Five Decembers Q0: War

NeilNjae

Not a question, but a place to reflect. This book is dominated by war, what it does to people, and what people will do to further it. Much of this is relevant to what's happening now in Ukraine (and elsewhere). Post your thoughts, if you'd like.

Apocryphal

My comment wrt this is that that I found in remarkable and highly implausible that both McGrady and the Japanese American woman both floated through the whole war in a kind of cocoon. Japanese Americans and Canadians were rounded up and placed in internment camps. This book seems to have ignored all of that. Does that do a disservice to the people who lived through it?

NeilNjae

A couple of articles about internment of Japanese on Hawaii during WW2:

• Hawaii internment, a website of resources for schools (a good primer)
• A Time article on internment, indicating that only a small fraction of Japanese people were interred on Hawaii.

Not mentioning internment may be a significant omission, but I get the impression there was more anti-Japanese prejudice in mainland US than Hawaii (which had about one-third of its population of Japanese descent at the time).

Apocryphal

Ah, that’s interesting. Ok know very little about the history of Hawaii, so I’ll have to read up. I know there was a Hudson Bay Company factory there at one time. I noted in the text the use of ‘King St’ and also something else that made it different from the continental US - were they using a different currency?

RichardAbbott

Continuing these thoughts, this is one reason why I don't see this as a war novel.... the events of the war and the conditions of life for most of the population are largely absent. We only find out about the Kentepai (spelling?) at the point where there's an imminent threat to McGrady and Sachi (and an interruption to their moment of intimacy) but I suppose that like the air raid wardens in the UK they were actually on the streets the whole time. Kestrel isn't IMHO so very interested in the war except as background scenery.

Which sort of does bring me back to the original focus of this starter. People react to war and threat in multiple ways - depression, avoidant over-consumption, exhilaration, PTSD, trauma and isolation, and a whole host more. Some people feel more alive in times of conflict, while others feel repelled or alienated. I think Kestrel puts most of his characters - and certainly the ones we are supposed to relate to and sympathise with - in the isolation and alienation camp. That category isn't all-encompassing, of course, but it's a reasonable one to pick and focus on. It provides a change of perspective from focusing on those who find an inner strength in war to accomplish great things.

On reflection, this is probably a partial response to my earlier comments about how odd to skip over three or so years of war with barely a mention - for McGrady and Sachi those years were unimportant and led nowhere. Only when it all came to an end did they start to reenergise and find something new in each other.