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Watanabe Yuichi is a guard at a Japanese prison during WWII guarding Koreans imprisoned mainly for sedition. Fellow guard Sugiyama is murdered and Yuichi is put in charge of the investigation along with inheriting Sugiyama's duties as censor of mail for the prison. This soon leads Yuichi to Yun Dong-ju, an imprisoned Korean poet. The book is nominally about the investigation but it's also about war atrocities, poetry, Japanese-Korean relations and more. I'm not really sure how I feel about the b
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Although parts of this book were slow going for me (the poetry parts) the message the author wishes to convey is an important one and one can easily see why, in general, Koreans are not overly fond of the Japanese. Fiction is often closer to truth than we imagine.
Mar 28, 2014
Kimberly
marked it as to-read
