Customer Reviews

Listen to the Voices from the Sea

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Dr. Midori Yamanouchi's translation of this post World War II collection of letters is brilliant. The work is a deeply moving collection of diaries written by young Japanese soldiers who gave their lives in a series of battles going from China, through the Pacific to the skies closer to Japan. Many of them were cultivated young university students, full of life and dreams, reflecting on the beauty of life, the love of their families and the painful duty that was their lot. These are sad voices, the now stilled voices of tragedy. Overall, an insight into war and the human spirit that rivals such western classics as "The Red Badge of Courage" or "All Quiet on the Western Front". Generations often forget the 'sins' of the past. Reading this book - now in English - may just remind us to avoid the trajedy of war at all costs.

Professors Yamanouchi & Quinn offer a much needed corrective to the five-decade old demonization of the Japanese soldier. This evocative, poetic, and compelling collection of soldiers' letters strikes down the dusty image of Japan's warriors as mindless, unthinking fanatics. In this volume we discover an entirely new and fresh insight into the mind-set and attitudes of young sailors, soldiers, and airmen who died in the service of Japan. The reader cannot help but be impressed by the sensitivity of these young men, by their literary yearnings, by their touching hopes for their families and futures, by the lyrical portraits they paint of even the grim and dangerous settings to which the war brought them. No little debt is owed to the editors for their masterful translation of these letters into useful and understandable American idiom. This is a rare and unforgettable reading experience which illuminates once again the common threads which bind humanity.

One of the best Pacific War stories told by the people who had to be there.

Each story captures your soul and makes you wonder why we even had to fight.

The saddest thing of all is that war still goes on somewhere in this world and that young people are still being killed just like the ones in the book.

This book must be read by as many people as possible, so perhaps we learn something and war will never start again.

I wonder when we, the human beings, will stop fighting and begin talking, negotiating...

There are books like this for the US as well as Germany soldiers. And, they are equally powerful.

It is said: People who never learn from the past will repeat the same mistakes all over again.

Ever since this book was originally published in 1949, four years after the end of the World War II, it has been one of the best sellers in Japan, even to this day.