Hindsight

That the dead don’t stay dead may be anguish for the subjects of their posthumous attention, but ghostly persistence can make great literature; especially when it is treated with the sad grace of “A Gesture Life.” In Chang-rae Lee’s moving and politically charged novel, the death of a young man’s innocence, a dying suburban shopping mall and a Korean wraith unexpectedly converge in a purgatory of the American Dream. With admirable delicacy, Lee anatomizes the legacy of a 50-year-old war crime in the life of his aging, unattached and haunted hero.

After service in the Japanese army during World War II, “Doc” Franklin Hata resettles in an upscale New York suburb. Submerging himself in work, he manages with considerable success to suppress the worst of his war memories. As his medical supply business prospers, he achieves “a kind of retail beatitude” to become (at the expense of a ruined family life) “the living breathing expression of what people here wanted, privacy and decorum and the quietude of hard-earned privilege.” Now in early retirement, Hata is lonely and lacerating in his self-analysis. His adopted daughter has left him amid a welter of generational conflicts and, given the ambiguity of not really being what he once was (merchant, father, solid suburban burgher), Hata comes to regard his lifelong search to belong as a “folly” and “continuous failure.” In this disturbance of roles and position, overpowering memories of his conduct during the war and particularly his love for a doomed “comfort woman” dominate his imagination.

In one of the more insane side shows of World War II, thousands of young women from Korea and other places under Japanese control were kidnapped and transported to serve as sexual slaves to the Japanese army. Many women, believing they were enlisting to work in factories, were sent instead to “comfort stations.” As a young medical assistant posted to a Pacific island, Hata is charged with overseeing the health of one such group of women. At first, he does not question the women’s status as female “volunteers” brought in to increase the troops’ morale. But, as his consciousness of the women’s individuality grows, so does his horror of the circumstances to which they (and he) are subject.

Fifty years later, his solitary agony is unrelenting. Baffled and ineffective, Hata tries to reconcile his environment with his history. He lives in an upscale oasis but feels sympathetically drawn to a sorry low-rent mall where “the grand waterfall leaked one night and left in its wake a dusty fungal odor that all the pizza and enchilada and chicken stir-fry of the food court can’t seem to mask.” It is in this mausoleum of venture capital, a relic of the go-go years, that Hata may be found brooding on the past: on his failure to save the women under his care, on the poor and the rich and in his own lost way on the empty mall itself, “why is it so abhorrent” to everyone but him?

Lee’s portrayal of Hata is written in unfashionably decorous prose, a language so fine and poised that its carefully situated eruptions seem even more radical. (When the absence of simple courtesies can seem viscerally disturbing, you know you’re in the hands of a virtuoso.) There are flourishes of language and lovely summaries of character that seem from time to time like the last lines of a torch song. Lee takes on history, war and peace, life and death, the class system, the ghosts of American progress, the family, aging and unresolved international war crimes. (The Japanese government has yet to offer a full apology and compensation to the approximately 200,000 women involved.) His novel is so abundantly full that early on you may churlishly wonder if he can keep all those ideas aloft and in motion. He does, and you want to salute his ambition and fearlessness. Lee is an original. His novel plays with the conventions of a ghost story and glides to its conclusion with a flourish: “I did not want innocence as much as I did an erasure reaching back, a pre-beginning, and if I could trade all my years to be at some early moment and never go forward again I would do so without question or any dread.” History is remorseless. There is no erasure possible, but some ghosts will negotiate. And there may be the consolation of composure, such as it is in Lee’s beautiful book.*