David Turri: A new and compelling voice…
David Turri’s first published novel, Damaged Cargoes seems to emanate directly from a dark recess of nineteenth-century Japan. The story takes place in the enclave inhabited by foreigners in Kobe. Turri’s impeccable eye for the details of treaty port life—the phaetons in which the merchants rode, the long bars where they drank with their consular protectors, the Bund where they walked, the appearance of their warehouses—give his story the kind of texture that reminds the reader of Michener.
But it is the way he brings his characters to life that makes the book truly appealing. In the dark, seedy world of the Kobe treaty port, Turri’s characters come alive as they speak. His gift for crisp dialog illuminates the contours of their often tortured conflicts with each other and the outside world with extraordinary texture; the reader feels like a privileged eavesdropper as they reveal their attitudes toward native Japanese and the peculiar pecking order of a society straining to replicate the class hierarchies of the contemporary West.
This world is where his themes gestate–redemption’s possibilities, the consequences of greed, the ambivalence of human motivation, all at the complex intersection of Japanese and Western culture. At the end of the book, one cannot help but wonder if these men’s moral corruption is due to their lawless environment or if, a darker possibility, each carries with him a spark of evil, waiting to be fanned.
Turri is no mere writer-explainer; this first novel establishes him as a new and compelling voice, a true storyteller. He has given us a marvelous tale, we hope the first of many.
