Rector's assistant Owen Mathias, a young and average sensualist, gradually stumbles on the considerable connections his church in Kobe, Japan, has to atrocities committed by Unit 731, Japan's biological warfare research center in Harbin, Manchuria, during World War II. Mathias's discoveries toss him into theodicy's deepest pit, savaging his faith and pinballing him among the vapid convictions of his rector, the pieties of ex-pat parishioners, the bitter doubts of an American...
Paul Snell, novice reporter, gets assigned a weekly column on chess, mostly because of his faux-filial attachment to the Hane Tribune's owner Waldo Turner. In return Snell promises to attend to, and probably marry, Waldo's fragile, unhinged niece Pamela Snow. The unlikely couple soon enough latch onto American chess prodigy, Mikey Spendip and his mother Vera, as they ascend the ladder of tournament chess. During the summer of 1980 at the Interzonal Finals in Manila, Philippines Spendip...
In This Footstool Earth, the final volume of The Japan Quartet, loose ends knit, recurring characters unspool or coil anew, and, as memories of atrocity thin, fiction's tissue mutates, melding cross-cultural encounters strangely.
These novellas track three meaning-making, moral skirmishes: a thickening tennis pro on the Florida-New York teaching circuit grapples with weakening personal commitments and a fading serve; a dispirited short-term Coast Guard reservist struggles with the ambiguity of an accidental murder on an icebreaker heading to the arctic; and an American vacuum sewers entrepreneur and a local archeologist explore the exploitation of women, art, and sexual comedy in Venice, Italy.
An off-hand speculation by ex-pat and professor, David Moran, sends his celebrated historian colleague, Graham Guade, on an investigation that peels back American use of, and protection for, Japanese doctors who committed unspeakable medical experiments in WWII. The inquiry into the legacy of those atrocities churns up murder and madness in both countries, and toys with the interplay of intimacy and career success, as well as accident and causality in history.
