Though Akira Yoshimura, born in 1927, is the author of some 20 novels, this is the first to be translated into English. Perhaps the reason for the delay is that he is better known as a historian of the Pacific War. Two of his recountings have been published in translation: "Senkan Musashi" appeared as "Build the Musashi: The Birth and Death of the World's Greatest Battleship" (Kodansha, 1991), and "Reishiki Sentoki" was published as "Zero Fighter" (Praeger, 1995).
His talent for depicting warfare informs novels and histories alike, however, and this translation of the 1982 "Hassen" reveals a professional writer of power, a popular novelist who knows precisely how to achieve his ends -- exciting and moving the reader.
"Shipwrecks" is about an Edo Period village on the shores of the Sea of Japan. The people eke out an existence by fishing and selling the salt that they distill on the shore -- boiling seawater over great fires in order to do so. But these nocturnal bonfires have another purpose. On stormy nights they lure onto the breakers what the villagers call "o-fune-sama."
These are passing merchant ships who head toward the fires of what they think is a port as they search for refuge. Wrecked, their cargo is despoiled and the crew killed. As reflected in the thoughts of a 9-year-old boy, the story is about the simplicity of inhumanity, and how naturally it follows deprivation.
One is reminded of this theme (how want strips man, how those qualities we hopefully identify as human -- altruism, compassion -- are the first to go when life is at stake) in the works of many other Japanese writers. Shichiro Fukasaku's well-known "Narayamabushi-ko" is about this. So is Kenzaburo Oe's "Shiiku," translated as "The Catch."
In the latter, one remembers the impoverished villagers (their catch is an American airman) who turn with real pleasure to the reddening horizon -- the hated city, Tokyo itself, is burning. Likewise, Yoshimura's villagers are united in their need, and the wrecked seamen they massacre are of no more account than the other debris of which they dispose.
This is a powerful theme because it strikes directly at one of society's prime pretensions -- that the need for some kind of social harmony is a natural trait, that decency is inborn. When one must depend upon o-fune-sama in order to live, however, goodness is not to be found.
Japan being a country where rectitude is commonly imposed, such reversions to an unfortunately natural state are both exciting and deplorable. One finds the same theme in England, another island nation. Works as otherwise dissimilar as "The Wreckers" and Daphne du Maurier's "Jamaica Inn" are about what happens when poverty forces people to purposely wreck ships, loot cargo and kill crews.
In Yoshimura's account of this horrid means of survival, the author avails himself of the innocence of his third-person boy narrator, who does not question his mother when he is told: "There's no room for pity. It'd be a disaster if any of them were allowed to live. They had to be killed, your ancestors decided that, and that's how it's been ever since. Village rules have to be obeyed."
Such an accounting of the truth about human nature never leads to popularity. I do not know how the book fared in Japan when it appeared, but this American edition -- well-translated, beautifully designed -- has ended up in the discount houses, from which I rescued my copy.
Part of this neglect might be because books on Japan are not selling as well as they used to. There are too many of them, Western eyes are now fixed on China, and the country's spectacular economic misfortunes have dissuaded those who thought they might "learn from Japan." Indeed, a well-known foreign writer on the country is at present completing a book to be called "Japan, the Irrelevant."
At the same time, however, a part of this edition's unfortunate fate might be accounted for by its earnest and admirable statement of a common truth that no one wants to hear. It is not that Rousseau was wrong and Calvin was right, but that we are simply not (look around you) the compassionate, rational folk that we would like to be.
This truth, as necessary as it is unpalatable, is stated with dignity, restraint, understanding and sorrow by Yoshimura, and his account ought to have been read by many more than it was.
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