Reimagining History

...he soon realizes he lacks the courage this requires...

...Shipwrecked is a harrowing tale of the retribution suffered by medieval villagers who commit atrocities in order to survive, and On Parole charts the fate of a murderer released from prison attempting to begin a new life, still unrepentant...

...The contrasts between the 1946 and 1957 trains illustrate the transformation of Japan...

...Interspersed through the narrative are her imagined letters, some 25 years after Johnson's death in 1784, giving an embittered, often distorted account of her disliked mother's friendship with the great man...

...But all is not paradise, nor could it be in a Bainbridge novel...

...He might outrun his pursuers...

...Peering down at Hester, it occurred to him that it was impossible to have both affection and veneration for one and the same person...

...Takuya had heard reports about cities being devastated by incendiaries, but the destruction he was witnessing far surpassed anything he had ever imagined...

...Takuya is shocked at such cowardice and betrayal in the men he once revered and obeyed...

...Like masses of towering whitecaps soaring up from a tempestuous sea, a myriad of flames seemed to press upward from the heart of the blaze.' After the bombing of Hiroshima, heard 125 miles away in Fukuoka as "a strange, almost rending sound, as if a huge paper had been violently ripped in two," Takuya concludes that the Americans "had ceased to recognize the Japanese as members of the human race...

...Johnson remains imposing, but life-sized for once...

...And what Hester Thrale lacks in wisdom she makes up for in wiles...

...This one, originally published in Japan in 1978, shows a stalwart officer devolving into a frightened, profoundly confused fugitive...

...Still more distressing is the shift in public opinion regarding the war crime trials, which he follows obsessively: "The thrust of the commentary was that Japanese militarists had started the War and that the Allied powers had no choice but to respond in kind...

...As he travels furtively through the "bombed urban wasteland" of Osaka, Kobe and smaller towns, seeking sanctuary with friends who have barely enough to feed their own families, he feels dismay at "what he sensed was a growing tendency to denounce every aspect of the defunct Imperial Army...

...Only Takuya's integrity remains intact...

...Now, under the American occupation, he is portrayed in the newspapers as a violent beast...

...Yoshimura is the renowned author of more than 20 novels...

...The son of a lower-middle-class civil servant from a small town, the naïve but intelligent Takuya joins the Imperial Army just out of university...

...The dilapidated stations, charred by American firebombing, swarm with the starving and the homeless, reduced to predators...

...All three novels challenge accepted wisdom, using a cunningly simple clarity, a blend of the reportorial and the lyrical, to deliver a dizzying complexity...

...His hyper self-awareness is charted in such excruciating detail that One Man's Justice transcends its circumstances to become an existential parable: the lone consciousness in a threatening, baffling world...

...He asked himself why he was crying...

...the man across the aisle pours sake...

...Johnson offers wit, social cachet, loyalty, and love, while the Thrales offer constant solicitude of every kind, plus the warmth of home and family...

...This is high comedy, but the "little deserving of respect" is not: Hester's unduly harsh treatment of her children (even for the unenlightened Age of Enlightenment) included whippings, scoldings, and frequent punitive medication involving digestive purges...

...Desmoulins, former companion to his late sick wife (and according to Bainbridge, occasional bedtime stand-in for her...

...When his boss, grateful for his conscientious work, wants to make him heir to the factory and offers his niece in marriage in the bargain, he is tempted yet refuses...

...This too puzzles him, until he grasps that time and geopolitics—it's 1950, with the Korean War not far off—have made the Occupation more lenient...

...And when a client wrongly suspects him of petty theft, all the humiliation of his position erupts...

...The most recent have been based on historical events: Master Geòrgie (1998) has its climax in the Crimean War...

...Willingly following orders from above, he and the others take eight Americans to the woods and behead them with their swords, then dispose of the remains to avoid detection...

...Every Man for Himself (1996) takes place on the doomed Titanic (pre-movie...

...Surely the handling of B-29 crew members would not be bound by provisions regarding the custody of normal prisoners of war...

...I first encountered Bainbridge in 1972 through her early novel, Harriet Said, so chilling in its grotesque amorality, so heedless of conventional behavior, as to be refreshing...

...When he began his flight he took along his Army pistol so that, like many higher-ranking officers, he might kill himself if his capture seemed imminent...

...As time passes, though, his will is worn down by hard labor, poor food, and above all perpetual terror...

...By the end, in the hands of the masterful novelist Akira Yoshimura, this casual opening has become a précis of the moral defeat of Takuya, the good soldier...

...An absolutist by temperament and training, he cannot accept the inevitable postwar changes in attitude, how all around him the hatred of the victors is waning...

...Never mind the Dictionary, The Lives of the Poets, the edition of Shakespeare: She's fallen madly in love with an Italian singer...

...what was he so sad about...

...Do not neglect me, or relinquish me," he writes to her...

...Anxiety allows him no rest: Like the protagonist of On Parole, "he was constantly watching what he did and said, straining every nerve to detect how people reacted to him...

...Queeney is the Thrales' highly precocious oldest daughter...

...He gives up, resigned to his stifling discomfort...

...Thrale, not least because she too had the gall to write a memoir...

...He cannot base a future life on a deception...

...Before long, however, the boy's head dropped...

...Despite his relief, his strict code of ethics is offended that standards of crime and punishment shift over time, that the law is no more trustworthy than the honor of former Imperial officers, lying and cringing before their judges...

...In a courtroom scene of tingling suspense, most of the accused receive death sentences...

...Bainbridge's succeeding novels—icy in tone, brilliant, witty, violent, bizarre—did not disappoint...

...Some, like Takuya, receive life...

...On Fiction Reimagining History By Lynne Sharon Schwartz ?ne Man's Justice (Harcourt, 276pp., $23.00) begins with a seemingly inconsequential moment on a packed train bound for the Japanese city of Fukuoka, the spring after the 1945 surrender...

...Thus Queeney's antipathy to her mother, stoked by a mistaken assumption of an affair being conducted right under the nose of her adored father...

...To make matters worse, the officers who ordered the executions, already in custody, are denying responsibility and blaming their subordinates...

...Boswell is harsh on Mrs...

...Aima Williams, a blind poet...

...Many of the novel's incidents, riotous cavortings and expeditions—to Johnson's home town of Lichfield, to France—are based on Boswell's Life of Samueljohnson, as is Bainbridge's vivid, tongue-in-cheek portrait of Johnson himself: "The scarred skin of his cheeks and neck, his large lips forever champing, his shabby clothing and too small wig with its charred top-piece, his tics and mutterings, his propensity to behave as though no one else was present, was at variance with the elegant demeanour imagined to be proper to a man of genius...

...He finally finds menial work in a village matchbox factory, where he lives for several years with his benevolent employer, using a false name, wearing glasses and a hat to hide his identity, utterly alone and gripped with panic whenever he leaves the premises...

...Takuya would lean back to create enough space for the boy to breathe...

...As he and his fellow officers see it, the Americans have violated the international rules of war by their daily barrage over civilian sites, killing over 100,000 people and leveling almost a million dwellings...

...Yet his actions, though awkward, show him as a helpful, generous friend...

...In his eyes could be seen a shadow of recognition at his powerlessness against the mass of adults, as well as a flicker of light, an entrusting of his well-being to this man who kept shifting back for him...

...Fittingly, Takuya's story starts and ends on a train: The young former lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial Army is on the run, wanted by the American military tribunal for war crimes...

...Its penetration and quiet lucidity make One Man's Justice an arresting achievement...

...in that sense he is impervious to change...

...Like Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, which forces our unwilling comprehension if not forgiveness of a German concentration camp guard, One Man s Justice compels us to rethink unwelcome, restive questions...

...Nobody will ever love you better or honor you more...

...and The Birthday Boys (1991) is about Robert F. Scott's failed expedition to the South Pole...

...and Frank Barber, a young black man whom Johnson both champions and employs as valet and general factotum...

...Now on parole like Yoshimura's earlier character, Takuya becomes a grimly modern Everyman, with a past stripped of meaning, facing a future devoid of values or certainty...

...On Hester's side, Johnson's importunate, infantile demands for attention, his clumsiness in times of need—for example, at the sudden death of her beloved son Harry—finally wear out his welcome...

...Perhaps the most telling of the slow changes during his four years in hiding is the erosion of Takuya's moral fortitude...

...But there are many deaths...

...Bainbridge is more evenhanded...

...He even resists his own mellowing, as rage is replaced by fear and he tentatively imagines the flyer he killed as a fellow soldier caught in the war machine...

...The more successful his operations, the more flyers parachute out, and in one instance Takuya's unit finds itself holding 24 Americans prisoner...

...Returning to his village 11 years later, Takuya finds a comfortable seat...

...It concerns the intensely fraught, quasi-amorous but probably unconsummated relationship between Samuel Johnson, 18th-century London's most esteemed man of letters, and Hester Thrale, the wife of a wealthy, accommodating brewer whose house became Johnson's second home and whose dining room was the setting for his orotund pronouncements...

...A man of simple integrity, Takuya believes without question everything he has been taught, takes pride in his Army role, and to the last day, against all evidence, foresees victory and cannot fathom the Emperor's surrender...

...But to no avail...

...Was it that here he was, someone who had graduated from university and gone on to reach the rank of lieutenant in the Imperial Army, now just a suspected criminal, a laborer with a hand towel wrapped around his face pushing a cart...

...the two that appeared here previously were also variations on the theme of crime and punishment...

...But as he watches them approach he is unable to move, overcome by lassitude...

...Japan is gradually recovering from the War, but Takuya will not recover...

...Countless novels have described the making of an apprehensive recruit into a toughened soldier...

...Eventually the trap shuts...

...In his London house he supports a motley crew consisting of Mrs...

...Had Japan won the War, he thinks ironically, he would have been a hero...

...To those who know Boswell's 1,200 pages it will be a provocative riff on the facts, a somber bit of mischief...

...And disillusion is too mild a term, even an inaccurate one, for what he suffers, because it implies a revealed reality...

...There was, he pondered, much in her character to inspire love and little deserving of respect...

...Besides being slovenly, Johnson is in poor health, partially deaf, blind in one eye, and given to hooting at owls...

...A boy's head is squashed between his mother and Kiyohara Takuya, the novel's hero...

...When Henry Thrale, whom she never loved, dies of preposterous overeating, venereal disease, and grief at his son's death, she withdraws from Johnson, who has entertained unrealistic hopes of marriage...

...The depiction of infant mortality and childhood illness is appalling...

...The very first chapter, set in 1765 when he is 56, has him succumbing to an attack of the "Black Dog," fearing for his reason, wailing incoherently and refusing to leave his room for days on end...

...His new friends, the Thrales, come to the rescue, carrying him off to their country house, where he stays on and off for 20 years—a tacit arrangement of mutual benefit and convenience...

...She shows the love, at once bountiful and selfish, between two hugely egotistical, willful characters, riddled by fatal misunderstanding and thwarted expectations...

...This was all right, this was the way it was always going to end...

...How did the thinking behind this differ from the mass incineration of a nest of vermin...

...His one false move springs from a stir of emotion—and maybe a half-conscious nudge at the inevitable: He sends his parents a New Year's card and is traced...

...As the officer in charge of Fukuoka's antiaircraft defense, he tracks American B-29s carrying out incendiary bombing missions on cities and villages and deploys planes to bring them down...

...In comparison, According to Queeney is fairly benign...

...Bainbridge gives a wonderful rendition of the man of genius' conversation—pointedly epigrammatic in true Augustan fashion, barbed, wise, and merciless...

...This ingenuous logic is reinforced when Fukuoka itself is firebombed...

...For readers new to the facts, According to Queeney will be a delicious recreation of 18th-century London, replete with smells, licentiousness, grime, and repartee...

...Each time the train lurched...

...Johnson is in love, in a frustrated, half-aware fashion...

...Thrale, who seems to have been constantly pregnant, had 11 children of whom only five survived...

...He is repelled by Japanese women consorting with American soldiers, or people in the street scrambling for their candy and cigarettes...

...The British novelist Beryl Bainbridge's new book, According to Queeney (Carroll & Graf, 216pp.,$22.00), also re-envisions history, even a battle of sorts, but the thrusts and parries, however devastating, are on a more intimate scale...

...Even more than The Reader, Yoshimura's novel demands a complete imaginative repositioning that is unsettling for anyone raised on the Allied version of the War, but also tonic—literature doing what it does best, an antidote to Hollywood's summer bombardment in the form of Pearl Harbor...

...The earlier one is filthy and wretched, crammed with gaunt, disheveled people "perched on the seat backs, clinging to the supports of the luggage racks...

...Johnson's worst affliction is melancholia—nowadays, depression...

...He hadn't done anything to justify his being suspected, so...

...Takuya feels no remorse...

...The only murders are the crimes and ensuing hangings gossiped about in Johnson's circle by the painter Joshua Reynolds, the actor David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, and other luminaries...

...Enough, he told himself...

...Public opinion has come round to viewing him as a victim of overweening militarism, but he refuses so facile an alibi...

...the washroom is usable, the station bustling with new shops...

...The thick neck of the single American Takuya kills represents to him all the savage force unleasl on his people...