Book Reviews
Go To Hopkins & Company Homepage	Go to Executive Times Archives Go to Book Review List
December 6 by Martin Cruz Smith Rating: ••• (Recommended)
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
Loyalty The finest novels reveal human nature from points of view or through characters that we come to know, but who seem different from us. With skill, fine novelists draw us into an unfamiliar world and by the time we leave the story, we realize that we have more in common with the characters than we thought. Martin Cruz Smith offers readers a glimpse into an unfamiliar world in his new novel, December 6. Set in Japan just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Smith tells the story of Harry Niles, black sheep son of American missionaries, who spent most of his life in Japan, becoming more Japanese than American in the process. Harry’s loyalties are questioned by all parties as war fever grows, and his roguish behavior leaves him with enemies on all sides. Smith presents aspects of Harry’s character in gradual exposition, and reveals an ensemble of people of many nationalities, whose behavior guides readers toward deeper understanding of human nature in different cultures. Here’s an excerpt from early in the book, the end of chapter 3, pp 38-9: “He had literally run into her when they met, Harry at the wheel of his car, Michiko bloody from a crackdown on the last Reds in Tokyo, a police sweep that scattered the comrades over rooftops and down alleys. Harry had pulled Michiko into the car and driven off, the first in a series of impulsive decisions he regretted, such as taking her home, patching her head, letting her stay the night. She left in the morning and returned a week later, her hair hacked short, with a pack containing a prayer wheel and the works of Marx and Engels. She stayed another night and another and never left Harry’s for good; that was two years ago. If he’d left her on the street, if he’d given her over to the police, if he hadn’t fed her the morning after he’d rescued her. That was probably the worst mistake of all, the fatal bowl of miso. If he’d just returned her silence when she left instead of asking whether she liked Western music. Gratitude was always a dicey issue in Japan; the very word arrigato meant both “thank you” and “you have placed a sickening obligation on me.” When she returned, she presented him with an Ellington record. What was interesting was that it was one of the few Ellington albums he didn’t own, which suggested the possibility that in the middle of the night, her head bandaged, she had searched his apartment while he slept. Besides admitting she was a Red, she told him nothing about her past. Never did. Harry had seen others like her, tough girls from the mills who organized unions in spite of the owners and police, who got their education from night school rather than Tokyo Women’s College and read Red Flag instead of Housewife’s Friend. Men, when they went to prison for radical activities, got religion and dedicated their confessions to the emperor. Women like Michiko hanged themselves in their cells rather than give their keepers an inch of satisfaction. Harry had gotten her into the chorus line at the Folies, but she was too argumentative for management, so when the war scare chased his American musicians from the Happy Paris to Hawaii, he replaced them by making her the enigmatic and, apart from lyrics, silent Record Girl. He heard a scraping outside. The club’s neon sign was off, but in the haze of the streetlamp Harry saw the discreet gate of the willow house directly across from the Happy Paris. A willow house was an establishment where geishas entertained. Harry was no fan of geisha parties, but he occasionally hung out in a back from across the street just to escape DeGeorge, if nothing else. A cart with metal-rimmed wheels went by, the nocturnal visit of the night-soil man visiting homes without plumbing, gathering what kept the rice fields fertile, the cycle of life at its most basic. The cart moved aside to let pass a van with the crossed poles and looped wires of a radio direction finder on the roof. The van sifted the air for illegal transmissions the way a boat night-trolled for squid. Or, Harry speculated, if the van was from the Thought Police, perhaps they were trying to sift dangerous ideas out of the air. They typically liked to raid suspects around three in the morning, but this time they seemed to be just passing through. The surveillance usually annoyed Harry, but with Ishigami on the prowl, the added security was welcome. Anyone, in one week, two at the most, Harry would be in the States. He saw himself driving down Wilshire, having that first martini at the Mexican place around the corner from Paramount where they stuffed the olives with chili peppers. He could taste it. When Harry left the window and approached the bed again, he saw that Michiko had moved the quilt aside in her sleep. The looseness of an underkimono made her limbs ghostly thin, half submerged in silk. Wouldn’t it be a relief to be with an American girl, a big blonde built for a convertible? He knelt, and with no more pressure than the weight of the air, ran his fingertips around the base of her thumb and up her arm to the warmth and soft hair in the hollow under her arm, then along her collarbone to the line of her cheek as if committing to memory her shape and smoothness, a calligrapher writing in the dark.” December 6 exudes passages like that one, full of images, impressions, and descriptions, that draw readers into a setting and characters that are memorable, human and loyal, in ways that are both expected and surprising. During this time of increased patriotism and thoughts about what it means to be foreign, and what it means to be loyal, readers of December 6 will gain a perspective and insight both rich and rewarding. Steve Hopkins, October 16, 2002
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the December 2002 issue of Executive Times For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com