Book Review - Zone of Emptiness by Hiroshi Noma

Zone of Emptiness a novel by Hiroshi Noma

Cleveland OH: The World Publishing Company, 1956

What an interesting read -When  Zone of Emptiness was originally published in Japan in 1952, it not only became a very popular novel, but was one of the many works of art from the early 50s that helped demolish the idea that the Japan of the wartime years consisted of a monolithic country all focused on one purpose and one God-Emperor.

The novel is written around two main characters, Kitani and Soda, who are privates at an army base near Osaka, late in the war. While there is no talk yet amongst the men of losing the war, they know that to be sent to the Southern fronts was a death sentence.

Kitani has just returned to his unit from two years in prison, to which he was sentenced for stealing an officer's wallet. Soda is a university student who has been drafted, and is working in the headquarters section of the unit. Kitani and Soda strike up a friendship, despite their differing backgrounds. Kitani is consumed by rage at his sentence, blaming Lieutenant Hayashi for pressing false charges against him, as well as his lover, the prostitute Hanai, whom he thinks betrayed him. His one desire is to exact revenge against these two, and any other accomplices in his fate. Soda has fallen in love with Kitani, and so tries to help him if he can.

The book's wider themes are the corruption that existed in the Japanese Army - Kitani learns at the end of the book that he was in fact the dupe of another Lieutenant who was engaged in ripping off supplies, which is one of the reasons he gets such a harsh sentence - and the lack of a feeling of duty amongst the men. Like most men in most armies most of the time, they are more concerned with keeping warm and fed, rather than the larger issues of the War, and right and wrong. The casual brutality with which the Japanese Army is associated is on display here, as well as a lack of brotherly feeling between the troops.

In the end the story is a tragedy - Kitani cannot revenge himself for the wrongdoing that he perceives has been done to him, and the corruption within the Army means that he is sent to the Front, as the rich father of one of those initially picked to go bribes the Sergeant to change the names on the list. The book ends with Kitani on the ship at night, waiting for the inevitable, and wondering if in fact Hanai may have been true to him after all.

The title of the novel comes from the character Soda, who sees life in the Army as a Zone of Emptiness - a place that is completely disconnected from the outside world, where nothing of any import occurs. He feels trapped, both physically and mentally, and morally as well, as he witnesses the corruption around him, knowing that there is nothing he can do to stop it.

One can easily see how this book would have made such an impact on publication - given the indoctrination of the Japanese people during the war years, this book would have been seen as iconoclastic, as well as possibly ringing true to those veterans who had made it back home. It is a searing indictment against Imperial Japan.

It seems that there has only ever been one translation into English of this book, the one I read, published in 1956 - interestingly a translation by Bernard Frechtman of the French translation of the Japanese original, which was published as Zone de vide.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka

Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka, translated by Ivan Morris

Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1957 (1990 printing)    ISBN 0804813795

I'm glad that my reading of Embracing Defeat by John Dower led me to this novel by one of the most well-known writers of Post-War Japan. Shohei Ooka was drafted into the Japanese army in 1944 and sent to the Philippines - Fires on the Plain is loosely based on his experiences there.

We first meet the protagonist of the story - he definitely doesn't see himself as a hero - Private Tamura, as he is being upbraided by his commanding officer from returning to his unit from hospital. It's made clear that food, not fighting, is the number one priority, and he is just an extra mouth to feed. So he heads back to the hospital, where he is unable to enter as without food he is not welcome. So he camps with the other hospital rejects, where he meets the unscrupulous old soldier Yasuda, and the young soldier he has under his sway, Nagamatsu.

When the hospital is bombarded by the Americans, he escapes into the hills. Sure that he will soon die, he wanders aimlessly until he finds an abandoned field of potatoes, and recovers his health. One day he explores a little further, and sees from the top of a hill the cross on a church in a village down by the shore. Seeing the cross makes him think of his own early-life battles with the concept of God, and he makes the decision to head down to the village to meet his fate.

When he gets there he finds the village deserted, apart from dogs and the corpses of some Japanese soldiers that have been massacred. He enters the church, but finds himself unmoved by the experience. When he is resting in the vicarage, he is disturbed by a Filipino couple who enter the house: there is a confrontation and Tamura (accidentally?) kills the woman, while the man escapes. He finds what they were looking for - a cache of salt - and leaves the village, discarding his rifle on the way back to his hilltop garden.

When he gets back there he finds a group of Japanese plundering the garden. He befriends them by offering some of his salt. They inform him that all soldiers have been ordered to fall back to the coast where they will be evacuated by the Navy. As they head toward the rendezvous point the stragglers become a stream of bedraggled, starving and dying troops. Tamura runs into Yasuda and Nagamatsu again, trying to swap tobacco for potatoes.

The troops mass to attempt a night-time crossing of the main highway, now under the control of the Americans. It turns into a massacre that Tamura escapes by heading back the way he came. Looking down on the highway from the hill he has escaped to, Tamura sees an American Red Cross truck arrive at the scene of the previous nights massacre: he sees the medics collect those still living, and tend them before taking them away. He then decides to surrender, and heads back down to the highway. When he gets there, he witnesses another Japanese soldier being shot while attempting to surrender, and flees to the hills again.

Now starving, his thoughts turn to cannibalism, and when he comes across a dying Japanese officer who offers his body to Tamura for food, Tamura has a crisis, and decides that not only will he not eat human flesh, but he will no longer eat any living thing. He eventually collapses, but is rescued by Nagamatsu, and taken back to the camp he is sharing with Yasuda. They have been surviving on "monkey meat", which Tamura soon realises is human flesh: Nagamatsu has been hunting surviving Japanese soldiers for food. In the madness that follows Nagamatsu kills Yasuda, and Tamura kills Nagamatsu, before beginning his wanderings again, collapsing and being taken prisoner.

The book ends with Tamura being in a mental hospital, trying to process his experience.

When the book was originally published in 1951, it was a sensation in Japan, with it's clear-eyed view on personal responsibility for death, the horrible truth of the final months of the Japanese Army, and the smashing of the myth of troops willing to die gloriously for the Emperor.

Ooka dwells on a few themes in this book, mainly what it means to be human, what is God and how is God relevant to humans in situations such as that described in the novel. This translation, by Ivan Morris, reads well and fluently, and the book is quite gripping - I read it in two sessions.

Recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The poet by Yi Mun-yol

The Poet by Yi Mun-yol, translated from the Korean and with notes by Chong-wha Chung and Brother Anthony of Taize

London: The Harvill Press, 1995           ISBN 1860460100

How often it is in life that something looked forward to and hoped for turns out to be disappointing, and those things sprung upon us, or that we stumble across despite ourselves, are great experiences. So it is with The Poet. My wife, who has an artistic temperament, bought this book second-hand because she liked the cover art (Tiger by Song'am) and, through a mis-communication I thought she had purchased it for me owing to its subject matter. I never would have purchased or read the book if left to my own devices, and that would have been my loss.

The Poet is a fictional re-telling of the life of Kim Sakkat, a wandering poet of the early nineteenth century in Korea. Written in a dry, almost academic style, Yi Mun-yol describes how Kim's grandfather aligns himself with a rebel force, and when he is captured and executed by the King, the rest of the family fall into exile and disgrace. Kim Sakkat is unable to enter the civil service and, burdened by shame and bitterness at his fate, becomes a wandering poet. Yi uses the bare bones of this story to write about betrayal, loyalty, fame, honour, wealth, truth and of course, poetry. He does this by describing the development of Kim's poetry during his journey through life.

Early on, before Kim realises that his attempts to re-integrate into the upper classes are fruitless, he composes a prize-winning poem condemning his grandfather's treachery. Disgusted with himself for betraying his family, he begins his life as a wanderer. It is at this stage that he has what turns out to be a pivotal meeting, with an old poet in the mountains. Although Kim doesn't realise it at the time, the old poet explains to him the true meaning of poetry - to be at one with the World, not to try and change it. Kim thinks the old man a dreamer, and goes on his way.

Yi describes the stages of Kim's poetry as stages in his life: his earlier works written to try and impress the upper class milieu into which he would have liked to be accepted were technically perfect and traditional in structure and theme - supporting the status-quo. Once he realises the pathway up the social classes is barred to him, Kim consciously sides with the lower classes, and begins to write works that are revolutionary in form - incorporating Korean language with traditional Chinese characters for the first time - and proletarian in content; writing of work, drink and sex, with much more humour than in his previous works.

The final stage in his poetic journey begins after he meets the old poet again and realises that the old man was right after all. Kim's final years and poems almost call nature into being as he recites: they are poems of what is, rather than what could be, or what he'd like to be. It seems, after a life of bitterness, anger and regret that Kim will die happy.

Like all good fiction, The Poet consists of many layers. As the reader discovers in the prefatory material, Yi's father, a communist, defected from South Korea to the DPRK during the Korean War. The Poet shows Yi not only working with themes that impact on him personally, but also looking at how society as a whole deals with betrayal and "traitors". As the book develops, Kim's knowledge of his grandfather's actions grows. As a child, all he knew was that his grandfather was a traitor to the King, siding with a rebel force. Later, during his travels, he meets an ex-rebel, who describes how Kim's grandfather was trying to bring about change and a better world for those under rebel control. Later still he meets someone else who questions that version of events. Yi shows us that one needs to be careful in what one believes, as nothing is black-and-white, and no one person's motives are entirely pure.

There is a strange section towards the end of the book where Kim becomes the poet for a band of revolutionary vagabonds, writing to instil bravery into the men, and revolutionary spirit into the locals. His work becomes widely popular, but fails utterly to help the revolution - words don't replace deeds in this case. This seems to be the final step in the progression for Kim in realising that poetry and words do not get you things in the "real" world - except maybe a meal or a drink here and there - and it is best to write the poetry that resonates within oneself.

The language in the book is spare, bald and matter-of-fact. Yi, in dealing with a real life, has twisted the story to make it his own by writing in a pseudo-academic style, correcting "mistakes" in the generally accepted life of Kim. The short chapters each deal with a specific event, yet while we know some of Kim's deepest thoughts, he is still an elusive character when he finally walks out of the frame of the story in the last pages. Yi's style, at least in this translation, reminds me of David Malouf's Ransom.

Highly Recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell