A review by jayisreading
Finger Bone by Hiroki Takahashi

dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.75

This was a hard novel to read. As short as it may seem, it took me a number of days to finish this one, mostly because the emotional weight of this book was so heavy. Set in the Pacific halfway through WWII, the novel is narrated by an unnamed Japanese soldier observing day-to-day life at a field hospital, where he is recovering from an injury. What I found interesting about this novel was Takahashi’s decision to show the futility of war not in literal trenches, but, rather, primarily in a quiet environment for the injured and dying.

I will fully admit that I picked up this book with some skepticism, as it was from the perspective of a Japanese soldier during WWII and translated from Japanese. I had a sense that the atrocities committed by Japan during the twentieth century would not be covered, which… more or less was the case. It became clear as the novel progressed, though, that Takahashi had a somewhat different intention, which was to show how the soldiers were almost unthinkingly trusting a government that didn’t reveal the full picture to them. The soldiers were led to believe that their side was winning the war; they cheerfully discussed how the indigenous people of the island they were on (the Kanak) would have to learn Japanese to prepare for inevitable tourism once the war ends; and they were fed misinformation about how the Allied forces were doing. The narrator’s belief in his government wavered as morale dropped over the course of the novel, not so much because he believed his side was in the wrong, so much as it was to question the purpose of war.

I still can’t quite place my finger on what about this novel didn’t completely work for me, but, overall, it was interesting reading from a different perspective and at a less-talked-about location during WWII.
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