Empire of the Sun

The novel recounts the experience of WW2 reality in and around Shanghai of a young boy Jim, the son of well-off British expats in China. The story has an autobiographical basis embellished with fiction. As such, it captures some incredibly valuable memories of wartime, something that needs to be read over and over again. And despite not being a factually precise memoir, it does not, in my opinion, stray far from a kind of truth — one that perhaps comprises a lot more than facts ever could.
This is an excursion into the bleak reality of a war-torn world, where the structures and certainties of peaceful time crumble away, and where everyone is left to fend for themselves. How do years of such chaos reflect on the psyche of a young, perceptive boy? The story is an account of the omnipresence of death, its acceptance as a daily occurrence, as something imminent and acutely relatable. How could a wartime child, a survivor by the grace of fellow prisoners’ kindness and self-sacrifice as much as his own innocent resourcefulness, carry on in a post-war world? How could he ever undo the ultimate demoralization the wartime years carried out on him? The novel does a tremendous job hinting at these questions in-between the lines focused on young Jim’s experiences.

"The parachutes sailed past, falling toward Lunghua camp. Unsteadily, Jim tried to focus his eyes on the colored canopies. Two of the parachutes had collided, entangling their shrouds. A silver canister dragged its collapsed parachute and plummeted to the ground, striking a canal embankment two hundred yards away. Making a final effort, before he had to lie down for the last time among the derelict aircraft, Jim stepped through the sugarcane into the flooded paddy. He strode across the shallow water to a submerged bomb crater in the center of the field, then followed its ridge toward the canal. As he climbed the embankment, the last of the parachutes had fallen into the fields to the west of Lunghua Camp. The murmur of the B-29's engines faded over the Yangtze. Jim approached the scarlet canopy, large enough to cover a house, which lay across the embankment. He gazed at the lustrous material, more luxurious than any fabric he had ever seen, at the immaculate stitching and seams, at the white cords that trailed into the culvert beside the canal. The canister had burst on impact. Jim lowered himself down the slope of sunbaked earth and squatted by the open mouth of the cylinder. Around him, on the floor of the culvert, was a ransom of canned food and cigarette packets. The canister was crammed with cardboard cartons, and one had broken loose from the nose cone and scattered its contents over the ground. Jim crawled among the cans, wiping his eyes so that he could read the labels. There were tins of Spam, Klim and Nescafe, bars of chocolate and cellophaned packs of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes, bundles of Reader's Digest and Life magazines, Time and Saturday Evening Post. The sight of so much food confused Jim, forcing on him a notion of choice that he had not known for years. The cans and packets were frozen, as if they had just emerged from an American refrigerator. He began to fill the broken box with canned meat, powdered milk, chocolate bars and a bundle of Reader's Digests. Then, thinking ahead for the first time in several days, he added a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes. When he climbed from the culvert, the scarlet canopy of the parachute was billowing gently in the air that moved along the canal. Holding the cold treasure to his chest, Jim left the embankment and waded across the paddy field. He was following the ridge of the bomb crater toward the perimeter of the airfield when he heard the leisurely drumming of a B-29's engines. Jim stopped to search for the plane, already wondering how he could cope with all this treasure falling from the sky. Almost at once, a rifle shot rang out. A hundred yards away, separated from Jim by the open paddy, a Japanese soldier was running along the embankment of the canal. Barefooted, in his ragged uniform, he raced past the parachute canopy, leaped down the weed-covered slope and sprinted across the paddy field. Lost in the spray kicked up by his frantic heels, he disappeared among the grave mounds and clumps of sugarcane."