One Morning Like a Bird [Paperback]

Andrew Miller has created a memorable interpretation of life in Japan as the encroaching climate of World War II changed the lives of his characters forever.

The story is focused on Yuji Tanako, a young man who has been fortunate enough to live on an allowance provided by his father, an eminent professor at the elite Imperial University in Tokyo. However, Yuji's father loses his tenure over mildly critical comments against the Emperor, and as the story opens, Yuji's allowance is scrapped.

Yuji has started to make a living as a writer, having published Electric Dragonfly, a book of poetry (in a nice touch, we see Yuji going round second hand book stalls to seek out his book and place it at the top of the pile). He works occasionally as a hack writer providing commercially-sponsored articles for magazines and newspapers. He also is a member of a literary circle led by a Frenchman, Monsieur Feneon, whose 19 year old daughter, Alissa, exerts her own charms on Yuji at a later stage of the book.

A main theme of the book is the gradual encroachment of the war on Yuji's life. Young men he knows have already been conscripted, and he has only avoided it because of a congenital chest problem which for now has disqualified him (as time progresses, the front-line demands more and more previously exempted men despite their medical problems which are not after all such a great concern).

Yuji has a rich inner life, and it is interesting to see where the author has populated his thoughts with a Japanese flavour, seemingly at odds with some of the European ideals found in the books which Yuji so admires. For example, the Japanese suspicion of the "foreign" has a tragic outcome when Alissa breaks in on Yuji's life: although he is able to achieve some adaptation to the idea of intimacy with a foreign woman, his Japanese sense of abhorrence at such relationships is never far beneath the surface.

The book is written in a sparse, almost Zen-like style. Some chapters are less than a page long and are word-pictures of short episodes. Andrew Miller has lived in Tokyo and describes himself as a "a haphazard Japanophile". Amazon has published some author's comments on the work, and it is evident that Miller went to great pains to get into the skin of the young Japanese poet. The "voice" of the book is convincingly Japanese and this is perhaps partly explained by Miller's willingness to seek advice where needed on all things Japanese.

In summary, the theme of the gradual dissolution of the artisitic life under the increasingly militaristic conditions of the early 1940s is worked out well in this fine and unusual novel. I am encouraged me to seek out this writer's earlier works.

For the first hundred pages, I wondered if I was going to persevere with this, which surprised me as I've always found Miller very readable. He writes beautifully here, as always, but the story is very slow to get going and I had serious problems with the viewpoint character: Yuji. He is spoiled, lazy, self-important (he published a volume of poetry that sold 37 copies) and has the infuriating habit of repeating things that people say to him back to them, which makes it astonishing that he doesn't get slapped several times a day.

The novel begins to take off only when he gets involved with Alissa, mixed-race daughter of his French friend, who simultaneously attracts and repels him with her otherness. As the war with China rages on (and the reader knows that a catastrophic war with the US is just round the corner), it seems that Yuji's weak chest will no longer save him from the draft. At this point he stops faffing about and starts behaving like a man and not a spoiled boy. It took a long time, but I finally cared what happened to him.

This novel grew on me slowly. At first, I found it hard to remember all the Japanese characters with their Japanese names, and re-reading sections was essential (a practice I don't mind if the end result is worthwhile, and this time it was). It also took me a while to warm to the protagonist, Yuji. However, by the end of the book I had found it a very moving and elegantly-written novel. Yuji grows on the reader just as he grows and matures as a young man trying to find his way.

I don't know much about Japan, but it captured the culture convincingly, at least for me.