Theories abound about how to explain such a low quality and tasteless novel written by a high ranking government official. In my opinion the solution is to see `The Apprentice' as part of the literary genre known as yellow peril pulp fiction. In this genre Asian men are stereotyped as drug-using sexual deviants and Asian women as prostitutes. Yellow peril fiction ranges from the Fu Manchu comic books to more restrained novels such as Wallace Irwin's 1921 `Seed of the Sun' about the evil Baron Tazumi's plot to grab all California agricultural land for the Japanese Emperor.
Mr Libby's novel about rural Japan in the early 20th century reinforces all the yellow peril stereotypes. The characters who are usually nameless are sex-obsessed neolithic brutes. The men get their sexual thrills with the animals of the forest if necessary. The featured women travel from village to village to give entertainment shows which feature dancing, booze, and lack of clothing. Life is depicted as filled with endless violence unhindered by any presence of a police force. The job description of the apprentice innkeeper includes being a wallet thief and a peeping tom. One severely disabled man is so depersonalized that he is referred to by the terms "it" and "itself".
`The Apprentice' is supposedly a mystery story but the plot is incoherent. Even the Hardy Boys mystery series for later elementary readers had a final chapter where all the loose ends were finally connected. `The Apprentice' ends with many of the story's events unexplained. Unfortunately there are still some Americans who believe that people of northern European descent are superior to everybody else. We may hope that the author of `The Apprentice' had a momentary lapse and that he is not really one of these people.
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