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A review by eely225
Requiem for Battleship Yamato by Mitsuru Yoshida
5.0
This is a book about the absurdity of facing death.
The author recounts in sparse, poetic detail the sequence of events that led to him narrowly escaping a sinking battleship. It is wildly rooted in the present tense, though written in retrospect, you are stuck with the narrator as he recounts the whipping, vivid thoughts of someone balancing his duty and his hopelessness. The brief digressions to tell the stories of his fellow sailors are beautiful in themselves, and taken as a whole clearly support the theme of chance, of the arbitrary unfairness of one living or dying.
I never faced death on this scale. But still, in my time in the military, my closest encounters with arbitrary violence felt the way this book feels. I was resigned to losing a life I'd barely lived, and the author seems to try to scream through to his past self at the insanity of his comfort. I, too, want to yell at a past self who said he was ready to die when he had no idea (has no idea) what that means.
The translation is clipped, brusque and hypnotic. It is upsetting and difficult to put down. The author is not merely saying a requiem for a boat; it's a song sung for the impossible situation of the thousands of men who died that day. This book is less one that you understand intellectually and more a book that finds a resonant echo with the part of your heart and the bits of your past that you tend to ignore.
To put it at its simplest, this book did everything it could hope to do. And then it did some more.
I don't know how or whether to recommend it. But if you read the description and think that it might be singing a song you know, pick it up and sing along.
The author recounts in sparse, poetic detail the sequence of events that led to him narrowly escaping a sinking battleship. It is wildly rooted in the present tense, though written in retrospect, you are stuck with the narrator as he recounts the whipping, vivid thoughts of someone balancing his duty and his hopelessness. The brief digressions to tell the stories of his fellow sailors are beautiful in themselves, and taken as a whole clearly support the theme of chance, of the arbitrary unfairness of one living or dying.
I never faced death on this scale. But still, in my time in the military, my closest encounters with arbitrary violence felt the way this book feels. I was resigned to losing a life I'd barely lived, and the author seems to try to scream through to his past self at the insanity of his comfort. I, too, want to yell at a past self who said he was ready to die when he had no idea (has no idea) what that means.
The translation is clipped, brusque and hypnotic. It is upsetting and difficult to put down. The author is not merely saying a requiem for a boat; it's a song sung for the impossible situation of the thousands of men who died that day. This book is less one that you understand intellectually and more a book that finds a resonant echo with the part of your heart and the bits of your past that you tend to ignore.
To put it at its simplest, this book did everything it could hope to do. And then it did some more.
I don't know how or whether to recommend it. But if you read the description and think that it might be singing a song you know, pick it up and sing along.