The Attack on Pearl Harbor appears in the account of Shozaburo Takitani’s years in Shanghai as a milestone in a war he experienced at a distance. Its significance in this passage lies in the contrast between a world-changing event and his untroubled continuation of nightclub life.

Place in the War

The attack is one item in a sequence of upheavals that also includes the Japanese invasion of China and the dropping of two atomic bombs. The narration gathers these events across the span of the war, while emphasizing that, for Shozaburo, they seemed to be happening somewhere far away.

Shozaburo’s Wartime Life

During the war, Shozaburo played trombone in Shanghai nightclubs and took little interest in history. He wanted to keep playing, eat three meals a day, and have women nearby. The mention of the Attack on Pearl Harbor therefore marks not a change in his course but the distance between the scale of the conflict and the ordinary pleasures around which he arranged his life.

Narrative Significance

The event helps establish the self-absorption that defines Shozaburo’s wartime outlook. The passage places Pearl Harbor alongside invasion and atomic destruction, then sets that history against the easy continuity of his life in Shanghai, sustained in part by influential friends who protected him when problems arose. It reveals no account of the attack itself; its force here comes from its position in the larger history that Shozaburo scarcely acknowledges.