Empire of the Sun (1984) By J. G. Ballard

I guess I’m developing a new favored genre because Empire of the Sun fits comfortably with several other of my reads over the past few years, let’s call it the Pacific Theatre genre.  This story is perhaps better known because of the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name – both the book and movie are excellent. The book, and to a lesser extent the movie, is depressing from its opening chapters.  It is also completely engrossing.

The plot is how a 10-year British boy, living in the International Settlement near the Bund (Huangpu River front) of Shanghai, gets separated from his parents as the Japanese invade the city concurrent with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  He survives the duration of the war in a prisoner of war camp on the outskirts of the city, his parents, if they are still alive, are in a different camp.  While the British and citizens of multiple other colonial powers are prisoners in these camps, they also realize that their Japanese captors are the only thing protecting them from the Chinese peasants – “coolies” who for decades have been virtual slave labor to the Europeans.

Childhood, spent under Japanese occupation and/or imprisonment is also the “big picture” theme of the excellent The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists, both by Tan Twan Eng, and set in the author’s native Malaysia.  They, like Empire, have a fascinating psychological subtext involving the personal relationship between captive and captor.  In Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, the British boy, this time from Kotakinakulu (Malaysia) is sent, alone, back to Britain just before the onset of the war.  While all of these books are excellent and important reads, The Gift of Rain stands out as the best – I’d love for Spielberg to make it into a movie.

I’m not normally complimentary of movies as they too often tend to rewrite the story to commercially fit a larger audience, who after all are in the theater for entertainment, not a history lesson.  In Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, rewrites are kept to a minimum, tweaking only to make the film fit, not to change the plot.    

Movie Trailer

Perhaps because the movie was true to the book, Empire of the Sun did not rake in any major Academy Award nominations.  This is a pity because John Malkovich was stellar in the film; and Christian Bale, who as a child himself played the lead role of Shanghai Jim -- who aged from 10 to 14 during the book -- was shamefully overlooked because of the Academy’s historic tendency to devalue the work of child actors.

Recommendation:  Watch the movie, and read the book if you are a history major – and by all means, read The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.