Second World War

The Second World War is both historical background and a force entering private life through displacement, imprisonment, bereavement, and generational memory. In the account of Shozaburo Takitani, the war is experienced at a distance while he plays music in Shanghai, then becomes an immediate threat after its end, when his wartime associations lead to imprisonment. Elsewhere, it stands behind the losses Officer Sakata recalls in speaking to Sachi and the later narrator’s effort to name the distinctiveness of the 1960s.

Shozaburo Takitani in wartime Shanghai

Four years before the war began, Shozaburo Takitani left Tokyo because of a problem involving a woman. A jazz trombonist with no property in Japan that he feared losing, he traveled to China with his instrument and fell in love with Shanghai. He was twenty-one, and the city seemed to promise him a bright future. The move placed him far from the coming upheaval, but it did not make him a reflective observer of it.

During the Japanese invasion of China, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombings of Japan, Shozaburo continued playing trombone in Shanghai nightclubs. The war, in his experience, was happening somewhere else. He concentrated on music, food, and companionship, with little inclination to think about history. His easygoing self-absorption existed alongside a capacity for kindness, and he made influential friends among Japanese Army officers, Chinese millionaires, and other powerful figures profiting from the war. Those connections made his life comfortable at the time, while also shaping the danger that followed.

Imprisonment and survival

After the war, Shozaburo’s connections brought him to the attention of the Chinese Army, which imprisoned him. Other prisoners were repeatedly taken from their cells and executed without trial. Shozaburo believed he would share their fate; he regarded death as possible and had largely resigned himself to it, thinking that he had already lived as he chose and had little grounds for complaint.

He passed the hours in his cell watching clouds through the window and recalling the women he had known. In the end, he was one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave alive and return to Japan; the other survivor, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost his mind. As the repatriation boat carried Shozaburo away from Shanghai, he could not make sense of his survival. His escape from execution is a stark reversal: the man who had treated war as remote was brought into its aftermath through imprisonment, yet lived when those around him did not.

Return to a changed Japan

Shozaburo reached Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war ended, emaciated and without possessions. He learned that his parents had died when their home burned in the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 1945. His brother had vanished on the Burmese front. He was alone in the world, but the news produced no dramatic outpouring of grief in him. He felt an absence and accepted loneliness as something that sooner or later awaited everyone.

Survival required him to begin again with the one skill he had. He found old associates and assembled a small jazz band that played at American military bases. A jazz-loving American Army major helped him obtain records from the United States, and the two musicians sometimes played together. After imprisonment, bereavement, and repatriation, music and new companionship offered a practical way to resume living—not a resolution of the losses, but a next step.

War remembered across generations

The war’s consequences also enter the book through Officer Sakata’s account of his brother, who died in Belgium in 1944 as a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The unit had gone to rescue a Texas battalion surrounded by the Nazis when his brother was killed. Sakata remembers that little remained of him beyond his dog tags and fragments of flesh in the snow, and that his mother changed profoundly after the loss. Because Sakata was a small child, he knew his mother only after that change; his memory is therefore also a story inherited from others.

Speaking to Sachi after her son’s death, Sakata distinguishes war’s human causes from the losses it produces. Anger and hatred, he says, belong to people; nature has no sides. He asks her to understand her son’s death as a return to nature rather than as an act belonging to a cause. His words connect one family’s wartime bereavement to Sachi’s present grief, without making the losses identical or undoing either one.

The war’s place in later historical memory

A narrator born in 1949 describes reaching twenty during the student movement and calls the 1960s a pre-history of late-stage capitalism. That generational account is not a history of the war itself, but it places the decade in a longer historical perspective: the narrator sees the sixties as an unusually direct, energetic period, distinct from the more complicated present. The Second World War belongs to the prior history against which postwar adulthood and social change take shape.

Across these separate accounts, the war is never reduced to one meaning or one experience. For Shozaburo it first seems distant, then narrows to prison, survival, and a return to a Japan emptied of family. For Sakata it persists through a mother transformed by the death of a son. The book’s dispersed recollections show public history entering private lives unevenly: through what a survivor experiences, what a family remembers, and what a later generation tries to name.