Ratings1
Average rating2
"Watanabe Yuichi, a young guard with a passion for reading, is ordered to investigate a murder. The victim, Sugiyama, also a guard, was feared and despised throughout the prison and inquiries have barely begun when a powerful inmate confesses. But Watanabe is unconvinced; and as he interrogates both the suspect and Yun Dong-ju, a talented Korean poet, he starts to realize that the fearsome guard was not all he appeared to be... As Watanabe unravels Sugiyama's final months, he begins to discover what is really going on inside this dark and violent institution, which few inmates survive: a man who will stop at nothing to dig his way to freedom; a governor whose greed knows no bounds; a little girl whose kite finds an unlikely friend. And Yun Dong-ju--the poet whose works hold such beauty they can break the hardest of hearts. As the war moves towards its devastating close and bombs rain down upon the prison, Watanabe realizes that he must find a way to protect Yun Dong-ju, no matter what it takes. As he digs further and further in to his investigation, the young guard discovers a devastating truth" --
Reviews with the most likes.
A guard is found dead, his lips sewn shut, inside Fukuoka prison during WWII. From there we are launched into a crime thriller as the narrator tries to determine who killed the feared and brutal Dozan Sugiyama, known as The Butcher. There are intrigues aplenty and nothing is as simple as it seems on the surface.
But it's also about the power of poetry, music, literature and the works of Korean poet Yun Dong-ju whose poems have been posthumously published after he perished inside a Japanese prison. It glimpses at the power of words and language.
At times the prose is a little clunky and can read like a script to an overwrought Korean soap opera. But amidst that are the bits of beauty you read books for, paragraphs that come out of nowhere that just floor you. Individual results may vary.
I kept thinking of Station Eleven, which I recently reread, and the adage “survival is insufficient.”