TOKYO STATION - Book review

 

Martin Cruz Smith’s standalone thriller Tokyo Station was published in 2002. I’ve read several of his books and haven’t found a bad one yet. This one is very impressive indeed.

The book spans three time periods: 1922 in Tokyo when the main character Harry Niles is a young boy; 1937 in Nanking, mainly a flashback of Harry’s that reveals the many atrocities committed by the Japanese against the Chinese; and 1941 in Tokyo, some days before the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbour.

The amount of detail seems prodigious but never swamps the narrative.

Harry was the son of an American missionary couple Roger and Harriet who were absent and busy proselytising most of his formative years. He gets involved with a gang of Japanese kids and quickly learns the language and the tricks of pickpocketing and generally conning people. A chance encounter with a local artist Kato ends up with him running errands and fraternising with his models, among them the beautiful Oharu. ‘To Americans a whore was a whore unless she was willing to be rescued; to the Japanese, a girl sold by her family to a brothel was a model daughter’ (p262).

Harry’s close friend Gen undertakes one of Harry’s errands as a favour and becomes involved with one of Kato’s clients, the enigmatic samurai Ishigami. Years later, Harry is responsible for Ishigami losing face in Nanking and thereafter he is hunted by the samurai. And neither he nor his friends and lovers are safe from the samurai sword…

The switches between the timelines are not labelled, but in most instances it’s obvious when that shift occurs.

Harry’s parents didn’t have much success in converting the citizenry: ‘The Japanese would smile, bow and say anything to move the gaijin along. Or would accept Jesus as a mere backup to Buddha’ (p101).

Harry owns and runs The Happy Paris nightclub. His jukebox operator is Michiko, who possesses a fiery temper and shares his bed. To complicate matters Harry lusts after Alice, the wife of the British ambassador, Beechum: ‘She did crossword puzzles in four languages. Most of the day, she was a brainless thing who spent her life at the Ginza’s shops and smart cafes, but every morning she spent in the code room of the British embassy’ (p168).

The imminent war with the United States is like an oppressive shroud over the Tokyo of 1941.  ‘A cart with metal-rimmed wheels went by, the nocturnal visit of the night-soil man visiting homes without plumbing, gathering what kept the rice fields fertile, the cycle of life at its most basic. The cart moved aside to let pass a van with the crossed poles and looped wires of a radio direction finder on the roof. The van sifted the air for illegal transmissions the way a boat night-rolled for squid. Or, Harry speculated, if the van was from the Thought Police, perhaps they were trying to sift dangerous ideas out of the air’ (p54).

Unusually, there is an instance of a single paragraph running to almost six pages (pp241-247), but Smith can be forgiven as it’s a painful reminiscence of his time in Nanking and his encounter with Ishigami – powerfully done.

Harry’s sexual awakening is finely judged and well told without being prurient. It’s almost poetic: ‘Followed by a profound sleep with Harry folded around  Oharu as if they were riding with their eyes closed slowly through the rain, the heart’s rhythm like a black horse. A faint electric haze lay in all directions. They rode through high grass soughing in the wind’ (p257).

A willow house was an establishment where geishas entertained, and there were plenty of them about. ‘A willow suggested something yielding and feminine, the sort of tree that knelt by water to admire its own reflection’ (p266).

There are suspenseful moments, some others quite grisly, and several finely tuned wisecracks pepper the tale. The characters are fallible, complex and believable. Throughout, Smith captures the time and the place convincingly. Recommended.