This book has been crafted to allow the reader to experience WWII from several different perspectives. The story is not linear in the beginning and we jump back and forth in time and country, which is a good thing, considering how intense some of these situations are, though near the end of the book no part of the story is easy reading.
Emiko the diplomat’s daughter had two great loves. One is a Jewish boy she met in Vienna. Leo lets us experience the uprising of the Third Reich and a desperate attempt to escape Antisemitism and all the horrors that the reader knows will come. With the intervention of the Japanese diplomat Leo and his family end up in Japan ruled Shanghai, eventually forced into a Jewish ghetto. Life there is brutal; this part of the book was difficult to read.
Emi’s second love of her life, Christian, was born in Wisconsin of German parents. The entire family ends up in an internment camp in Texas where he meets Emi who has also been interned. Emi and her mother will be repatriated to Japan, but Leo and his parents face repatriation to Germany, where he has never been. To escape being sent into Hitler’s Germany at war, he chooses to join the US Army.
At this point in the book we follow horrors of Leo and his family trying to survive in Shanghai, Christian battling his way with the 7th Division across the Pacific, and Emi who has been sent away from her Tokyo home to a small village in the mountains, occupied by many internationals trying to live out the war. For both Leo and Emi, surviving is harrowing and starvation is a major theme. Also there is the compounding presence of both Japanese and German soldiers in Shanghai and Japan. Christian, while adequately nourished, is questioning killing the enemy who he perceives is not so different from himself. Unlike his fellow soldiers, he is not a “Jap” hater, he loves a Japanese woman. This emotional turmoil is presented for the reader to ponder. It probably could be a book unto itself.
Karin Tanabe has immersed us in war on many fronts, focusing on the task of staying alive, mostly ignoring the politics of war, indeed most of the characters are clueless of the big picture. Survival is all they know.
- Goodreads rating – 3.86
- REVIEW – Jan Fickeissen