I was very impressed with this. The story begins in Japan shortly after the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 but also moves 20-25 years into the past. Briefly it is the story of a man who resisted the draft in Japan during WWII, something punishable by death, and we learn how he lived for those 5 years from when he was about 20 to 25, but we also see how he lives in the present of the novel. The story begins about 1965 or 1966, contemporary with the initial publication of this novel in Japan. It was translated into English in 2002 which is the copy I read.

This story is told so well with a special sort of realism I felt like I was hearing a true narrative from someone. I've never read a Japanese novel like this before. However it needs to be read rather carefully as our narrator may be in the middle of a business meeting in 1966 and suddenly we are back in 1941 or 1943 and then a paragraph or three later back to his present. Memories come to him and we experience them in his real-time. There is also a rather abrupt switch in the middle of the book to a secondary character having a drunken jag.

Haruki Murakami apparently admires this author but this isn't a story like one by Murakami. There is a long introduction written by the translator that helps explains things about the author and the setting of the book, although some of it was "over my head". ( )

To be a draft-resister during the Vietnam War was one thing; to be a draft-resister in Japan during WW II was considered a crime worse than murder, and was punishable by death. This novel relates the story of Shokichi Hamada, who successfully evaded military service during the war. He took on a pseudonym, and wandered the country as an itinerant peddler. After the war, he became a clerk at a university. Hamada's life in the present (1965) is interspersed with his life as a fugitive during the war. When certain events occur which highlight Hamada's past, which he has never tried to hide, he suffers the consequences, but also is forced to reconsider which was the better life--conforming to society's norms or living as his "own person."

While the book is not antiwar per se (the war is entirely in the background), it is an examination of what it means for an individual to reject society's norms. One important theme is that postwar society in Japan was not all that different than prewar society in its expectations of its populace.

This book is one of Haruki Murakami's favorite books, and in a lecture he has described the novel as an account of society at two particular moments in time, which contrasts the life of the "hero" Hamada was when evading the draft, with his current life as an alienated bureaucrat simply struggling to keep his place in society. ( )