KANNANI AND DOCUMENT OF FLAMES: Two Japanese Colonial Novels, by Katsuei Yuasa, translated and with an introduction and critical afterword by Mark Driscoll. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005, 193 pp., $19.95 (paper).

The odd rightwing extremist excepted, it is difficult to find anyone these days who has a good word for colonialism, much less imperialism. Thus it is easy to forget that back when the Japanese imperialists were riding high there were thoughtful artists and intellectuals who believed in and supported what might be called "liberal colonialism," and that one can, without being an odd rightwinger oneself, write, as Mark Driscoll does, of "pluralist innovations in colonial governance that were a feature of Japan's imperialism until 1940."

These innovations stemmed, Driscoll suggests, from a notion "that was ubiquitous in colonial discourse and was something that the majority of literate Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese believed up until the end of World War II: East Asians for the most part possess a shared ethnological and cultural history within the imperial Chinese regional sphere." Therefore, Driscoll believes, "the historical trajectory in East Asia can be said to begin with multicultural postcoloniality in the period of Japan's colonial rule and end with an ethno-racially homogenized cultural nationalism."

What was it like, however, to live in this premature "multicultural postcoloniality?" We get an excellent sense of that from the novels "Kannani" and "Document of Flames" by Katsuei Yuasa.