Post war Japan. Betrayal and murder!

The Lantern Boats by Tessa Morris-Suzuki              

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A young Scottish Japanese woman has been repatriated from Australia to Japan after the war.

Elly and her family had been residents in Australia and interned there during the war. In Japan she meets and married a Scots journalist, Fergus Ruskin. They are looking to adopt a child, 

A Japanese youth, Kamiya Jun, from islands off from Russia was working on a smuggling boat, and through a series of happenings ends up in an American intelligence unit that has a very low profile, a Black Ops type organisation.

Elly and Jun’s lives intersect when he sees her attending an event entitled, Study Circle on Women in the New China. The woman he’s been tracking, Vida Vidanto, the Japanese Poet, whom he dubs The Fox is speaking. Elly hardly knows Vida, but she accepts an invitation to lunch, curious to know more about her, afraid of what her husband Fergus’ relationship might be with Vida. And so Elly and Vida get dragged into Jun’s surveillance operations. Work that he falsifies and embellishes to satisfy his new masters, fearful of consequences for himself if he doesn’t. There are however dire outcomes for others.

People collide innocently and others interpret those meetings as darker events.

Knowing the thinking of post war United States comes in handy. The House UnAmerican trials with Senator MCarthy are happening in the States instigated to root out communism, the Allied Occupation of Japan is led by the Americans, and Communism and Russia is a threat on one hand, with China on the other.

An unusual, edgy and interesting story that engages with history from a different perspective. Morris-Suzuki strikes to the heart of fears and life for many in Japan in the years following the war.

A Jofee Books ARC via NetGalley