PRISONERS OF WAR

A white American man falls in love with a Japanese-American woman, and anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor threatens their relationship.

Patrick Ellsworth McBride, the son of a bookie and bootlegger, was born in 1920 in a quiet suburb outside of San Francisco. As a young child, he falls in love with Beatrice “Bea” Sakai, his schoolmate, and works on her family’s flower farm, where they grow yellow daffodils and white narcissus. Bea’s father accepts the connection between Patrick and Bea and acts almost as a second dad to Patrick, teaching him how to garden. But her mother angrily dismisses any possibility of a romance between the teenagers. Meanwhile, America has become staunchly anti-Japanese—especially after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Undaunted, Patrick and Bea become engaged, and he lands a job as a machinist for the Bureau of Ordnance at the Naval Torpedo Station in Keyport, Washington. But Bea’s world starts to fall apart. Her father, suspected of spying for Japan, is shot to death by federal agents. Her family’s flower shop is burned to the ground by vicious neighbors. And Bea is sent to an internment camp, where a guard sexually assaults her. She breaks off the engagement to Patrick, convinced that their marriage could never survive the political climate in the U.S. In a desperate bid to win Bea back and distinguish himself from the nation he’s come to see as brutally closed-minded, Patrick plots to sabotage the torpedoes he helps construct, an act of treason punishable by death. Debut author Scott deftly captures the interplay between wariness and alarmism. Patrick decries Japan’s bellicose government, but he also laments the indiscriminately broad strokes used to paint the whole of the Japanese-American population. The author has a gift for the sympathetic portrayal of antagonistic views, making the novel as a whole a provocation to nuanced reflection rather than a knowing screed. The writing, however, is markedly unliterary and often almost childlike. Enthusiastically declaring his devotion to Bea, Patrick says: “Oh, Babe, I love you more than a fat kid loves ice cream!” And Bea’s mother, the one character in the novel who is a self-lampooning caricature, shrilly explains her objections to Bea and Patrick’s relationship: “Our daughter can’t be matched to a white devil. I can’t bear the shame of her marrying an unclean white. I’d rather she marry one of those stinking garlic-eating Koreans than a white! This cannot be. She must become Japanese.” Nonetheless, Scott patiently unfurls the plot, plausibly describing the remarkable metamorphosis Patrick undergoes. Similarly, he makes credible Bea’s gradual disenchantment, which is even more intense since she seems caught between two cultures, neither of which makes her feel fully at home. The result is a heartbreaking novel, unflinching in its acceptance of the world’s incurable flaws.

Despite underwhelming prose, an affecting and historically keen story.