Long the Imperial Way
WAY by Tasaki. Houghton Mifflin, $3.50.
This first war novel from the Japanese side is based on the author‘s three years’ service as a private in China before Pearl Harbor. It is a remarkably Interesting and successful fictional documentary — a vivid and patently honest picture of how the Japanese soldier was brutalized by indoctrination and sadistic discipline: of how he lived, fought, satisfied his appetites, and died; of his rare pleasures, his many fears, and his stifled longings. The author has brought off the considerable feat of making people whose inner life has seemed to us indecipherable emerge as human and understandable; and he has done it without in any way trying to whitewash their conduct.