NAW Reading Challenge: After Darkness by Christine Piper
To celebrate our inaugural New Australian Writing (NAW) Award shortlist, we’re running a NAW Reading Challenge.
This week our participants have read After Darkness by Christine Piper. Here are their responses to the novel. (Ed. note: may contain spoilers!)
Our favourite response for this week (not to mention the winner of our $100 gift voucher) is…
Jill says:
It’s no accident that Christine Piper, the author of After Darkness, is interested in Japanese history and its intersections in Australia. She is of mixed Japanese/Australian parentage and has a personal interest in these themes. The narrator of her novel is Tomokazu Ibaraki, a doctor who – in flight from events in Japan – accepts work in Broome in 1938. He is subsequently interned when war is declared in 1941.
With Ibaraki we are presented with a man who struggles to connect; he runs away at any vestige of intimacy. The most interesting question for me is ‘why’. Is it the nature of Japanese masculinity? The impact of his father’s death? His vulnerable position within the rigidly bullying, corrosive power structure of the Japanese Research Unit? Or, the horror of what that unit is working on in Manchuria?
What Piper does best in this novel is capture the changes in weather, mood and tension between characters in Broome and Loveday (the camp where Ibaraki is interned). Inevitably this novel will be contrasted with Richard Flanagan’s novel of the Thai- Burma railway. While Flanagan’s is a visceral immersion in the horrific, this one is more clinical and distanced; I’m grateful to both authors for shining a light on parts of our history that need to be remembered.
And, here are some more of our favourites…
Cherie says:
I had not long finished a new crime book when I began Christine Piper’s After Darkness. About a quarter of the way into the story, I admit I did consider moving onto to something else, but I decided to persevere and I am so glad I did. By the end, After Darkness proved to be a very satisfying and rewarding read nd definitely one of my favourites of the year. I think it took a few chapters to adjust to the rhythm of the book – the short, direct sentences and straight-forward writing style.
After Darkness follows Doctor Tomakazu Ibaraki’s life from Tokyo to Broome, and later to his experiences in Loveday internment camp in South Australia during WWII. Ibaraki is a decent, hard-working and introspective man who often struggles to communicate with those close to him. He tries to reconcile the values of his workplace in Tokyo (discretion, discretion, discretion) with his conscience. Unfortunately, he is forced to face some horrific truths and at times this seems simply too overwhelming: I felt stained by my association with the laboratory.
Dr Ibaraki does have the ability to recognise flaws in his personality and over the course of the novel he learns and grows from his friendships with Johnny Chang, Sister Bernice and other acquaintances at Loveday. After years of trying to forget and escape painful memories, Ibaraki returns to Tokyo and re-reads an old letter from Sister Bernice: Finally, Sister Bernice’s words open up to me. I’d clung to the ideal of discretion, when it was courage – and forgiveness – I’d needed all along. My silence had been weak.
After Darkness is a beautiful novel and I strongly urge readers to give it a go.
Alice says:
The three narrative threads in this novel are folded into each other like an intricate Japanese origami: the novel moves and shifts geographically and chronologically, yet like origami, these shifts and folds are united by the single person narrative voice of Tomokazu (Tomo) Ibaraki.
In the first narrative thread, Tomo is a young Japanese medical student, recently married to Kayako (in a love-match) and recently recruited to the ‘Epidemic Prevention Laboratory’ within the Army Medical College in Tokyo. Set immediately prior to WWII, Tomo has been sworn to secrecy about his work which is horrific by any standard. It is this silence which destroys his relationship with Kayoko.
In the second narrative thread, a disillusioned Tomo has left Tokyo to work in a Japanese hospital in Broome, caring mainly for the small local Japanese population and the larger, but seasonal, population of Japanese pearl divers. The story of his relationship with Sister Bernice is, again, a story of how silence impedes human understanding:
I would like to have said such things and more to you in person. Not doing so is my greatest regret. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long (Psalms 32:3).
The third narrative thread sees Tomo interned as a Japanese alien in wartime Australia. ‘Misguided loyalty’ leads him to ignore another prisoner’s accusation, and is later overcome with guilt when he believes that his refusal to believe the accusation prompted the fellow prisoner’s deteriorating mental state. Silence plays its powerful part again:
Did you tell anyone about the bullying?
My throat was tight. ‘No, I didn’t think it was my place. I’m only a doctor – I try to stay away from camp disputes.
It is only at the very end of the novel does Ibaraki, now 81 years old, finally break his silence.
