Californians in Japan’s WWII Army

Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley (Atlantic Monthly Press: $14.95)

Some novels survive on courage and lofty ambitions; plot, character, device and tone come somewhere later on down the line. “Soldiers in Hiding” stems from a single, stunning idea, and the reader recognizes that idea as a declaration of the most serious intentions.

Then comes the hard part. The author has to figure out how to make that idea into a novel. In some places here, Richard Wiley succeeds, and--to my mind, at least--in some places he doesn’t. But even when the narrative turns embarrassing, the reader’s time is never wasted. Reading “Soldiers in Hiding” is like watching a man on a high wire.

Emotionally Split

Teddy Maki and his friend, Jimmy Yamamoto, have been raised in pre-World-War-II Southern California. Teddy is already “split,” emotionally, by the time he hits his teens; he spends half his days in Los Angeles with his uncle’s family, half on his dad’s truck farm.

The irony--which really does work like “iron,” like rods of metal through reinforced concrete--is that we know the truck farm is already history, we know the Japanese in Los Angeles will be trotted off to Manzanar. Poor Teddy and Jimmy decide as teen-agers to travel together to Tokyo, in 1941, to see if they can get work as jazz musicians. Thus, as perhaps do all young boys, they stagger into war under the twin burdens of dizzying ignorance and total disorientation.

But when war breaks out, Teddy appears to have a better grip on reality than the civilians around him. “America is 100 times bigger than Japan,” he explains patiently to a grandfather in the family that has taken him in, and “100 times as strong.” It’s not American patriotism that makes young Teddy mention this, but a simple sense of things as they are. Then, the world begins to tilt: Teddy, Jimmy and their young booking agent, Ike, are speedily packed off to the Philippines, to fight in the war against America. If they’re no good at carrying guns, at least these boys can carry clipboards and look efficient.

For a while, life begins to look like a jungle war movie. Ike is left for dead, Jimmy dies in a hideous confrontation (that must not be revealed here). A psychotic Japanese army officer is unpunished for his atrocities. In the press of these terrible events, Teddy is discharged and sent back to Japan, physically well but psychically scarred beyond repair.

Taking His Friend’s Place

In the personal history that runs through this chronicle, and far, far more important to Teddy Maki than who wins this war, Japan or America, he must take up the threads of his life again. This life by now has shifted completely to Tokyo. Jimmy has earlier married Ike’s sister, a wise and beautiful girl named Kazuko. Since Jimmy is dead and Kazuko is pregnant, it seems reasonable and correct that Teddy take his old friend’s place; as Kazuko’s husband, and--when the baby is born--as Milo’s father.

The “unwritten” sections of narrative here are mysterious and important. As Teddy and Kazuko and Milo and Kazuko’s mother walk through Buddhist temple grounds, soak in public baths, put on fresh kimonos, you sense the “American” Teddy Maki receding into deep space, like a lost star. He’s gone , wrenched from his early life by almost cosmic forces, and a last letter from his father (who’s in the American Army fighting Europeans) proves it: There’s no way things can go back to what they were. Teddy is Japanese now, and that’s it.

Destruction of a Culture

In some of the most moving scenes of this middle section, Kazuko’s mother questions her family anxiously: “Do the American bombs blow things up or blow things down? Try to remember. Is it better to hide in the back of your house or to run out into the street and get under a tree?” And sadly, wistfully, she remarks that “the Americans are not going to bomb Kyoto . . . they have respect for Japanese culture. . . .” But of course Japan is destroyed--not, finally, by bombs, but by the vulgarization, the Americanization, of this precious culture. In the postwar years, Teddy Maki makes his living with a dreadful television show, an “Original Amateur Hour.” And Teddy’s son, Jimmy’s son, is an American rock musician with his own limo and chauffeur; his own army of fans.

There are really two themes holding “Soldiers in Hiding” together. This first, this lonesome sense of fractured deculturization (which, remember, has begun with Teddy before the war, even before he’s left Los Angeles) is beautifully rendered. The second, having to do with the enduring guilt of soldiers who can never be free, either of the suffering they receive or inflict, is neither fully realized nor very original. In the closing scenes of “Soldiers in Hiding,” Teddy Maki, using his television apparatus, confronts that psychotic Japanese army officer, after all these years. The officer has been waiting for just such an occurrence, and through the judicious use of stylized Noh masks proves that, given the same circumstances, all the participants would act in just such a way again. Thus, “All soldiers die. . . . None of them are guilty.”

Replaying World War II with Noh masks to establish guilt has already been tried by Roger Pulver in his stage play “Yamashita.” And the psychotic officer here has a stage set up, ready, along with his masks. But, predictably enough, the effect is stagy and unconvincing.

The wonderful idea here, the original one, the two jazz musicians stuck in a profoundly wrong place as their lives shatter, is terrific. The narrator’s voice is spooky and haunting. But there’s a thin line between audacious and embarrassing, and in his last chapter, Wiley crosses it.