A Boy Called H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan - Softcover

Senoh, Kappa; Bester, John

4.39

112 ratings by Goodreads

9784770029355: A Boy Called H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 4770029357 ISBN 13: 9784770029355

Publisher: Kodansha USA, 2003

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This is the fascinating true story of a Japanese boy's growing disillusionment with the conduct of a patriotic war.

Boy H's father was a tailor, his mother a tambourine-banging Christian in a country of very few Christians. His childhood unfolded in the 1930s, when militarism was steadily strengthening its grip on Japan; it ended when the nation lay in ruins. What set H apart from other kids, despite the shared preoccupation with schoolmates, movies, and sex, was an unusually sharp eye and a precociously skeptical attitude that made him a bit of a loner in a conformist society.

Though at times dark, his anecdotes are arranged with the lightest of touches and a sharp sense of humor. The total effect is of a rich, varied, and intensely readable novel, but one that involves real lives, actual events.

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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.

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