A Boy Called H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan (Kan Yamaguchi Series) - Hardcover

Senoh, Kappa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 4770023251 ISBN 13: 9784770023254

Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc, 1997

Synopsis

Written from a child's viewpoint, recounts stories of people and events in Kobe, Japan, that shaped the author's life growing up during the time of Japanese militarism through World War II.

About this title

About the Author:

On leaving school, KAPPA SENOH worked as a graphic designer before making his largely self-taught debut as a stage designer in 1954. Since then his work for the theater, as well as for operas and musicals, has made him one of Japan's leading artists in the field and won him many awards. He is also known as a best-selling essayist and illustrator, especially for his "Kappa Takes a Look at ..." travel book series on various parts of the world, with their uniquely detailed drawings.
A Boy Called H is his first venture into full-length book form.

The translator, JOHN BESTER, an Englishman who has lived most of his life in Japan, is one of the foremost translators of Japanese literature. Among his translations are works by Masuji Ibuse, Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kenji Miyazawa. In 1990 he received the first Noma Translation Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

A bestseller in Japan, Senoh's memoir (written effectively if unusually in the third person) of his childhood in wartime Kobe is refreshing in the honesty with which it faces some ugly realities in Japan before and during WWII. Senoh describes in meticulous detail the Orwellian nature of wartime Japan, with its secret police, its press censorship and its suffocating atmosphere of enforced conformity. Senoh and his family were suspected of disloyalty because they were practicing Christians and had friends in the U.S. What's most shocking about Senoh's account, however, is that despite his inner rebellion against the war, he consistently did his "public duty." In the book's most revealing episode, Senoh gives a passionate speech to a school admissions board about "smash[ing] the American and British fiends." Again and again, Senoh robotically mouths the party line when the situation requires it. He even assists an army officer in capturing a downed American pilot. How does Senoh resolve the breathtaking inconsistency between his doubting private self and his gung-ho public self? He doesn't. Senoh seems more comfortable hinting at, rather than directly confronting, big questions about personal responsibility and collective guilt. Maybe these questions remain too painful, both for himself and the entire Japanese nation, but failing to ask them leaves a gaping hole at the center of this narrative. At times, the book reads more like a detailed historical account and less like a personal story of survival; readers expecting an intimate memoir might be disappointed by Senoh's choice to tell his story from the distance of an emotionally detached third person. Nonetheless, this book is engaging, well-crafted and original. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 4770023251
• ISBN 13: 9784770023254
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528