Soldiers Alive

When the editors of Ch kron, Japan's leading liberal magazine, sent the prizewinning young novelist Ishikawa Tatsuz to war-ravaged China in early 1938, they knew the independent-minded writer would produce a work wholly different from the lyrical and sanitized war reports then in circulation. They could not predict, however, that Ishikawa would write an unsettling novella so grimly realistic it would promptly be banned and lead to the authors conviction on charges of "disturbing peace and order." Decades later, Soldiers Alive remains a deeply disturbing and eye-opening account of the Japanese march on Nanking and its aftermath. In its unforgettable depiction of an ostensibly altruistic wars devastating effects on the soldiers who fought it and the civilians they presumed to "liberate," Ishikawas work retains its power to shock, inform, and provoke.