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It is almost impossible to find a serious novel that does not touch on the subject of death. “In the Woods of Memory,” taking for its theme the death of the soul, is no exception.
The rape of a 17-year-old girl by four U.S. soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa forms the animating horror at the core of this story, based on a number of similar cases related to the author [Shun Medoruma] by his relatives.
In writing this novel, Medoruma creates a sound chamber of voices, time shifts and associations, moving back and forth from 1945 to 2005. He filters experiences through eye witnesses, a wartime Okinawan-American interpreter, an obsequious village ward chief, an American attacker now tormented in his old age by his collusion in an act of barbarity, and his grandson, who is given the harpoon head used by Seiji in the attack on his grandfather.
read more here @ The Japan Times
read reviews here @ Foreword Reviews, @ Asia-Pacific Journal, @ Stone Bridge Press
Now there's a traffic-stopper of a headline! Reading makes you - young women - insane. But not just insane, but "incurably" insane. Well, lead me to Bedlam!
Read some excerpts from this devilishly insane article from History Buff:
In 1886, homeschooling pioneer Charlotte Mason wrote that “the girl who sits for hours poring over a novel to the damage of her eyes, her brain, and her general nervous system, is guilty of a lesser fault of the nature of suicide.” Strange as it may sound, Mason's belief that reading fiction was physically dangerous for girls and women was actually held by many medical doctors of her day.
A few years earlier, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg—the same guy who invented corn flakes in an attempt to "cure" people of masturbation—called novel reading “one of the most pernicious habits to which a young lady can be devoted. When the habit is once thoroughly fixed, it becomes as inveterate as the use of liquor or opium.”
Read entire article here @ History Buff and learn more about Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) here @ All Day.
