Makoto Oda (1932–2007)

Maybe something was lost in translation, but I was very unimpressed with Makoto Oda's short novel The Breaking Jewel. It follows a Japanese army unit deciding to fight to the death against the US Marines on the island of Peleliu, more specifically the squad leader Sergeant Nakamura and his subordinate, Corporal Kon. Unfortunately, the characters are poor, the prose is dull, the combat is sketchy and the narrative is limp and rotten. There is little to no sense of the passage of time, even though we are told months pass during the grim battle for the island, and the development of the characters' thoughts and actions are superficial.

Oda was a noted peace activist in his home country, but if there is any sense of this in The Breaking Jewel it is heavily disguised. Oda's soldiers in the story fight with 'honour' and 'courage' against 'American devils' who only want to wipe them out like insects; oftentimes, it seems like Oda's peace activism is of that distasteful and distinctly Japanese sort which basically amounts to 'isn't it horrible what the Americans did to us'. Maybe, because of the Japanese reluctance to face its wartime behaviour honestly, Oda's book is more potent in its original language, triggering some cultural mechanism or reaction. But a mere chronicle of a Japanese unit fighting to the death is less useful to a Western audience which already knows – unlike many modern Japanese – about the savage, masochistic death-fetish inculcated in the Imperial soldiers of World War Two.

Aside from one good anti-war line on page 59 (a soldier told to 'avenge' his dead wife and daughters retorts that "the Yanks he might kill probably also had wives and little daughters"), there is not much to recommend in The Breaking Jewel. Even its discussion of gyokusai, the banzai charge or 'breaking jewel' of the title, is rather feeble, and I finished the book with no sense of what, if anything, it was trying to say. Whether merely lost in translation or attributable to Japan's continued strange relationship with its fascistic war history, this story remains unknowable to me.… (altro)