Fracture

Yoshie Watanabe returns to a tumultuous past, in the aftermath of the devastating Fukushima earthquake in 2011. His recollections are centred around his relationships with women around the world and Japan's position since the 40s. An ambitious premise, but the writer falls short. Extremely short, in my opinion.

Watanabe's lovers are given what seems to be a powerful, determined and confident voice. But their desperate focus on sex diminished them in my eyes, and every character (Watanabe included) was so cold, so distant, so impossibly empty... The story takes us on a journey to Tokyo, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid and touches, primarily, on the status of Japan following the war, the difficult questions raised by Japan's actions during WWII but there is no mention of Japan's unimaginable atrocities against China. Naturally, there is extensive reference to the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all the way to the era of the Cold War, Chernobyl and out times.

Now there was a significant problem I faced which ruined the book irreversibly. Watanabe's remarks were nationalistic and misogynistic. Was the writer's intention to make him appear thus? Did his musings reflect the writer's own opinions? Regardless of the answer, it became a chore to read once repetition and dubious political remarks got in the way. The anti-nuclear message is evident, and rightly so, but there is a thin line between so-called activism and ignorance of the historical facts. The need to justify the actions of the Japanese army during WWII while turning the blind eye to the massacre in China was infuriating. It was ridiculous. It was horrible. The remark that Germany ‘'is the bravest nation'' because they ‘'had the guts to admit'' the atrocities was the phrase that made me want to throw my e-reader away. Really? Does the Argentinian writer (who apparently has Jewish roots (!) although I doubt it...) believe that a mea culpa absolves you? The torture my grandfather went through in Dachau isn't erased by a billion ‘'I'm sorry''. The burnt villages, the executed families, the millions of Jews, the millions of victims of the Nazis tyranny, the soldiers of the Allies that lived Hell on Earth in the battlefields of the Pacific aren't forgotten because a politician whispers an insincere ‘'I'm sorry''. I suggest Churchill's biography to the writer in order to understand what it means to be a fighter to free the world from darkness. If the writer wishes to feel pity for the Nazis, the Japanese, the Turks and every army that caused terror during the WWII, there are many ‘'squads'' he can join. I am disgusted. This is my opinion and whether others disagree with me or not doesn't interest me in the slightest. Each one of us answers to his own private code of morality. I answer to the wound of my family's torment during WWII.

In addition, the focus on sex was cheap, voyeuristic, degrading. One more reason for me to throw this away.

Yes, the prose may have been beautiful at times, and the spirit of each city was depicted in a direct, moving way. But, in my opinion, political and social themes were used in a lengthy lecture with the reader as the target audience. And I don't like being lectured by writers who most obviously retain a frightening kind of political agendas. And yes, this is a political disagreement and a deep loathing of seeing the repetition of sex being used as a ‘‘literary'' trope. It's my opinion and I won't ask anyone's permission. Perhaps, we should leave the tremendously talented Japanese writers to write about Japan.

ARC from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.