From the Fatherland With Love - Ryu Murakami

From the Fatherland is a bit like the Japanese response to that weird pop cultural trend in America about North Korea suddenly becoming a dominant military power and somehow occupying them. That Red Dawn remake, the Homefront series of games etc. Its a lot more coherent, believable and smart than those though.

For a start North Korea has no interest in conquering Japan, they just plan to occupy Fukuoka city, and they want to do that to knock Japan and the world off balance and weaken a regional rival. Japan hasn't been doing too well at this point, its looking quite a bit like Weimar Germany. The economy is stagnant, unemployment is extreme, the government is weak and only still functioning thanks to a coalition government of moderates from the main parties. Both the political right and left are polarising society and looks like re-armament and militarisation might be a possibility. The JDF has been guying a lot of equipment, most of which doesn't really make sense unless they go on a war footing.

Meanwhile in North Korea things are (relatively) on the up. Tensions with the US have declined (wouldn't that be nice) and their economy is staggering back onto its feet. So now's the best time to strike. The plan is simple, smuggle some Special Operations Forces (SOF) into the country and start taking hostages. For their plans to work they're relying on the fact the Japanese state has no experience with situations of this sort and will probably be paralysed. Then wait for reinforcements to move into secure the territory as an exclave.

There's a ton of research that's been put into the novel and the work shows. There's an explanation for every question, how they get the first teams in, how they cover for this internationally (a fake rebellion) and how they're going to pay for the massive costs of occupation, how so few soldiers can have such tight control of so large a population etc. It wouldn't work in reality but for a novel it grounds everything really well.

But despite the premise this isn't a military pulp novel, there are some shoot outs and skirmishing but the focus is mainly on culture clash. It does this in two ways, the first is contemporary Japanese culture and North Korean military culture. Its quite funny, most of the Koreans have to drink unsweetened tea at first because they couldn't find any sugar jars, they didn't know about the little packets of sugar. Another time a sergeant discovers a porno mag and can't understand what the captions under the pictures mean. He can read Japanese fairly well its just the slang talk in the magazine about Double D's and ballistics confuses him.

The other case is with a group of delinquent youths who live in a sort of runaway commune of outcasts on the outskirts of the city. They don't fit into either world, and soon come into conflict with the commandos. By delinquents I don't mean anime nerds, these boys are so distant from other people several have assaulted or killed people already, and they weird and dangerous obsessions. One collects venomous insects, another has a sort of sawblade boomerang, another knows so much about buildings they've collected explosives and cutting torches etc.

Its a very interesting conflict, and one that's kinda depressing in its conclusions. Japanese society, its governance and values don't come out of it unscathed, and its hard to call the outcast boys heroic.