Like an affliction that allows you to function in an apparently normal manner but seditiously disables the sufferer, the dark legacy of war, never far from the minds of the adults in the story, is like a prolonged malady whose only treatment is large doses of optimism. Remembrance and passionate engagement in the here and now defined the mood of the immediate postwar years in Japan.
In "J-Boys," Shogo Oketani's search for meaning in the temporal, the unsullied child's world is placed against the intense, atonement-driven ambitions of adults to build a new Japan. Set in 1965, Tokyo was already undergoing changes almost as cataclysmic as the wartime decimation of the city. Traces of a more rural city, however, could still be glimpsed in the backyards of tumbledown wooden homes, and in the voices and paper images of kamishibai, itinerant storytellers, who still worked the older quarters of the city.
While there was a degree of sentimentality for the past, its reassuring customs and habits, most Japanese embraced change. This endorsement fueled the transformation of the city. The narrow focus of Oketani's story, a rite of passage in post-Olympic Tokyo, belies its universality. The life of its main character, 9-year-old Kazuo, in which wonderment and inquiry are placed against the values and admonitions of sententious adults, will be familiar to many readers.