tokyo while aiding young people protesting the conflict. Those in her small, snowy town of Kitayama already consider him a jōhatsu, or one of the “evaporated people”—folks so overwhelmed by the pressures of society and families they simply leave their lives behind. When Emiko’s mother dies, she goes to Tokyo to track down her father, but with little money and few leads, she finds herself among many of the city’s less savory characters, from serving girls instructed to “talk cute” by their yakuza bosses to criminal imperialists and glue-sniffing delinquents. But she also meets Juan, an American GI from Puerto Rico who has been sent to Japan on medical leave after being injured while fighting in Vietnam. He reminds her of her father, and they fall swiftly in love. But they can stay together only if they leave Japan, Juan going AWOL and Emiko abandoning her hunt for Hiroji. Or they can put off their love until Juan’s service in the war is over, leaving their future in fate’s uncertain hands. Keech’s book presents a post–World War II Tokyo that is no longer in lockstep with America, with New Left, anti-war movements like the Beheiren offering readers a view of Japan in the 1970s many may not have considered. Emiko is a strong, independent, and clever protagonist, using her wits to try to find her father and outsmart the radicals and criminals on the edges of this new, harsher world outside Kitayama. But the story struggles when it leaves Japan, as the setting and dangers faced by Juan in Vietnam never come to life quite like the streets and trains of Tokyo do. The war-torn jungles seem less frightening than, say, Emiko’s imperialist boss or the gangster she winds up owing money. Thankfully, this digression only accounts for a small portion of the novel. And though wartime romances are obviously not rare, the historical and political impacts of Vietnam on Japan as depicted here make for unique challenges for a charming pair of lovers.
A vivid and unusual era and setting help this wartime love story stand out.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73305-249-8
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Real Nice Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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