The Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

Book Review
The Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard
First published in 1984 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
This edition published in 2005 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Film produced in 1987 and directed by Steven Spielberg

A most incredible book... It holds the reader glued to every page, not unlike the grip of death which encased Shangai after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.

The story, based on J.G. Ballard’s actual experiences, is about a young British teenager who lives with his parents in Shangai at the eve of Pearl Harbor and is then interned by the Japanese from 1942-1945 in the Lunghua prison camp near Shanghai. It is truly mesmerizing, in the negative sense unfortunately, because of the countless moments of inherent evil that arose as a result of war. The places—airfield runways made of bones of dead Chinese, a make-shift cemetery full of corpses with extremities sticking out, canals full of dead bodies, floating flower coffins with Chinese babies—the people—an opportunistic American soldier who profits from death, Japanese soldiers bent on brutality, an American doctor who does everything to save the sick and dying, the indifference of a British woman to a sick boy—and events—the killing of a Chinese coolie, the never-ending deaths of sick prisoners, the death march to Nantao—exemplify that evil and are described with such incredible detail and clarity as to be almost permanently engraved in the mind of the reader.

Through all the death and destruction, of which almost every chapter of the book is filled with, lives a young British teenager (the author himself, but written in 3rd person) who has an incredible will to survive. The question of his morality is ever-present if we judge his thoughts and actions solely; yet in the face of starvation and omnipresent death, his story is one of a smart young boy who is trying his best to survive. When viewed under those circumstances and compared to the actions of others in the book, his story can be perceived in a more positive yet still overwhelmingly sad light. Indeed, it is the author’s reconstruction of his thoughts in particular that divulge the horror of the events he experienced. One of the most memorable concerns the death march to Nantao:

“Dr. Ransome had recruited a human chain from the men sitting on the embankment below the trucks, and they passed pails of water up to the patients.

Jim shook his head, puzzled by all this effort. Obviously they were being taken up-country so that the Japanese could kill them without being seen by the American pilots. Jim listened to the Shell man’s wife crying in the yellow grass. The sunlight charged the air above the canal, an intense aura of hunger that stung his retinas and remind him of the halo formed by the exploding Mustang. The burning body of the American pilot had quickened the dead land. It would be for the best if they all died; it would bring their lives to an end that had been implicit ever since the Idzumo had sunk the Petrel and the British hand surrendered at Singapore without a fight.

Perhaps they were already dead. Jim lay back and tried to count the motes of light. This simple truth was known to every Chinese from birth. Once the British internees had accepted it, they would no longer fear their journey to the killing ground….”

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the book in the 1986 movie of the same name is insufficient at best. While the cinematography and acting are good, the crux of the story—the cruelty and horrors of post-Pearl Harbor Shangai—is conveniently glossed over. It’s as if Spielberg decided to change the script from an “R” to a “G”. The problem is that the latter version of the movie no longer resembles the former and effectively does injustice to the thousands of people (and millions more not included in the scope of the book)—including the author himself—who suffered and/or died in Lunghua prison and Shangai from 1942-1945 at the hands of the Japanese.