Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan [Paperback]

Terese Svoboda (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 22, 2008

After her Uncle's suicide, Terese Svoboda investigates his stunning claim that MPs may have executed their own men during the occupation of Japan after World war II

 

[Our captain] commended us for being good soldiers and doing our job well and having a minimum of problems. Then he dropped a bomb. He said the prison was getting overcrowded, terribly overcrowded.

As a child Terese Svoboda thought of her uncle as Superman, with "Black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps." At eighty, he could still boast a washboard stomach, but in March 2004, he became seriously depressed. Svoboda investigates his terrifying story of what happened during his time as an MP, interviewing dozens of elderly ex-GIs and visiting Japan to try to discover the truth.

In Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Svoboda offers a striking and carefully wrought personal account of an often painful search for information. She intersperses excerpts of her uncle's recordings and letters to his wife with her own research, and shows how the vagaries of military justice can allow the worst to happen and then be buried by time and protocol

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In spare, controlled prose, novelist and poet Svoboda (Tin God) turns to nonfiction to deliver a powerful memoir-turned-political exposé. Svoboda sets out to document the military experiences of her uncle Don, but the Abu Ghraib prison scandal unleashes her uncle's repressed memories, sending him into a deep depression. Before his eventual suicide, Don confesses long-unspoken secrets on cassettes for the author. The tapes reveal more about his service in post-WWII Japan, as well as detailed accounts of human rights abuses. As the book progresses, Svoboda grows increasingly aware of the consequences of Don's words. His stories are interspersed through-and haunt-every chapter "I listen to his tapes several more times. His voice sounds much lower than I remember, it's so gravelly I could walk on it." The raw quality of Svoboda's relationship to her uncle is as captivating as Svoboda's investigations of the postwar period are alarming. Because she tries to include so much, the author occasionally runs into structural problems-though some of her digressions actually help the reader: by including interviews with Japanese citizens, tales of frustration with the National Archives, and conversations with her father, Svoboda illuminates her text.
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Review

"A sense of urgency pervades all of [Svoboda's] work, giving the words a pulse, making her language race with insistence." --Poets & Writers

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Product Details

• Paperback: 225 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974902
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974909
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #154,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #15 in Books > Law > Specialties > Military
  • #87 in Books > History > Military > United States > Veterans

More About the Author

Writing in the voice of God as I did in Tin God didn't seem like much of a stretch after being the eldest of nine children. We lived in a small town in southwest Nebraska with the smell of sage tumbleweeds and cattle feedlots. Although I've lived most of my adult life in NYC, I'm still haunted by home, a place that's now mostly in my head. But in NYC, I can travel without going anywhere. Eight languages are spoken on my block, including Chinese. For me, that's perfect--I can be surrounded by people I know but I can't understand a word they're saying. Although I've never been a pirate in 18th America, this year's Pirate Talk or Mermalade should reveal my interest in research. Even Henry Hudson believed in mermaids! Next year's Bohemian Girl will return to Nebraska, albeit 19th century Nebraska, with a spunky girl who escapes from the Indians.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Artful, Sly, and honest, April 1, 2008

By 

Gay J. Walley - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan (Paperback)

Black Glasses Like Clark Kent is one of those non fiction books that reads like a novel, almost a French novel, in that the narrator is self-aware and weaving the opinions and feelings and revelations of the characters in the story around the action of the book. The action is haunting -- what DID happen to the MPs and their prisoners in Postwar Japan and why does no one want to talk about it -- but, equally as haunting, is the family suffering the loss of the uncle MP who recently committed suicide. Was what he saw and lived through unbearable? He has sent his writer niece (Terese Svoboda) the tapes of what happened and she listens and then begins to investigate. As with all suicides of someone one knows and loves, she feels she did not do enough. She does enough to tell his story and find the morality that he himself was reckoning with. Of course, the book makes us, once again, reflect on the high moral and mortal cost of all who "serve". It proves that if the serviceman is willing to remember, the pain can get him. Hence, many of Svoboda's interviewees aren't talking. Svoboda's style (in all her books) is spare, sly, and unflinching in getting to the heart of her story. In this book, her father (the uncle's brother) rallies her on. Personally, I am partial to non fiction by novelists, since they cannot but give you all the facts without going to the heart. The book stays with me.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully rendered ambitious book, March 31, 2008

By 

Ellen Placey Wadey (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan (Paperback)

In Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, Terese Svoboda has rendered a beautifully nuanced memoir. Her uncle has a secret about his service as an MP in post-WWII occupied Japan that becomes more urgent when he sees the photographs of Abu Ghraib. But he won't reveal this secret easily to her. He sends her tapes of his memories through the mail, and Svoboda must piece together all the information at her hands -- her uncle's memories, his letters home to his girlfriend during his service, her familial relationships, statistics about the occupation of Japan -- many of which are conflicting, her understanding of heroism, and interviews with aging WWII veteran and Japanese native populations to try and uncover the secret. In the vein of Susan Griffin, Svoboda offers a mosaic text with pieces of the puzzle -- military documents, memories, photographs, and taped transcripts juxtaposed so that the reader joins her in the journey of trying to uncover what her uncle couldn't bring himself to say. This memoir is written for readers who like to be actively engaged by a story rather than sitting back and having it spoon fed to them. Her writing is beautiful. Her honesty is bracing. It should never be forgotten during the reading that this is a true story -- her uncle's last story. If we are to understand how events like Abu Ghraib happened, then we need to understand how it was not an isolated incident in our military history. Svoboda takes the difficult and accurate view that the brave men and women who serve in our military are often asked to do things in the line of duty that will haunt them the rest of their lives. I highly recommend this book.

1.0 out of 5 stars Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, October 24, 2011

By 

David Y. Henna "Novelist" (Honolulu) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan (Paperback)

Writer was sent the taped diary of uncle who commited suicide after being a guard at an American stockade just after the conquest of Japan. The portion of this book
that quotes the uncle's diary in italics is excellent, but unfortunately that is only 1/3 of the book and the other 2/3 which is the author's interpretations are
editorials about the current Iraq war, trying to create a parallel with Abu Ghraib,
and attempts to sound poetic and avant garde but only irritates. Obviously the author who has published other things didn't have enough tape transcripts and she tried to pump up the book with her own interpretations but only managed to make me wish that I had never purchased the book. Despite the poor writing (to me) on the author's part, the point she makes that black servicemen were much more likely to get both arrested and executed for rape by the American military than white servicemen are obviously valid and one wonders if this is true even today.
Not content with listening to her uncle's tapes the author did a lot of traveling and digging and interviewing and probing his former superiors and co-workers as well as doing army library research on the prison itself for which I give her credit, but her writing is simply too self-conscious and too obviously out to impress. I do not recommend this book for casual reading, but her uncles' transcripts are valuable because it's the only source material, an actual diary, that I could find about guarding an American stockade just after the war with the Japanese, and Japanese prisoners are mentioned as well. Particularly interesting is the episode where a young Filipino teenage boy comes with the express purpose of killing some Japanese and actually succeeds. The uncle's transcripts are golden. Another interesting part is where black prisoners escape only to have sex at a geisha house a short distance away. The most chilling part is where the prison commandant has prisoners executed to make space, but note that the only
interesting parts to me are the actual diary transcripts, not the authors' remarks.