Based on Ballard’s childhood experiences in a Japanese concentration camp outside Shanghai, this autobiographical novel became a successful film adaptation for director Steven Spielberg in 1985.
The story unfolds in three parts, opening in Shanghai on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The protagonist of the story is Jim, an 11-year-old boy living in a fine house on Amherst Avenue with his English parents. His father is a businessman, and the family enjoys a comfortable life that includes a swimming pool, servants, and a chauffeur-driven Packard. But war has already come to Shanghai: the Japanese army is encamped nearby, and violence is palpably near. When the Japanese storm the city, Jim is separated from his parents in the chaos of exploding shells and the onslaught of tanks and troops.
Throughout this first section of the novel, Jim roams the city alone, too naïve to realize the dangers that lurk on every corner, but becoming wiser to them minute by minute. He attaches himself to two American merchant seamen, Frank and Basie; they are able to feed him, although Jim is convinced they’re trying to sell him to one of the Chinese merchants in the open-air markets. When Jim persuades the two men to visit his family’s house on Amherst Avenue, the three of them surprise a group of Japanese soldiers who have billeted themselves there. Soon, Jim and the others find themselves in a fever-infested detention camp, and from there they go to the Lunghua Camp, a few miles from the city.
The middle section of the novel skips across two years of confinement at the camp and opens on 14-year-old Jim, no longer the child who had first arrived here at 12. He is a tough survivor. Basie is in the camp as well, and Jim continues to learn the tricks of survival from him: bowing to the Japanese, stretching rations as far as possible, and keeping out of trouble. Jim helps Dr. Ransome in the hospital and spends restless hours roaming the camp in the golf shoes Dr. Ransome gave him. As the tide of the war turns against the Japanese, Jim watches the airplanes in the sky change from Zeroes to Mustangs and B-52 Superfortresses. But the prisoners are isolated from the larger world and have no way of knowing whether help is on the way or when it is likely to arrive. The conditions steadily deteriorate, the rations continually shrink, and the guards become more brutal as defeat becomes more inevitable. When Jim sees, or thinks he sees, the flash of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, 400 miles away, he knows that soon the Americans will arrive. Another wave of chaos engulfs the camp as the Japanese try to rid themselves of the prisoners by marching them to death around the countryside.
In the final section of the novel, Jim is nearly dead from starvation and sickness, roaming the countryside around the camp. He survives an excursion with the near-dead prisoners being rounded up in the former Olympic Stadium, lying still among the corpses so he will not have to join the last death march. Although the war is over, relief is slow to come to Shanghai because of sectarian fighting between Communists and other factions for possession of the city and its lucrative trading port. But finally, American planes begin dropping food instead of bombs, and Jim inches back from the delirium of standing at death’s doorstep. With astonishing speed, he leaves the hell of the camp and walks into the house on Amherst Avenue: his parents are there, having survived internment at Woosung camp.
In the closing pages, Shanghai is bustling back to life, now with American warships tied up in its ports, and Jim is aboard a ship bound for the home he had never previously known in England. Ballard’s fictionalized memoir is a fascinating account strewn with unforgettable images of war’s horrors. He places his protagonist in a nightmarishly surreal environment, and every sentence rings with historical accuracy: surely, this boy’s experiences record just what anyone might expect to experience in the wasteland of a wartime prison camp.
The third-person objective narrator maintains a dispassionate and factual tone in presenting the life-threatening conditions Jim endures; additionally, the narrator captures the odd child’s logic with which Jim views events. As Jim prepares to leave Shanghai for England, the reader may suspect that some part of Jim will always remain at Lunghua, or that he takes the camp with him wherever he goes. Clearly, the boy who entered the camps was a lifetime away from the young man who came out of it bearing the same name, but utterly changed by his three years there.
Bibliography
Luckhurst, Roger. The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
———. “Petition, Repetition, and ‘Autobiography’: J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women,” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 688–708.
Stephenson, Gregory. Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Categories: British Literature, Japanese Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis, War Literature
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