1945
Robert Conroy turns history on its head by asking what would have happened if Japan had not surrendered after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The answer is a series of bloody encounters between invading Americans and desperate Japanese in a plausible chain of events that begins with a military takeover by hard-line Japanese officers and ends with a rescued emperor signing a peace treaty. Conroy manages to capture the spirit of Japanese militarism in his realistic portrayal of real historical figures engaging in political and military actions that were certainly possible. His American characters, principally the Japanese-American OSS agent Joe Nomura, seem more finely portrayed, at least to this reviewer. Most of the figures in the novel were participants in the Pacific War (Hirohito, Ozawa, Genda, Sugiyama, MacArthur, Nimitz, Halsey) and their actions and interactions in this contrafactual story highlight the author’s extensive research into the time period.
