Kamikaze
by Michael Slade
Signet, 2006, 388 pages
This fast-moving thriller mixes violence, blood, and
suspense as Genjo Tokuda, a retired yakuza (Japanese mafia) boss involved in
every sort of crime, tries to exact revenge on the American airman who helped
wipe out his ancestral line at the end of World War II. Kamikaze is the
twelfth novel by Michael Slade about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's
Special External Section (Special X), which investigates criminal cases with
links to foreign countries. Michael Slade is the pen name for Jay Clarke and
his daughter Rebecca, who both live in Vancouver, where most of the novel's
action takes place. Japanese kamikaze pilots get mentioned in several parts of
this book, but the main plot, despite the book's title, focuses on topics other
than kamikaze.
Even though this novel contains interesting details about
Vancouver, the chapters set in other locations, especially Japan, lack
specifics. In spite of a four-page listing of sources, the research for
historical portions of this novel seems rather shallow. For example, Slade
includes in his sources only one book directly related to kamikaze. This
reference source, Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods by Axell and Kase
(2002), has its own shortcomings related to accuracy and source documentation;
therefore, much of the kamikaze-related information provided in Slade's book
should be read with skepticism.
Kamikaze introduces many characters and plot twists.
Although the author skillfully depicts Tokuda as the personification of evil,
the personality and motivations of some characters remain unclear, partly due
to the large number presented in the book. Slade keeps up the tension and
thrills until the end, but a few parts should have been cut or shortened as the
plot rambles in places.
Tokuda leaves Tokyo to visit Vancouver with the purpose of
torturing and then killing Joe "Red" Hett, who had been part of the
crew of Enola Gay when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, where
everyone in Tokuda's family died. A plane piloted by one of Tokuda's henchman
from Japan crashes into the Canada Place Convention Center in Vancouver where
Pacific War veterans are meeting. The pilot of the suicide plane tosses out Joe
Hett's son Chuck from the plane just before crashing into the meeting place. Tokuda's men then
abduct Joe Hett's granddaughter Jackie, a member of the Canadian Mounties'
Special X squad. Joe and the Special X squad work together to rescue her.
Twin children, born in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong of the
same mother but different fathers, play key roles in the story. Their mother was
a Canadian nurse serving in a makeshift hospital at St. Stephen's College in
Hong Kong. On Christmas Day of 1941 as the Japanese Army approached, she had
sex in a closet with a British captain to release her stress. Then Japanese
soldiers stormed the college, and Genjo Tokuda gutted the captain with a
bayonet and raped the nurse. The British captain's daughter, Lyn Barrow, kills
Tokuda in a horrible manner when he visits Vancouver. Tokuda's son, known only
by the code name of Kamikaze, arranges to contact his father in Vancouver when
he discovers his Hong Kong parentage. He tries to kill Joe Hett at the
convention hall where Pacific War veterans are meeting, but police shoot him
down before he can reach Hett.
On April 6, 1945, Tokuda took part in the defense of Okinawa
from Shuri Castle. He supposedly, even in the middle of a raging battle, used
his binoculars to view the mass kamikaze assault that day on the American
fleet. The novel's description of this attack includes many inaccurate
stereotypes and generalizations. For example, the author describes kamikaze
planes designed to drop their landing gear on takeoff so it could be picked
up and reused for other suicide runs. These Japanese planes never existed. The
novel states that each kamikaze pilot shouted "hissatsu" (sink
without fail) at the top of his lungs as he began his dive, but the real pilots
did not have such a custom [1].
Tokuda's unnamed cancer-ridden henchman who crashes a plane
into the convention center is quite a contrived character with no clear
motivation. During the war, his uncle had piloted the ultimate suicide weapon,
an ōka (piloted glider bomb), and Tokuda's henchman for some unknown reason
fantasizes that he also is an ōka pilot even though he has only an old prop
plane for the attack. The book never reveals why he has such an intense desire
to kill innocent Pacific War veterans more than sixty years after the war's
end.
Genjo Tokuda's son, whose real name is never revealed, goes
by the code name of Kamikaze, but he has no clear connection to historical
kamikaze. Tokuda's sword is named kamikaze, or "divine wind" in
Japanese, and his son took the same name even though the book does not
tell how he found out the sword's name since his father lived in secrecy on the
other side of the Pacific Ocean in Tokyo. The author improperly muddles up
yakuza hierarchical structure with kamikaze. He explains that Kamikaze in
the "child role" of the yakuza structure had to be "willing to
take a bullet for, and be a bullet for" Tokuda in the "father
role." As a result, "He had to be kamikaze. He had to be ready to
die." This connection between yakuza and kamikaze is so much nonsense.
Before Kamikaze's planned attack against Joe Hett at the convention hall, his
father Tokuda explains the ideals of Japanese kamikaze by telling the story of
First Lieutenant Hajime Fujii, whose wife committed suicide along with her two
young children in order to allow her husband to be free to join a kamikaze
squadron as he desired. Fujii's story has little relevance to Kamikaze's
attempt to take Hett's life by hurling four Molotov cocktails at him in the
convention center. Although the author mentions Kamikaze's Pacific War
counterparts when he runs toward Hett with a flaming bomb in his hand, it is
not clear that Kamikaze's attempted murder of Hett can even be considered a
suicide attack. Although waiting police shoot him down before he reaches Hett,
he could have thrown the Molotov cocktails and tried to escape if he had gotten
close to Hett.
When Jackie Hett ponders the reasons for her father Chuck's
death and for the suicide attack on the convention center, she starts to think
about the similarities of modern-day terrorists and Japanese kamikaze (pp.
253-4):
Both the attackers of 9/11 and the kamikazes volunteered to
sacrifice themselves for sacred beliefs. Both thought that they were inflicting
divine punishment on their enemies. Both prepared themselves spiritually for
the carnage to come. Both thought that their gods were watching over them, and
that death had its own rewards. The Al-Qaeda crews were told to shout
"Allah is great!" as they struck, for that's believed to incite
terror in the hearts of infidels. And the kamikazes were told to yell "Hissatsu!"
at warships as they crash-dived.
The author does not provide support for the above assertions
on Japanese kamikaze, and historical reality differs greatly from these
unsupported statements.
This thriller, which includes several bloodcurdling
scenes, tries to connect historical events of WWII with the present day.
However, the historical connections depicted in Kamikaze turn out to be
unconvincing.
Note
1. Slade apparently picked up this error from
Axell and Kase (2002, 77, 82). These two authors describe an obscure manual
dated May 1945 from an Army training air base near Tokyo. This manual has the
statement that a kamikaze pilot should shout "hissatsu" when
diving into the enemy, but memoirs of Japanese pilots who served in special attack squadrons do
not mention this instruction. In addition, Genjo watched the mass kamikaze
assault on April 6, 1945, a month before the manual was even published.
Source Cited
Axell, Albert, and Hideaki Kase. 2002. Kamikaze: Japan's
Suicide Gods. London: Pearson Education.
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