On 7 July 1989 the air was thick with heat in the Toyama district of Tokyo. Tsuyu, the rainy season, had just ended, leaving the atmosphere dense. At the former government health building location, a large pit was being dug for the new National Hygiene and Disease Prevention Research Centre. The workers buzzed around the site, their foreheads glistening in the sun. The mechanical digger plunged deep into the earth, scraping against rock as it brought up a mound of dirt. Something pale shone through the soil. At first, it looked like pieces of ceramic. On closer inspection, the workers realised it was human bones.

Twenty-five years later, their identities are still unknown.

In a city famed for skyscrapers and neon lights, Toyama is a quiet pocket in an urban jungle. Situated in the heart of Tokyo, only thirty minutes by foot from the world’s busiest train station, Shinjuku, it is bordered by busy Meiji Road at one end and the prestigious Waseda University at the other. In between lies residential housing, several schools, a public library, a Buddhist temple, the National Centre for Global Health and Medicine, and acres of leafy parkland. Hundreds of years ago, a lavish garden built by a feudal lord occupied the area. Now, at least a dozen public housing monoliths crowd the edges of the park.

Like most of metropolitan Japan, Toyama is full of contradictions. It is a place where the indigent and the upper middle class live side by side. In this suburb, an ancient Shinto shrine dedicated to gods of war is a short walk from the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, committed to exposing wartime violence and enabling justice for victims.

My first visit to Toyama was on 1 March 2013. The grass was tawny and the ground was thick with dry leaves, but I occasionally spied tiny green buds on the branches of trees. Mothers pushed prams through the park and up gently sloping alleys crowded with dwellings. Now and then, a door creaked or the murmur of a television sounded from within.

The idyllic snapshot of suburban life is worlds apart from Toyama’s former identity as a hub of military operations during the Asia–Pacific War. Seventy years ago, the neighbourhood was home to a mounted regiment, the Toyama Military Academy, and the Tokyo Army Medical College. The latter was a collection of buildings within a high-security, gated compound, where the Imperial Army’s medical élite, academics, and politicians gathered to share research and hold secret talks about Japan’s expansion into East Asia.

Few relics of that past remain. When Japan lost the war, the buildings were abandoned and many were eventually destroyed. The only structure still standing is a stone edifice that was once the meeting room of the Toyama Military Academy. It now forms the basement of the United Church of Christ.

‘Infected victims were vivisected to observe the progress of disease – sometimes without anaesthetic.’

The area’s unusual past might have stayed relatively obscure but for the accidental unearthing of the bones in 1989. News of the discovery of at least thirty-five human skulls prompted speculation. Some wondered if they were the victims of unsolved murders, while others thought they were the casualties of wartime raids or the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake. Kanagawa University history professor Keiichi Tsuneishi was one of the first to suggest ties to Japan’s covert biological warfare program during World War II. Tsuneishi, whose earliest work on the subject was published in 1981, knew of a special department known as the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory located within the Army Medical College. He was quick to draw links to Unit 731, the secret unit of the Army Medical College that developed biological weapons and experimented on living humans, starting in 1932 in the Japanese colony of Manchuria, and later in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Singapore. The unit conducted tests on bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, typhus, smallpox, botulism, and poison gas. Infected victims were vivisected to observe the progress of disease – sometimes without anaesthetic. Test subjects were referred to as maruta, or ‘logs’, originally as a joke because the Unit 731 compound was disguised as a lumber mill, then the term persisted. Victims were political dissidents, common criminals, and sometimes poor farmers. They included the elderly, infants, and pregnant women.

About three thousand people were directly killed in the experiments at the Unit 731 compound alone. Japanese forces also deposited wheat, rice, and cotton riddled with disease-infected fleas near communities, and released typhoid and cholera into village wells. The total death toll resulting from the spread of disease is estimated to be between 250,000 and 300,000.

As the daughter of a Japanese immigrant, I have long been drawn to stories about Japan. In some ways, unravelling the mystery of the bones is my attempt to decipher a culture that is at once both familiar and unknown to me. Although I have lived in Japan several times since my childhood, I have always remained an outsider. Confronting the silences of Japan is a way of piecing together my cultural heritage. So I went to Japan to meet the unofficial guardians of the bones, concerned citizens who have no direct connection to the remains, but who have taken it upon themselves to see that justice is served.

Yasushi Torii (photograph by Christine Piper)

As I approached the north exit of JR Okubo station, two greying men waited for me. Yasushi Torii and Shigeo Nasu have dedicated much of the past two decades to exposing Japan’s wartime atrocities and assisting war victims. Torii, a high school biology teacher in his mid fifties, first heard about the unearthed bones while volunteering for a care organisation for disabled people in Shinjuku. One of his colleagues, Noboru Watanabe, told him that human remains dug up near his apartment in Toyama were presumed to be linked to Japan’s biological warfare program. In 1991, Watanabe joined a group of concerned citizens on a trip to China to learn more about the program. They met families of Unit 731 victims and attended an exhibition about the unit. He returned the following year, and Torii went with him. ‘Back then, I didn’t really know anything about the bones, I just followed,’ Torii said. ‘That was actually my very first overseas trip. Of course, after listening to the voices of the local people, I was shocked. From then on, I decided to be actively involved.’ Torii is now the president of the Association Demanding Investigation Into the Human Remains Found at the Former Army Medical College Site, a citizens’ group founded by his friend Watanabe and several others. ‘The group’s primary aim is to return the bones to their families, or if the family can’t be determined, at least back to their home country.’ Since 1996 the association has been conducting annual walking tours for the public to visit sites related to Japan’s secret wartime past. The walk usually takes place in early April, while the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, but Torii and Nasu agreed to guide me during my short trip to Tokyo on the cusp of winter and spring.

Nasu is a member of the Centre for Victims of Biological Warfare, an organisation campaigning for recognition, an apology, and compensation from the Japanese government. The group also aims to educate people and bring to light other details of Japan’s bio-logical warfare program, such as the use of poison gas. Now retired, Nasu was working as a security guard at a hospital when he heard about the families of Unit 731 victims’ compensation claim at the Tokyo district court. ‘Since I worked the night shift, I had plenty of time during the day, so I decided to support them,’ Nasu said. ‘Once you know only a little about this war, you’re forced to want to get involved to do something about it.’

A mild wind blew as Torii, Nasu, and I set off from Okubo station. Our final destination was the National Hygiene and Disease Prevention Research Centre in Toyama, where the bones currently rest inside a granite monument. Torii quickly took the lead, charging ahead to point out places of interest. Nasu kept to the back of our small group, often wandering off to inspect this or that. On the main street of Okubo, home to bustling Korea Town, signs advertising Korean barbecue and massage parlours flashed thinly in the morning light. We stopped in front of an ordinary-looking Japanese funeral parlour.The window displayed three wooden altars with double doors open to reveal Buddha figurines inside. My grandfather had an altar just like these in his home on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Torii gestured to the funeral parlour. ‘This is the place where people who die in Shinjuku ward who can’t be identified are kept. In 1989, after the bones were found, they were stored in the basement here until March 2002, when they were interred inside the monument.’

The story of the bones is a long one. Even now, twenty-five years after they were discovered, it is still unresolved. The reasons are complex: the accumulation of a number of court cases and appeals, combined with ordinary bureaucratic delays and an extraordinary lack of institutional cooperation. After the bones were discovered, the police investigated the remains and found they belonged to men and women who had died at least twenty years earlier, and that there was no evidence of violent crime. They concluded that even if the deceased had been victims of crime, they had been buried for more than fifteen years, so the statute of limitations had passed. The police dropped the case and public interest waned. The Ministry of Health and Welfare, on whose property the remains were found, agitated for a cremation, as is the custom in Japan. With that, the inconvenient discovery would have been finally dispatched. Yet the Shinjuku ward local government refused to drop the matter, repeatedly requesting the ministry launch a full investigation. Each time they were refused. ‘We have no obligation to investigate just because we own the land,’ said ministry official Nobuhisa Inoue. In a rare act of defiance, the then-mayor of Shinjuku, Katsutada Yamamoto, launched an independent investigation using local government funds. He approached world-renowned physical anthropologist Hajime Sakura, director of human research at the National Science Museum.

‘Professor Sakura was really interested in doing it, but the head of the museum denied, saying it was out of the scope of the museum. But I’m not sure it was the real reason,’ Torii explained, hinting that other forces were at work. On the advice of the Human Remains association, Shinjuku ward next approached specialists at Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo and St Marianna University School of Medicine in Kanagawa. ‘In both those cases, the individuals were willing to do it, but the universities denied.’

It seemed whichever way they turned, they were met with silence.

A few days earlier, on a wet winter’s day, I met Kazuyuki Kawamura, a former Shinjuku ward assemblyman. As I walked to his workplace in Shinjuku, cold rain pelted down and touched my skin through my jacket. Kawamura greeted me with a smile. His office was lined with shelves stacked high with books, folders, and cardboard boxes. Desks laden with paper crowded the middle of the room.

Kazuyuki Kawamura (photograph by Christine Piper)

While the foyers of commercial buildings in Japan are uniformly stark and clean, almost every office I have visited is a domain of disarray, seemingly at odds with the Japan of carefully controlled tea ceremonies and minimalist design. Homes reflect a similar divide: the sitting room, where guests are received, are ordered and aesthetically harmonious, while the rest of the house is often chaotic. The tidy exterior versus the cluttered interior points to the dichotomy at the heart of Japanese culture: the conflict between honne (personal feelings and desires) and tatemae (public façade).

As we sat down at the hodgepodge of desks, Kawamura described the tension in the ward office as officials deliberated over what to do about the ‘troublesome’ discovery. Although they believed the ministry should manage the site, the ministry’s refusal to conduct an investigation played on their conscience. The Shinjuku local government office eventually announced it would pursue an independent investigation, a decision that Kawamura described as ‘very courageous’.

Shinjuku ward’s first choice to analyse the remains, anthropologist Hajime Sakura, eventually agreed to the project, but only after his retirement from the National Science Museum. He carried out the research in the basement of the funeral parlour in Okubo, where the bones were stored. In April 1992 he reported his findings: in addition to the thirty-five easily recognisable skulls, there were 132 skull fragments, thirty spines, six chest bones, thirteen thigh bones, and seventeen neck bones from at least sixty-two, and possibly more than a hundred people. The remains were from Mongoloid men and women who had died ‘from several tens of, to one hundred years’ earlier. More than ten skulls had holes from bullets or drills, and cuts by ‘perhaps Japanese swords’ made after death. He also found evidence of experimental surgery or surgical practice, as most of the skulls bore scalpel or saw marks, but he could not prove a definitive link to Unit 731, as the bones did not show any particular signs of disease.

Following Sakura’s report, the Ministry of Health and Welfare agreed to launch an investigation to determine the origin of the bones. They began conducting interviews and questionnaires with former Army Medical College personnel. But then Shinjuku ward did an about-face, announcing its wish to cremate the bones. The new mayor, Takashi Onda, believed that as a definitive link to Unit 731 had not been found and since there was no one to claim the remains, they should be cremated according to law – a move that Kawamura opposed. ‘By cremating the bones, we would lose the evidence – that was what we feared most. At that point, I realised we needed some kind of movement.’ In 1997, he formed the Citizens for the Investigation of World War II Issues – a group that aims ‘to verify from a neutral point of view the victims of the war’.

‘Something pale shone through the soil. At first, it looked like pieces of ceramic.’

Like many of the people I interviewed in Japan, Kawamura has long been involved in grassroots politics. As a university student, he protested against the Japan–United States security treaty renewal in 1970, demanding the removal of American troops in Okinawa. He joined the socialist party and in 1979 was elected to Shinjuku local government, where he served for twenty years. Kawamura was born in 1952, a few years after his father returned from China, where he had fought during the war. ‘At the start of the war, my father was an English teacher at a girls’ school. He and the other teachers were summoned to the war zone in China. It was a form of conscription – they couldn’t refuse.’

I wondered whether his father’s military past impelled Kawamura to seek justice for war victims. But he told me the reverse actually occurred:

Because I became involved in these issues as a student, I decided to ask my father about his experience ... he talked to me about it. He didn’t even want to go to war, but he was forced to. During his training in China, he was ordered to use a bayonet to kill Chinese people [for practice].

I froze. I had read about Japanese soldiers practising bayonet technique on Chinese prisoners before, but hearing it in those terms – someone’s father, who had previously been an English teacher at a girls’ school – stopped me cold. I tried to imagine one of the teachers at my all-girls high school being sent to war and then having to spear a helpless prisoner. Mr Hartley, or diffident Mr Lacey. It was impossible to conceive.

Kawamura’s father was captured as a prisoner of war and forced to do hard labour at a coal mine in the former Soviet Union for three years after the end of the war. He died recently at the age of ninety-two, six months before the Japanese parliament finally enacted a bill to compensate former POWs interned in the Soviet Union. Kawamura continued speaking about his father, but I could not stop thinking about what it would be like to face another human being one moment, then drive a bayonet into his chest the next. I tried to steer Kawamura back to his prior revelation.

‘Did your father’s experience in China affect him deeply?’

Kawamura considered my question for a moment, his left eyelid drooping in concentration.

‘I don’t think he was that affected. He spoke about his stories quite calmly.’

Torii, Nasu, and I crossed Meiji Road and entered the outskirts of Toyama. A path bordered by a green hedge guided us towards the park. From somewhere to our right, the chatter of school children reached us on the wind. I felt a shift in the atmosphere as we left the concrete matrix of urban Tokyo behind.

We stopped at a dusty expanse bordered by low shrubs and trees. There was hardly a soul in sight.

‘See that tall tree?’ Torii pointed to a lone zelkova in the middle of the expanse. ‘That’s the probable former location of the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory.’

The Laboratory, located in the grounds of the Army Medical College, was Shiro Ishii’s Tokyo base and the hub of his biological warfare empire. Ishii established it in 1932 as a facility to develop biological weapons. Even within the highly secure Army Medical College, access to the laboratory was restricted. Ishii’s initial experiments went well, but he wasn’t sure whether they would work in the field, so he pursued human testing. Aware of the limitations of being based in Japan, Ishii looked to the new Japanese colony of Manchuria in northern China, and opened his first overseas base in Harbin in 1932. Historians such as Keiichi Tsuneishi believed the bodies of murdered test subjects were sent from China to the Tokyo laboratory for further analysis. But as Sakura’s analysis of the remains did not find a definitive link to Unit 731, and with no witnesses to confirm it, the connection remained conjecture.

Koeisha funeral parlour in Okubo, where the bones were kept for thirteen years (photographed by Christine Piper)

In 2001, the Ministry of Health and Welfare finally released its report on the remains, almost ten years after it announced it would pursue an investigation. Based on interviews and questionnaires completed by 368 former personnel, the ministry determined the corpses were probably used by the college for educational purposes. The report raised the possibility that some of the bodies were transported from war zones, but did not offer a reason for this. In a win for the Human Remains association, the report recommended that the bones be preserved rather than cremated, but it concluded they were not connected to Unit 731 and there was no need to further investigate. On a rainy day on 27 March 2002, the remains were finally moved from the funeral parlour in Okubo and ceremoniously interred beneath a three-foot-high granite repository in the grounds of the National Hygiene and Disease Prevention Research Centre. ‘These are human remains, not just any object. It’s only appropriate to pay due respects,’ ministry official Makoto Haraguchi said. By interring the bones, he no doubt hoped to close a difficult chapter in the ministry’s history.

The controversy might have waned but for eighty-four-year-old Toyo Ishii (no relation to Shiro Ishii). Ishii was in her early twenties when she was employed at the Army Medical College as a nurse in the oral surgery department. Ishii broke decades of silence when she revealed that she was ordered to dispose of corpses, body parts, and bones in the final weeks of the war as American forces approached. ‘We took the samples out of the glass containers and dumped them into the hole,’ she wrote in a statement released in June 2006. ‘We were going to be in trouble, I was told, if American soldiers asked us about the specimens.’ Ishii said she was never involved in nor knew about experiments on humans, but often saw body parts in glass jars and bodies floating in pools of formalin in the hospital’s three morgues. She identified two other areas near the Army Medical College where she was instructed to dispose of the bodies.

Ishii’s testimony, more than anything else I had read about Unit 731, struck a chord. I was fascinated by the internal and external forces that conspire to keep someone silent. Ishii first began to talk about her war memories in 1998, when Shinjuku ward began gathering war crime testimonies. After she spoke about her employment at the College, members of the Human Remains association and the Minister for Health and Welfare arranged to meet her. ‘I don’t think Ishii originally intended to proactively testify. Even when meeting us, she showed trepidation,’ Torii said. Ishii regretted the hasty disposal of the remains and wanted some sort of monument created for them. She was happy after the monument was erected, and died in 2012.

Toyo Ishii was not the only one to testify. Several dozen Japanese have shared their stories about their involvement in Japan’s biological warfare program. As part of a travelling exhibition about Unit 731 that Torii and Nasu helped to stage in 1993, many former Unit 731 members publicly discussed their experience for the first time. Ken Yuasa spoke at several locations about his time as a young army doctor in China. ‘This is not easy for me to speak about, but it is something I must confess,’ he began, as quoted in Unit 731 Testimony by Hal Gold. ‘What I did was wrong. It is also true that it was forced on me by the government, but that does not reduce the size of my crime.’ Yuasa described the first time he vivisected a man, an old Chinese farmer. Despite his revulsion, he went through with it, saying he had always been the type of person to follow orders:

If you made a disagreeable face [at being ordered to do a vivisection], when you returned home you would be called a traitor or a turncoat. If it were just me alone, I could tolerate it; but the insulting looks would be cast on parents and siblings. Even if one despises an act, one must bear it ... That was my first crime. After that, it was easy. Eventually I dissected fourteen Chinese.

Toyo Ishii’s disclosure prompted the ministry to conduct an excavation in 2011, the specific intent being to find more buried human remains. But after a comprehensive dig that lasted months, no remains were found – only plaster casts and prosthetic limbs used by the adjacent hospital, eerily symbolic of the human body parts that activists hoped to find.

We emerged from the park into the open area surrounding Toyama Heights public housing apartments, where Torii’s friend and colleague Noboru Watanabe used to live. A warm southerly whipped between the buildings, stirring up debris. I blinked against the dirt, my feet heavy as we walked into the wind. Torii paused in front of me and pointed to the sky. ‘Haru ichiban.’ The first storm of spring.

The National Centre for Global Health and Medicine rose up to our left, a huge multi-storey complex. It was formerly the First Imperial Army Hospital during the war. Army Medical College personnel used to live just across the road, but little was evident of that past in the concrete high-rises and cement-rendered dwellings. The area was heavily bombed towards the end of the war, and the resulting firestorm destroyed most of the buildings and left at least 100,000 civilians dead.

We momentarily lost our way in the narrow alleys between houses and apartment blocks before finding our target: the site of Shiro Ishii’s former apartment. Although I knew the original building was no longer standing, I was disappointed to detect nothing sinister in the curved staircase and off-white bricks of the low-rise block.

‘The tidy exterior versus the cluttered interior points to the dichotomy at the heart of Japanese culture ... ’

Shiro Ishii, dubbed the Josef Mengele of Japan, was the mastermind of Japan’s biological warfare program. He was born in Chiba prefecture, about two hours from central Tokyo. His family, wealthy and influential, exercised a kind of feudal dominance over the locality. This would prove useful in later years, as Ishii hand-picked many staff for the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory and other units from the population in his home town, knowing they couldn’t refuse or speak against him owing to their allegiance to his family. From an early age, Ishii hoped to serve his country in the military. In 1920, less than a month after finishing his undergraduate medical degree, he joined the Imperial Army and became an ardent supporter of the ultra-nationalist faction.

Ishii was a gifted pupil with an extraordinary memory and almost superhuman energy. His real brilliance, however, was his political shrewdness. Sycophantic to his superiors and domineering to his subordinates, Ishii was adept at manipulating others for his own benefit.

In 1927, Ishii read a report that immediately piqued his interest. It concerned the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of chemical warfare. If it was banned, he reasoned, it must be powerful, and so began his lifelong interest in biological warfare research. Ishii lobbied for the military to conduct research into germ warfare, but it wasn’t until 1930 that the army leaders and political atmosphere were receptive to his requests. That year, he became professor of immunology at the Tokyo Army Medical College and was promoted to a major within the army, thus beginning his rapid advancement through the ranks.

Shiro Ishii

Ishii was regarded as both eccentric and brilliant. Although he had detractors, such as army Surgeon General Hiroshi Kambayashi, who labelled him an ‘ambitious boaster’, his opponents were in the minority. Amid the nationalist fervour of the new decade, Ishii was able to convince his superiors that biological warfare was the way of the future. In 1932, the dean of the Army Medical College, Chikahiko Koizumi, set aside funds and land to create a building for Ishii’s use. From there, Ishii expanded his biological warfare operation to Manchuria, and then to other parts of China and Singapore.

In the paper, ‘Japanese Pacifism: Problematic Memory’, Mikyoung Kim explores the conflicted nature of Japan’s postwar collective memory, entangled as it is with Japan’s multiple identities: Asia–Pacific aggressor, nuclear bombing victim, and postwar pacifist advocate. Referencing the ideas of psychologist Hayao Kawai and sociologist Takeshi Ishida, Kim cites the ‘empty centre’ at the core of Japanese mind and culture as the reason for the perceived Japanese moral ambiguity towards their wartime past:

The empty centre, asserts Ishida, embodies a situational logic for conflict avoidance, not necessarily conflict resolution. The end result is temporary pacification, not permanent reconciliation ... Because aesthetic principles take higher priority in the Japanese mind than moral aspirations … tensions aroused by the cultural dichotomies of tatemae-honne (front vs. honest inner feelings) and omote-ura (visible vs. hidden layers of self) are mitigated. In terms of Kawai and Ishida’s mental topography, this is because they are resolved [sic] of the vacuous centre which filters out moralistic sentiments. The Japanese are therefore inclined to perform situationally appropriate actions divorced from genuine feelings ... As the empty centre filters out the unpleasant engagements with one’s own sins, difficult memories make the past unusable.

Japan has repeatedly been accused of ‘historical amnesia’ in relation to its wartime aggression, due to the government’s reluctance to officially apologise to victims, and also because of several history textbook controversies from the 1950s to today, in which ministry-approved textbooks were censored or revised to downplay Japan’s aggression in Asia. Yet certain trends in the population run counter to this idea of wilful forgetting. Seiichi Morimura’s book about Unit 731, Akuma No Hoshoku (The Devil’s Gluttony, 1981), sold 1.5 million copies in Japan and catapulted Japan’s biological warfare program into mainstream consciousness. From July 1993 until December 1994, the Unit 731 exhibition organised by Torii, Nasu, and others, toured sixty-one locations in Japan and attracted more than 250,000 visitors. Their popularity indicates that Japanese people are not amnesic, but are in fact deeply engaged with their wartime past.

The postwar trend to diminish and conceal past atrocities, and the more recent movement to expose and learn more about Japan’s conflicted past reflect a schism within society. In Japan’s Contested War Memories (2007), media scholar Philip Seaton argues for a pluralistic view – one that highlights the diversity of contested war memories in Japan:

[T]he term ‘memory rifts’ symbolises the divisions deep beneath the surface ... [T]here is a rift between, on the one hand, liberal Japanese (‘progressives’, shinpoha), who see apology and atonement for the past as the best way to restore self-respect and international trust; and on the other hand conservatives, who see a positive version of history and commemoration of the sacrifice of the war generation as the best way to achieve national pride.

My second visit to Tokyo to research the human remains followed in May 2013, when the city was in the full thrust of spring. Vegetation crowded the parks in near-violent abundance. Children dawdled on their way home from school, woozy in the sun. The drab palette and brisk wind of two months previous had vanished. Tokyo was a different being; the city felt entirely new.

With my surroundings rinsed clean of winter’s torpor, I met Norio Minami, the lawyer engaged in the lawsuit to halt the cremation of the bones. His office was a short stroll from Shinjuku Gyoen, the manicured park with elaborate Japanese and European-style gardens that was once the domain of a feudal lord.

As the first human rights lawyer I had ever met, Minami was not what I expected. I had envisaged a gruff, sports jacket-wearing type, weary from the vicissitudes of life. With his thick, wavy hair and trim navy suit, Minami looked more like a classical composer. Throughout the two hours we spent talking, Minami was earnest and unfailingly polite.

Norio Minami (photographed by Christine Piper)

As we sat inside a partitioned enclosure within his office, Minami explained that he had become involved in the case of the human remains because of his interest in the civilian activism movement. Through his contacts, a group of concerned citizens, headed by Keiichi Tsuneishi and whose members included Torii, approached him. Local governments in Japan are legally obliged to cremate unidentified bodies, and the group wanted to take legal action to prevent that outcome: ‘I knew from the beginning we wouldn’t win the case … But by raising the issue we thought we could get public attention and make people aware of the fact there were many human bones found that remain unidentified … and by that, stop the cremation.’

Minami, who is fifty-nine, contacted former Unit 731 members to gather evidence for the case. One of the people he approached was Mr Okada (not his real name), who had an administrative role within the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. In the postwar years, Okada had become involved in the peace, democracy, and anti-nuclear movements, and so he initially co-operated with Minami. At the first few meetings, Okada talked about the unit’s experiments with bacteria and rats, but he didn’t say anything about human experimentation. It wasn’t until the third or fourth interview that Okada divulged that he had been involved in human experimentation in China:

He eventually revealed to me he killed people ... This was a fact he never disclosed to anyone else, not even his family members … his wife, kids – nobody … When I later asked for permission to include that part in his statement, he became vague, saying, ‘I don’t really remember ...’

Okada had agreed to testify in court, but on the day he was due to appear he said he wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t go. He eventually provided a written statement that made no mention of human experimentation. ‘I’m sure he really wanted to confess. It must have been a weight on his heart for a very long time … I’m sure he wanted to, but he could not. People were pushed into such a situation because the government did not admit what happened. That led me to be involved in the lawsuit to sue the government for not admitting the atrocities.’

I asked Minami whether he pitied the Unit 731 members because he felt they had no choice. He looked down, deep in thought. Strain showed in the folds of skin around his eyes. ‘That is a very difficult question,’ he said. ‘If I look at the situation from a third-person point of view, I think: there must have been other ways. But if I put myself in the shoes of the former members, if I were really there – I don’t know. There is a high possibility I would have committed the same things. I have interviewed many former Unit 731 members who told me they eventually became numb … I can’t say I would not turn into one of those people … Humans are weak. You never know what you might do.’

In the low hum of his office, filled with the murmur of voices, the whirr of the copier and the occasional trill of telephones, Minami reflected on the silences of the past – silences decreed by institutions and enacted by individuals. Through the judicial process, Minami hoped to foster relief by encouraging perpetrators to speak out. ‘I knew [the former Unit 731 members] were suffering … [T]hey were suffering because of their guilt and they couldn’t speak out. I wanted to release them, in a way.’

In 1995, Minami filed a compensation claim at the Tokyo District Court on behalf of families of Chinese victims of Unit 731 experimentation. Through his involvement in the case, Minami became close to several of the plaintiffs:

There is one woman whose husband was sent to Unit 731 for experimentation … When we visited the place where she was tortured by the Japanese military police, she insisted I stay at her house because, she said, ‘You’re my son.’There is another lady who was a victim of the Nanjing Massacre. When I interviewed her, her son came. During the interview, the son said something to his mother, and she started berating him. I asked the interpreter what they were talking about. Apparently the son said, ‘Since we need to buy medicine and other necessities, maybe you should ask him for some money.’ She rejected the idea immediately and told her son to get out of the room, which he did. These were the moments when I felt what I had been doing paid off. There were many moments when I wanted to quit. There were times I spent more money than I earned. But these encounters, these relationships and the feeling of connection has been invaluable … this comes from human relationships and the fact we believe in each other.

The court rejected the compensation claim in 2002, on the grounds that China had waived its rights to war reparations when it signed the 1972 Japan–China peace treaty, establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries. Despite the plaintiffs’ loss, they achieved one breakthrough: the court acknowledged the existence of Unit 731 and its ‘cruel and inhumane’ activities in China – the first time a court in Japan had done so. The legal team appealed the ruling, but the case was eventually rejected by the Supreme Court.

One of the reasons why Japan has hitherto failed to come to terms with its past is that many of the perpetrators of war crimes returned to positions of power. Minami said: ‘Germany was able to carry out objective war compensation, because none of the former Nazi members became a part of the régime after the war. Whereas in Japan, those responsible for wartime atrocities remained within the régime.’ An example of this continuation of power is the current conservative prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, who is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, minister of commerce and industry from 1941 to 1945 and prime minister from 1957 to 1960. As a member of Japan’s war cabinet, Kishi oversaw the forced conscription of hundreds of thousands of Korean and Chinese labourers. He spent three years in prison as a suspected Class-A war criminal, but was never tried.

‘One of the reasons why Japan has hitherto failed to come to terms with its past is that many of the perpetrators of war crimes returned to positions of power.’

‘Another reason,’ Minami continued, ‘was Germany was surrounded by developed countries that demanded Germany’s responsibility for the war. Whereas Japan was surrounded by developing Asian countries, so the pressure was relatively low. Japan was a large economic power, so the other Asian countries thought they had to put up with Japan’s refusal to make amends for its past actions.’ Japan’s nuclear bomb victim identity further complicated matters, as international pressure on Japan to make amends for its wartime aggression was diminished due to the bomb’s devastating legacy.

Shiro Ishii and others connected to Japan’s biological warfare program escaped prosecution through a secret immunity deal with the United States. At the end of the war, with the Russians poised to invade Manchuria, Ishii instructed staff at the units to kill remaining prisoners, destroy all evidence of experimentation and dynamite the compounds. Plague-infested rats were released into local areas, causing an outbreak of the disease that eventually killed 30,000 people. Ishii returned to Japan, where he spent several years in hiding and even fabricated a story that he had been shot dead. Meanwhile, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were rising, with both nations eager to access data from Japan’s biological warfare research to use for their own military advantage. The United States brokered a deal first, agreeing to exempt the leaders from prosecution for war crimes in exchange for the data. Edwin Hill, the chief of US Army Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick in Maryland, reported that the information gained from Japan’s biological warfare program was ‘absolutely invaluable’, ‘could never have been obtained in the US because of scruples attached to experiments on humans’, and ‘was obtained fairly cheaply’ (as quoted in Factories of Death by Sheldon Harris [2002]). At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal), only one reference to ‘poisonous serums’ used on Chinese civilians was made. It was swiftly dismissed due to lack of evidence. A year later, in late 1949, the Soviet Union held a separate tribunal, the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials. All twelve accused Japanese military personnel were found guilty of manufacturing and using biological weapons, with sentences from two to twenty-five years at a Siberian labour camp. However, all were released back to Japan by 1956; the longest sentence served by anyone connected to Japan’s biological warfare research was seven years. Neither Shiro Ishii, nor the second commander of Unit 731, Masaji Kitano, nor Ishii’s deputy at the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, Ryoichi Naito, were ever tried.

‘Humans are weak. You never know what you might do.’

In the decades following the war, former bacteriological warfare scientists became presidents of universities, deans of medical schools, and representatives of government agencies, many receiving public honours. ‘[O]nce freed of the danger of war crimes trials, alumni of the biological warfare units were able to assume leading roles in the postwar Japanese medical and scientific communities,’ writes Sheldon Harris in a chapter of Military Medical Ethics, Volume 2 (2002). Naito Ryoichi went on to found the Green Cross Corporation in 1950. It became one of Japan’s leading pharmaceutical companies, until it was rocked by scandal in 1998 when it was found guilty of selling HIV-infected blood, leading to at least 400 deaths.

Ishii’s activities after the war are unclear. Some historians believe he went to Maryland to advise the United States on bioweapons, while Ishii’s daughter Harumi maintains he stayed in Japan and opened a clinic, dedicating himself to the welfare of children. In any case, while most of his colleagues advanced their careers, Ishii withdrew from public life. He died at home of throat cancer in 1959. According to his daughter, he converted to Catholicism in his final years, which seemed to bring him peace.

In Minami’s office in Shinjuku, the room was quiet. It was past six o’clock in the middle of Golden Week holidays, and nearly all the other workers had gone home. Darkness was gathering outside. Almost two hours into our discussion, Minami was still carefully choosing his words, the same sincere expression on his face. If not for people such as Minami, agitating for change, the matter of the bones would have fallen into obscurity in Japan long ago. ‘In the case of Germany, it was more of a top-down decision. The government made a decision to compensate, and this was handed down to the people,’ he said. ‘But in Japan, this approach is difficult to achieve. You have to change the society – change the people – first, and then there will be a bottom-up movement that will eventually change the attitude of the government. But this will take time.’

The National Institute of Infectious Diseases sits atop a hill adjacent to Toyama Park. The bricks of the low-rise building are a pale cobalt blue – perhaps the architect’s attempt to give the building some cheer. Torii, Nasu, and I entered through the sliding glass doors and provided our details for the visitor register. After a few minutes, a guard appeared and started escorting us towards the monument for the bones. Torii, pausing in front of an alcove at the corner of the building that framed a network of pipes, said: ‘This is where the bones were found in 1989. In the basement, to be exact. That spot is currently used as the library, meaning the people researching in the library are doing that together with the bones.’ He spoke with a slight smile.

As we continued down the path, anticipation rose inside me. The monument to the unidentified bones was the highlight of the walk. Not only is it a memorial to the unidentified victims, it is also a symbol of Japan’s contested memory – a permanent and a temporary resting place, depending on whose view one takes. The members of the Human Remains association still hope to DNA-test the bones and send them to their village of origin, although very little progress has been made in the past decade. Before my visit to Japan, I had seen the monument in photos online, but I wanted to see it in person to pay my respects.

The monument to the bones erected by the ministry in 2002 (photographed by Christine Piper)

I looked up. Silver clouds shredded the sky. We walked a few more steps, turned a corner, and then I saw it. Beneath the branches of a cherry tree, the memorial sat, all sleek black lines and sharp corners, a symbol for clean, ordered Japan – the Japan of tea ceremonies and minimalist design. Although it was a suitably grand structure, the block of granite seemed to speak of the anonymity of the bones and of the cruelty of the régime that carried out the killings. A plaque affixed to one side read:

On this site stood the former Army Medical College until 1945. In July 1989, when Toyama Research Office was due to be constructed, human remains thought to be specimens belonging to the Army Medical School were excavated. This plaque is to offer our deepest condolences to the deceased.

Ministry of Health and Labour, March 2002

At the rear of the monument, cement steps descend to a metal door. Inside, the bones are stored in fourteen wooden boxes stacked on metal alloy shelves. I imagined them jumbled together, like the clutter of offices in Japan, so often hidden from public view. For years, the bones were stored in cardboard boxes at the funeral parlour, until one of the victims’ relatives visited Japan and demanded to know whether any progress had been made regarding them. ‘The answer she received was that the bones were moved from cardboard boxes into wooden boxes,’ Torii said.

Where we stood at the top of the hill, the wind was strangely absent. It was quiet, almost preternaturally so. Someone was playing tennis nearby. I heard the pop of a ball hit back and forth, a metronome to our solemnity. It brought to mind every case brought to court, the rejections and appeals, the constant back and forth – a game of perseverance, drawn out over years.

My mood was sombre as I tried to think of the people to whom the bones once belonged. But with the remains hidden inside the obelisk, I struggled to feel any true connection or to grasp the extent to which they had been wronged.

Two kanji characters are inscribed on the monument’s polished flank. ‘Seiwa’is how they are read. It is an invented word, chosen by someone within the ministry, combining two common characters for ‘quiet’ and ‘peace’. Although ‘quiet peace’ would be a fitting epitaph for most tombstones, in light of the unique situation of the remains, it seems a particularly cruel irony. Almost seventy years after the end of the war and twenty-five years since the discovery of the remains, the 233 human bones are still waiting, still silent.

The Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay was first presented in 2007 and has become Australia’s premier essay prize. Originally sponsored by Copyright Agency (through its Cultural Fund), Calibre is now funded by Australian Book Review. Here we gratefully acknowledge the generous support of ABR Patron Mr Colin Golvan SC.

Mark Blyth’s Austerity:The History of a Dangerous Idea is at heart a morality tale, or, more accurately, an account of two competing and diametrically opposed morality tales jostling to explain both the recent Global Financial Crisis (GFC) that engulfed much of Europe in 2008 and the austerity policies that were implemented by most governments in that region in its aftermath. According to proponents of austerity, economic growth can only be achieved through reductions in state spending. Blyth argues with great passion and intelligence that the austerity policies, which have involved severe cuts to government services and higher tax rates for average wage-earners, have not only caused great misery but are, in the end, economically counter-productive.

There is probably a subtle, composite word in Mandarin for it: the mixed elation and outrage of finding that something – a book, an artist, a secret holiday destination – which you privately cherished for its obscurity has been discovered by someone else. There must be a word for the chagrin attached to recognising that the intruder has possessed it more thoroughly; knew it first; has broken the unspoken pact and told everyone. If there is such a word, Linda Jaivin, sinologist and translator, will know it, and so would the McGuffin of her seventh novel, The Empress Lover. Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, who was also a sinologist and translator, has been a personal joy of this reviewer’s household: gentleman, scholar, baronet, adventurer, linguist, flamboyant aesthete, friend of Wilde, expatriate, hoaxer, enthusiastic homosexual, and, finally, according to his extravagant, long-suppressed ‘memoirs’, lover to the septuagenarian empress dowager of China. Now the gem glints dustily in a fiction of his own.

Cento after Peter Steele

Is this not running wild?
Silk-white ashes of dream and film
nerve into drama −
into darkness and its minotaur

In fact, we are a pack of jokers
cloaked but cold
taking to change as salamanders
were once thought to take to fire

Yes, such silk-white ashes
– their yield, their plenitude –
may as well be rained together
Love’s cost in a seared world

In the 1960s she was deemed an Irish Jezebel. After the publication of her début novel, The Country Girls (1960), the local postmistress told her father that a fitting punishment would be for her to be kicked naked through the town.

Now, a half century later, her litterateur countryman John Banville has introduced Edna O’Brien’s Collected Stories with unalloyed tribute: ‘She is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time.’ And on the flyleaf of her new memoir, Country Girl, Seamus Heaney’s praise for her incarnational language is paired with his grasp of its authentic, dark sources: ‘One great virtue of Edna O’Brien’s writing is the sensation it gives of a world made new by language … A lyric language which is all the more trustworthy because it issues from a sensibility that has known the costs as well as the rewards of being alive.’

All writers mine their lives, some most clearly through combining the autobiographical and the fictional, so that, as with Christopher Isherwood, their works become a mixture of the self-revelatory and observations of the worlds in which they have lived. In more recent times, no one has more closely followed Isherwood than Edmund White, now the author of more than twenty books, professor of writing at Princeton, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Craig Sherborne’s previous books include two memoirs, Hoi Polloi (2005) and Muck (2007), and an autobiographical novel, The Amateur Science of Love (2011). His second novel, Tree Palace, is an excursion outside the confines of the first-person narrative. First-person narrative does not of course always imply confinement, but in Sherborne’s case the mining of his own life experience has an intensity of focus and closeness of observation that reminds me of Lucian Freud’s painting. He has a way of pulling you into the room with him and making you look at the nakedness of others, holding you there to witness every nuance of exposure, physical and psychological. Sherborne’s fascination with bodily intimacy focuses on a sexual relationship in The Amateur Science of Love, but in the memoirs it arises from contemplation of evolving family resemblances from his youth and early adulthood through to his parents’ old age. They are a family of three, insular and closely interdependent, and the sense of confinement takes on a genetic dimension.

When did you first write for ABR?

June 2013.

Which critics most impress you?

Peter Brown on the ancient world, Terry Eagleton and Jim Holt on philosophy, Robert Evans and Ian Buruma on international relations, Joan Acocella and Janet Malcolm on anything. I don’t always agree with them, but they are knowledgeable, witty, revelatory writers. In Australia, Delia Falconer and James Bradley on fiction, Richard King on non-fiction, Geoff Page on poetry. I’ve had the privilege of editing them and always admired their clarity of thought and easy writing styles.

Electricity

Dear Editor,

Brian McFarlane’s review of Michael Blakemore’s memoir of his years at the National Theatre (February 2014) reminded me of my own experience of Laurence Olivier’s performance in Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1971.

Calibre Prize

Christine Piper is the winner of this year’s Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay. The judges – Morag Fraser and Peter Rose – chose Dr Piper’s essay from a field of 100 entries, and a shortlist of six. The essay, ‘Unearthing the Past’, is a worthy successor to last year’s winner, Martin Thomas’s celebrated ‘“Because it’s your country”: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land’. The similarities between the two, different though their subject matter is, are uncanny. Here the human remains – subject to historical wrongs committed by the Japanese prior to and during World War II – must be identified before they can be interred.

Christine Piper

Christine Piper – a freelance writer and editor who was born in South Korea to a Japanese mother and Australian father – writes about biological weapons and experiments on living human beings. The remains of just some of the victims (the overall death toll is estimated at 250,000 to 300,000) were discovered in Tokyo twenty-five years ago. They have never been identified.

The story takes Dr Piper to Japan, where she interviews key lawyers and activists who are seeking answers – and the identities. We also meet the unspeakable Shiro Ishii, dubbed the Josef Mengele of Japan. Ishii, who masterminded Japan’s biological warfare program, escaped prosecution through an immunity deal with the United States. He died at home in 1959.

This is bracing, urgent journalism at its very best, and we congratulate Dr Piper, as we do the other shortlisted essayists. Read ‘Unearthing the Past’ online.

On learning that she had won the Calibre Prize, Christine Piper, who is currently in the United States, told Advances: ‘I am honoured to be chosen as the winner, and delighted that my essay will have a wide audience thanks to Australian Book Review and Colin Golvan. I’d like to dedicate the award to the activists who have spent years campaigning and raising awareness about this dark chapter of Japan’s past.’

This is the eighth time that ABR has offered the Calibre Prize, which is intended to advance the essay form in this country. We look forward to presenting Calibre again next year, and here we gratefully acknowledge the crucial and generous support of Mr Colin Golvan SC.

Roving Blog

To complement our burgeoning coverage of the arts, we have created the Roving Blog. Every couple of months we will appoint a new blogger to write about, well, all manner of things – from books and theatre to politics and society – anything that takes their fancy, really; in ways that will engage our diverse, enquiring readers. The blogger will present at least four substantial posts during his or her tenure, some of which may appear in the print edition; and will also engage with our readers through social media.

We’re delighted that Fiona Gruber, who will be well known to ABR readers, is our inaugural blogger. Fiona is a journalist and producer with twenty years’ experience writing and broadcasting across the events. Her interests are multifarious. Keep an eye on our website – and expect the unexpected!

David Malouf

Deakin Edge at Melbourne’s Federation Square holds about 500 people – and just as well. The response to ‘An Evening with David Malouf’, to be held on Wednesday, 23 April, has been exceptional. David will be in conversation with ABR’s Poetry Editor, Lisa Gorton.

As we go to press, we still have some spaces available. If you wish to attend, please contact us by email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This is a free event, by general admission. At the conclusion of David Malouf and Lisa Gorton’s conversation, there will be a very special announcement about ABR and David, so do stay on after the questions. ABC TV’s  Big Ideas will film this event for subsequent presentation.

Earth Hour

Lisa Gorton, in her review of Earth Hour (March 2014), spoke of the imaginative continuity in David Malouf’s published work as it has appeared over more than half a century. ‘What is astonishing in Malouf’s work is the way it opens to his readers the experience of writing itself, the state of experiencing reality through the body and imagination at once.’

This month we have five signed copies of Earth Hour to present to new subscribers. Those hoping to obtain a copy should phone or email Grace Chang (03 9699 8822 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). We’d encourage you to do so early in the month.

$200,500 n.o.

Private patrons and philanthropic foundations have enabled the magazine to broaden its publishing and support Australian writers through non-traditional programs. Lately, we’ve been doing our sums. The combined value of the Porter Prize, the Calibre Prize, the Jolley Prize, and the writers’ fellowships stands at $200,500. This is on top of our normal fees for contributors. Happily, the latter continue to rise. We have been able to lift them by forty per cent since March 2013, and this is a trend we aim to maintain.

We list all our current Patrons online. Currently we have 130 of them. Please contact the Editor if you are interested in becoming a Patron.

Two bites of the cherry

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize may be the most alliterative prize in the country, but it is by no means the only poetry competition on offer. There are some fantastic opportunities for poets – none more lucrative than the remarkable University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, which is worth a total of a cool $25,000. This is now open for the first time, with a closing date of 30 May 2014.

Poets concerned about food and sustainability might be interested in another new competition, the Secondbite Poetry Competition, which has been founded by Anne Carson. She told Advances that Secondbite seeks to promote the food rescue charity of the same name and to raise awareness of ‘the appalling food waste in Australia and the plight of people who are food insecure’.

Judith Beveridge and Chris Wallace-Crabbe will prepare the shortlist, and noted restaurateur and ABR contributor Gay Bilson will join the panel to select the winner and two runners-up. The former will receive $5,000; the latter pair $500 each. Entries close on 30 May. For more details see: www.secondbite.org

Maxine Beneba Clarke

It’s a propitious time for Maxine Beneba Clarke, whose poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in many periodicals. Last year she won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript with her first collection of short stories, Foreign Soil. Hachette Australia will publish the book in May this year.

Maxine Beneba Clarke has now won the 2014 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, which commemorates the life and achievements of the distinguished biographer Hazel Rowley, who died in 2011.  The Fellowship, which is worth $10,000, will enable Clarke, who is of Afro-Caribbean descent, to work on ‘a memoir of growing up black in white middle-class Australia’.

Jolley Prize

You still have time to enter the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. It doesn’t close until 1 May. See our website for full details (you can enter online as well). The shortlist and the overall winner will be announced at a ceremony during the Melbourne Writers’ Festival (Saturday, 30 August). The three chosen writers will receive a total of $8,000.

Two years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld published a partial biography of Mahatma Gandhi (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, 2011), which outraged public opinion in India and served as a vehicle for the self-promotion of leading politicians who railed against the supposed contents. Although the book was not yet available on the subcontinent, and so had not been read by the politicians, populist calls for its banning came thick and fast. The controversy could be traced back to a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal by an admirer of Gandhi’s nemesis Winston Churchill. The reviewer claimed that Lelyveld’s book allowed the reader to conclude that Gandhi ‘was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist’, not to mention a homosexual and a racist, something that the book itself did not say.

Usually, significant books are revisited on significant anniversaries. By these lights, Mike Berry’s critical re-evaluation of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society should have appeared in 2008, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication. In this instance, we can be grateful that normal publishing practice has not been followed, for it enables Berry to incorporate the momentous events of the past five years into his analysis and to interrogate the insights that Galbraith’s scholarship might bring to bear on the causes and repercussions of the Global Financial Crisis that hit shortly after the great economist’s death in 2006.

Berry declares his intentions to be modest: he does not attempt to rewrite The Affluent Society for the twenty-first century or to provide a biography of the book or its author. Rather, he describes his revisiting of Galbraith as ‘an exploratory (and personal) foray into the increasingly perplexing present and an increasingly uncertain future, resting on a sturdy, if ageing guide’. This is an ambitious enough project in itself and one that enables Berry to develop a critique of the prevailing economic orthodoxy and its failures in relation to the GFC that is all the more powerful for being well informed and carefully argued.

Galbraith’s book took aim at the bedrock of what he called ‘the central tradition’ in economic theory: the idea – evident from Adam Smith (1723–90) onwards – that the primary concern of economics is with resolving the problem of scarcity (or to put it more technically, with finding the most efficient means to allocate scarce resources between competing ends). By the 1950s, Galbraith argued that, at least in the United States and comparable developed nations, scarcity was no longer the central issue. This was something that John Maynard Keynes had glimpsed in the midst of the Great Depression. In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), Keynes argued that, for most of history, ‘the primary, most pressing problem of the human race’ had been ‘the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence’, but that this would soon be solved. He predicted that by 2030, technological advancements and economic growth would lift living standards in ‘progressive countries’ between four and eight times, confronting human beings with a new existential dilemma:

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Keynes was wrong on two counts. First, living standards rose even more quickly than he predicted – his lower limit of a four-fold increase in GDP was achieved in just fifty years. Secondly, he overestimated the human capacity to convert that material abundance into meaningful leisure. Keynes anticipated that once scarcity was overcome and essential needs met, we would choose to work fewer hours – fifteen hours per week was his guesstimate – and would thus have time to ‘cultivate … the art of life itself’. We would come to understand that, as Aristotle put it, ‘wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else’. We would see money as ‘a means to the enjoyments and realities of life’ rather than an end itself, and so recognise that ‘love of money as a possession’ is ‘a somewhat disgusting morbidity’.

Galbraith shared with Keynes (and with John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx) the hope that, after solving ‘the economic problem’, humankind could get on with the more important business of cultivating ‘the art of life itself’. By the 1950s he could also see why that day had been indefinitely postponed. According to the theory of diminishing marginal utility, as goods become more readily available, their value declines. Once I have eaten six potatoes, a seventh is worth little to me. On this basis, the affluent society should reach a point of satiation, at least for essential goods like food, clothing, and shelter. Galbraith recognised, however, that what applies for a particular good does not hold true for goods in general. Having had my fill of potatoes, I may want to switch to truffles, or choose to eat my spuds with designer cutlery. As Berry puts it: ‘There may indeed be a hierarchy of need but no limit to what one wants. Once one set of goods is consumed, consumers move seamlessly in pursuit of a never-ending stream of new goods.’

Galbraith refuses to accept the dominant view that this behaviour is a given, the ‘natural’ outcome of the human psyche. In orthodox economics, our consumption patterns reveal our free choices as rational, self-interest maximising individuals – what we buy is evidence of what we want. Even before behavioural economics raised serious doubts about how rational our choices really are (by fully alerting us to the human susceptibility to cognitive bias), Galbraith was already asking the prior question: why do we want the things we choose? He also dares to make normative judgements – to declare that some wants are more valid and more important than others. As Galbraith recognised with trademark irony, this put him at odds with the mainstream of his profession: ‘Nothing in economics so quickly marks an individual as incompetently trained as a disposition to remark on the legitimacy of the desire for more food and the frivolity of the desire for a more expensive automobile.’

The idea that our wants are limitless fits neatly with the interests of those who profit from a system that validates economic growth and increasing GDP per capita as the primary goal of social organisation. For Galbraith, many contemporary wants are ‘contrived’ rather than ‘original’. They arise, via mass advertising, from the systemic requirement to keep expanding the production of goods and services that generate profits in a market economy. In other words, the market creates the very wants that it seeks to satisfy, which leaves consumers forever chasing their tails. For Galbraith, the economics profession is complicit in perpetuating this circularity: ‘For then the individual who urges the importance of production to satisfy these wants is precisely in the position of the onlooker who applauds the efforts of the squirrel to keep abreast of the wheel that is propelled by his own efforts.’

By tugging away at the foundation stone of scarcity, Galbraith was seeking to bring down other building blocks of conventional economic wisdom. If wants are contrived, the consumer is no longer sovereign because the market does not respond to our needs but forms them. As Berry notes, this raises questions about what Galbraith calls ‘“the paramount position of production”, our fixation with increasing the output of goods and services; any goods and services’.

The primacy of production shifts attention from what we produce to how much we produce. What the market delivers is by definition good, because it is what we choose, and what it fails to deliver is irrelevant (because there is no market for it). For Galbraith this upsets the ‘social balance’ resulting in an ‘over supply of privately produced goods and services’ that generate a profit, and an under supply of public goods and services that are essential to the ‘smooth functioning of the economy and society’. As a result, we can choose from an endless array of different flavoured potato chips, but struggle to find suitable childcare; we are bombarded with new ways to combat body odour, but cannot afford to bury overhead transmission lines that may spark catastrophic bushfires; we are offered ever more ways to gamble, but make no dent in homelessness. As Galbraith puts it, there is ‘an implacable tendency to produce an opulent supply of some things and a niggardly yield of others’. Any attempt to rebalance the system, by, for example, increasing taxes, runs up against the entrenched power of vested interest. Advertising reinforces these warped priorities: ‘[t]he engines of mass communication, in their highest stage of development, assail the eyes and ears of the community on behalf of new beverages but not of more schools.’ In the end, as Galbraith recognised, the economy is not some indifferent machine with its own intrinsic laws of operation; it is a system of social organisation shaped by power.

‘ ... we are offered ever more ways to gamble, but make no dent in homelessness.’

Nor can economics claim the status of a ‘value-free’ discipline – a kind of ‘social physics’ – for as long as its central goal is growing production, other concerns, like economic security and inequality, fade into the background. If scarcity is the core problem, primacy must be given to ‘squeezing the most output out of limited resources’. Questions about whether workers enjoy job security and how output is shared are secondary issues, particularly when the overall pie is growing. As long as everyone’s slice is getting bigger, the relative size of the portion is a less pressing issue: growth is ‘the great solvent of the tensions associated with inequality’.

Berry finds it understandable that in the first edition of The Affluent Society Galbraith underestimated the persistence and perniciousness of inequality and all but dismissed poverty as a non-issue – he was, after all, writing at a point in the twentieth century when the income gap between rich and poor had been declining for several decades as developed nations became more ‘middle class’. By the 1980s this process had begun to reverse. Between 1979 and 2006 the average income of the top one per cent in the United States rose by 256 per cent, compared to an income rise of just eleven per cent for the bottom fifth of society.

Galbraith was alert to a different problem arising from the primacy of production: that it requires an increasing, and increasingly dangerous, dependence on debt. As he noted, in a system that spends billions creating wants via advertising, the logical next step is to finance those wants. The levels of household debt that worried Galbraith in the 1950s looks ‘ludicrously small’ today, but in them, says Berry, Galbraith identified the roots of our current global crisis – a ‘consumption-fuelled boom that was based on the general acceptance of growth as the litmus test of economic success’.

This is a stimulating book, and not just because it leads us back to Galbraith’s original work. Berry, like Galbraith, reminds us that orthodox economics does not ‘adequately explain the human condition’ and so makes a less than reliable guide for public policy.

I have never met a pope, but I have sometimes felt their shadow. In 1981, at the tender age of nineteen, I was a novice in the Jesuit order. We lived in a vast establishment in Sydney: the community included naïve youngsters such as myself, wily old retired Jesuits, as well as representatives of every age group in between. It was quite a fun place to live. One day, we were all summoned to a community meeting, a rare event for such a large group. The rector solemnly read out a special letter which announced the fact that Pope John Paul II had sacked the superior general of the Jesuits, the much-loved and saintly Father Pedro Arrupe. It was clear to me that even those Jesuits who had seen everything had never seen anything like this. The mood was sombre.

Pope Francis (photograph by Casa Rosada)

The years ahead would be difficult. John Paul II was an admirable man in many ways, but under his influence the Catholic Church became obsessed with the controlling influence of the papacy rather than with the liberating influence of Jesus Christ. John Paul II became the centre of years of what you might call popolatry. The test of belonging to the Catholic Church became loyalty to the pope rather than a search for God through a relationship with Christ. To provide just one example: I had the opportunity in 2000 to interview Professor George Weigel, an American who had just written a massive and absorbing biography of John Paul II. The American had been given unprecedented access to the ailing pope and the result was a very sympathetic book. I asked Weigel if, in all his research, there was a single issue about which he disagreed with the pope. His answer surprised me. He said there was just one. He had believed that when John Paul II made his statement in 1994 that women were never ever going to be ordained to the Catholic priesthood, the pope should have given reasons for his pronouncement. Admittedly, this would have been difficult, as there were no plausible reasons to give, a reason being something different from a rationalisation. Weigel then conceded to me that he later realised that the pope had been wise after all, because the church’s teaching would never change, although the reasons for it might well change. I was thunderstruck. He was saying that you could find the arguments you needed to support the conclusion you wanted. Far from being an example of the objective truth about which the pope liked to speak, it was more like intellectual opportunism. The fact of the matter was that the teaching about the ordination of women was a test of loyalty.

‘The test of belonging to the Catholic Church became loyalty to the pope rather than a search for God through a relationship with Christ.’

Please excuse such a long preamble to a consideration of Paul Vallely’s biography of the Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now known as Pope Francis. I mention these recollections, and there are plenty of others that could have gone with them, only to explain the rare eagerness with which I devoured this book and the personal hunger I brought to its pages. There have been a number of books about Francis, some of them appearing almost as soon as he was elected a year or so ago. This is by far the best. It is sober, judicious, and well informed. It gets beyond both the hostile ranting and the infatuated clichés under which the institution of the papacy is often buried. It depicts Bergoglio as far more subtle than an ideological warrior.

Five years ago, it would have been inconceivable to me that a Jesuit could be elected to the papacy. Vallely explains how this came about. It is due partly to the fact that Bergoglio’s grandparents were poor emigrants from Italy and partly to the fact that, as a young priest, Bergoglio had a reputation for being conservative. But there was a real X-factor in the choice, and the first year of Francis’s papacy has surprised many. His style and substance are both different from anything we have seen for a long, long time. His first major work, The Joy of the Gospel, is the most invigorating papal document of my lifetime.

Vallely argues that Bergoglio brings one major advantage to the job. John Paul II had the great misfortune of never having been wrong in his life. This is not true of Bergoglio. Indeed, at the time of the conclave in 2005, which elected Benedict XVI, Bergoglio was undermined by a group of cardinals who made sure everyone knew about his ambiguous role in Argentina’s dirty war. Bergoglio was, at the time, a young leader of the Jesuits in Argentina. His ineptitude, to put it mildly, led to the imprisonment and torture of two Jesuit priests, Fathers Jalics and Yorio. Vallely painstakingly demonstrates how that scarifying experience was the beginning of a seismic shift within Bergoglio. It led to his profound commitment to the poor and rejection of the trappings of power. He became ‘the bishop of the slums’. He became prepared to stand up against the culture of clericalism and privilege, the world of ‘father knows best’, which has so deeply exacerbated the crisis of sexual abuse.

A lot of people have written off the papacy as an antiquated force that postures most unhelpfully in a world where genuine spiritual hungers are excited by an engagement with reality rather than a flight from it. Vallely’s book may just provoke them to think again. It portrays a man of quiet and humble depth and an institution that needs to do more than look after itself.

What’s missing from this floor?
The furniture, but also the reason

I take a straw broom to the damp leaves on the side path.
The concrete pavers are stained and dirty as they have been
for much of the year. Stooping allows me to see

for Sophie

You are seething; I am worried.
We have read the Greek myths.

Why does illness create such a marked need for story? Why do we want to read about other people’s illnesses and talk or write about our own? At the most basic level, it is surely because human beings always need stories. Indeed, neuroscientists believe that narrative consciousness is hard-wired into our brains. But what is it about illness in particular that invites narrative? Sociologist Arthur Frank suggests that a crucial aspect is that illness threatens us physically, existentially, and spiritually. In The Twelfth Raven, poet and psychologist Doris Brett confronts these threats with honesty and clarity. The result is an illness memoir as memorable as Eating the Underworld (2001), her remarkable book about ovarian cancer.

In this case, Brett is writing about her husband Martin’s stroke in 2009 and the severe complications that ensued. She is now in the role of partner rather than patient, although near the end of the book Brett also undergoes surgery. While Eating the Underworld was a combination of journal entries, poems, and short fiction, this book, told chronologically over a span of three and a half years, is written in a more traditional memoir form, with only two poems included. The book has a classic memoir beginning. Brett and Martin have packed all they need for a dance workshop. ‘We are prepared for everything. Absolutely everything. Except for what happens.’ What happens is that Martin suddenly finds himself unable to talk. They are soon in an ambulance on their way to hospital, where it becomes clear that Martin has had a stroke.

There are many turns in the story of Martin’s stroke and subsequent heart problems and in Brett’s advocacy and care for him. They become interesting not just because Brett makes us care about Martin, but also because of the observations she makes on the whole process of illness. For example, she recognises the importance of witnessing other people’s pain, the need for the physical presence of family and friends (emails or phone calls do not offer the same salve), the loneliness of being a carer, and the loss of self that can come with serious illness. Brett also describes the way the health system itself can hinder successful treatment: the hierarchy of specialists, their inability to talk to one another, poor provision of information to patients, the underfunded wards with overworked staff, and the endless waiting for beds, specialists, nurses, registrars, therapists. Anyone who has spent time in the public hospital system will recognise these situations, though few of us deal as effectively with them as Brett seems to have done. It is clear that Martin’s recovery was partly due to Brett’s research and advocacy skills and her ability to dedicate time and energy to his situation. Sometimes Brett leaves the detail of her own story and interior landscape and moves into a more generic discussion of issues, such as the need to treat depression in stroke sufferers. I found these sections less engaging and the tone-shifts uncomfortable, but the content will be useful to some readers.

‘She describes the sense of being split into several selves, a common response to times of crisis and illness.’

The fear and shock that accompany serious illness are vividly described in this book, as when Brett breaks down and howls like an animal faced with the ‘infinity of black water under ice’. She describes the sense of being split into several selves, a common response to times of crisis and illness. As Martin’s health improves, Brett gradually moves back into a more normal life. She notes: ‘It feels comfortingly safe and stable until suddenly, with the flick and speed of a switchblade, I am plunged back into the realisation, not just of what might have happened, but of what will eventually happen. And normality vanishes into the knowledge of death.’ This is the existential threat that, Frank suggests, illness provokes.

Brett is particularly interesting on the role of creativity and the effects of writing about illness. She read as many memoirs as she could by partners of those with serious illness, noting, ‘Memoirs became my only way of spending time with a fellow traveller.’ Clearly, she intends The Twelfth Raven to offer others the same solace. But she also notes that writing itself is in some way a counterbalance to grief and loss. During Martin’s illness, Brett wrote regular email updates to her friends; she includes some of these in her book. Their tone is markedly different from the rest of the memoir: they are deliberately humorous and non-threatening, written to amuse and inform, but never to frighten her ‘audience’ off. This is the tone of much first-person Internet discussion about illness, as well as of many of the everyday self-protective conversations we have. For me, the comparison between the updates and the rest of the book highlighted the value of memoirs like The Twelfth Raven: they provide a space for honest, deep, and crafted reflection on issues that affect us all but that we may not explore in other spaces.

According to Brett, the twelfth raven represents ‘joy for tomorrow’ and her book certainly ends on a positive note. The raven is also a trickster, a spirit that breaks convention and causes chaos, destroying thoughtlessly but also bringing gifts. The trickster – like illness – reminds us that human beings must live in a contingent world, that our illusion of control is just that, an illusion. Brett the writer may also be a trickster, offering us both a story of destruction and a gift.

The relationship between the world of soldiers and the world of civilians has long been a topic of interest to historians and other scholars of war. Joan Beaumont’s significant new book Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (reviewed in ABR, February 2014) emphasises the importance of considering the war front and home front side by side, and argues that it is impossible to understand one without the other. In recent work I have been undertaking, recovering the traces of the language of Australian soldiers in World War I, I was intrigued by the way in which the press throughout the war years commented on, and wrote about, this language.

Moira McKinnon practised as a community doctor in Halls Creek, in the Kimberley, where her first novel Cicada is also set. She was joint winner of the 2011 Calibre Prize for her essay ‘Who Killed Matilda?’, the story of an Aboriginal woman whose audacity and traditional knowledge prompted McKinnon to question the efficacy of Western medicine and philosophy.

This début novel by Melbourne writer Suzanne McCourt is a coming-of-age story set in the wild coastal landscape of the Coorong in the 1950s. Writing from the point of view of a child, McCourt captures the heightened sensibility of her narrator, Sylvie, to portray a family in devastating close-up and a natural world teeming with smells and sounds and sights.

During World War II, billeted Axis POWs were deemed such a threat to the morals of British women that theBritish government enacted legislation proscribing amorous fraternisation. Although these laws were rescinded in the conflict’s aftermath, Jo Riccioni’s début novel demonstrates that the appeal of the foreigner endured, as a family of Italians arrive to disrupt the postwar calm of Leyton, an east London farming community.

A chronicle of Nigeria in the turbulent 1960s, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) is, to put it crudely, a page-turner: a story of love, sex, betrayal, horror, heartbreak, and, ultimately, forgiveness. In other words, ideal material for cinema: it is easy to understand why this film adaptation has been described by its star Thandie Newton as a Nigerian Gone with the Wind.

Lawrence Williams is a twenty-year-old New Zealander about to commence studying art history at the Sorbonne. Stranded at a deserted train station in the French town of Hendaye after a less-than-perfect holiday in Madrid with his girlfriend, he is suddenly arrested by the sight of a woman twice his age who saunters past him in a white leopard-print dress. A few pages later, the unlikely pair are having drinks at a nearby cafe.

‘Fields of Vision’, the first story of Abbas El-Zein’s collection, introduces us to a world in which tragedy is swift and often arbitrary, and if not arbitrary, at least stems from motivations so obscure as to appear so. The sniper protagonist of this story, perched atop his Beirut rooftop, picks off citizens at random, revelling in his having ‘a place in their lives’. He sits outside society and is yet an inherent part of it. This is true of all El-Zein’s protagonists, at once divorced from their various cultures and vitally connected with them. Their actions are both reactions against and definitions of the worlds from which they stem.

Mark Dapin’s anthology, From the Trenches, is a timely but not opportunistic book. At more than 400 pages, it is long enough to suggest the sheer scale of the war and its centrality to European (if not world) history ever since. It samples all the relevant genres (letters, memoir, journalism, fiction, poetry) and offers a multiplicity of viewpoints (senior ranks, subalterns, NCOs, privates, and nurses). The book is not simplistically pro- or anti-war, but its overall message is unmistakable. The whole enterprise was a huge and bloody mistake, stupidly prolonged by inadequate politicians for more than four years.

Why does illness create such a marked need for story? Why do we want to read about other people’s illnesses and talk or write about our own? At the most basic level, it is surely because human beings always need stories. Indeed, neuroscientists believe that narrative consciousness is hard-wired into our brains. But what is it about illness in particular that invites narrative? Sociologist Arthur Frank suggests that a crucial aspect is that illness threatens us physically, existentially, and spiritually. In The Twelfth Raven, poet and psychologist Doris Brett confronts these threats with honesty and clarity. The result is an illness memoir as memorable as Eating the Underworld (2001), her remarkable book about ovarian cancer.

Franz Kafka lived in Prague in the early part of the twentieth century, during a period of considerable turmoil. Before succumbing to laryngeal tuberculosis aged forty, he witnessed the disintegration of an empire and the subsequent formation of a republic. Kafka also endured the administrative and domestic realities of a world war and was among millions of Europeans infected with Spanish flu. He barely survived the latter, and while Europe’s political convulsions certainly left their mark on the man, most efforts to bring Kafka’s fiction and life into an explanative relation have failed. Perhaps only Elias Canetti’s slim monograph on Kafka’s letters to Felice, Kafka’s Other Trial (1974), stands as the exception.

Lecturing in Vienna in 1999, Nick Cave outlined his theory on the nature of the love song. ‘Within the fabric of the Love Song … one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.’ Unless pain and longing simmer beneath the surface of the music, it isn’t a love song at all. What Lorca referred to as ‘duende’ and Cave himself calls ‘an inexplicable sadness’ at the heart of the love song is evidenced in even the most cursory sampling of his oeuvre. From the despairing lilt of ‘Where Do We Go Now but Nowhere’ to the apocalyptic cheer of ‘Straight to You’, the darkness and desperation of love are constants in his work.

There once was a boy named Lenny
Whose talents were varied and many
So many that he was inclined
Never to make up his mind
In fact he was so gifted
He never felt uplifted
Just undefined.
Poor Lenny – ten gifts too many
The curse of being versatile.
To show how bad the curse is
We’ll need a lot of verses
And take a little Weill.

Lauren Bacall performed Stephen Sondheim’s spoof of Kurt Weill’s ‘Jenny’ at Leonard Bernstein’s seventieth birthday

How does one get a handle on a phenomenon like Leonard Bernstein? The whirling dervish of the podium was also a brilliant pianist and a composer who wrote for both Broadway and the concert hall, although it is interesting that his most performed orchestral pieces, the overture to Candide and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, are both from his Broadway life. He was a great proselytiser for classical music, as one can still see in his Omnibus appearances and his Young People’s Concerts, and a strong advocate for American composers, but he was also a ruthless self-promoter, as some of his erstwhile friends and mentors found to their cost. A mostly happily married man and loving father, he was also a wildly promiscuous, mostly gay, Lothario.

‘Each note of the nightingale’s song is sung in only one tenth of a second. For humans to be able to appreciate the nuances of those elaborate performances, the songs have to be recorded and slowed down for replay.’ So writes Teja B. Pribac, guest editor of the latest Southerly, subtitled Lyre/Liar. Pribac goes on to explain that her volume examines ‘emerging ethical implications of writing, with particular emphasis on representations of nonhuman animals’.

How many words does it take to write a life (or actually half a life) of movie star Barbara Stanwyck? Admittedly, she had a long career – she started in a revue chorus in 1921 at the age of fourteen and played in her last episode of the television series The Colbys in 1987 at the age of eighty – but 1044 pages that take us only to 1940? As Liz Smith quipped in the Chicago Tribune, ‘She was a great actress, but not Winston Churchill.’

In chapter fifteen of Middlemarch (1871–72), George Eliot writes about the germination of literary passion: ‘Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume … as the first traceable beginning of our love.’ Rebecca Mead’s book on her own engagement with Middlemarch captures this experience of burgeoning intellectual desire: the rush of recognition a reader can feel upon first encountering a novel, and the enduring relevance a beloved book might offer as its contents transform through frequent readings.

Lawrence Hill is the son of a white mother from Chicago (‘a kickass civil rights activist’) and a black father (‘most recently from Washington DC … urban, educated, lower middle class’), but grew up in Toronto. Blood: The Stuff of Life, the ninth of his books, originated as the Canadian Broadcasting Commission’s Massey Lectures, an annual series of broadcasts inaugurated in 1961 as a forum where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time. The Australian equivalent is the ABC’s Boyer Lectures.

When I was a child, comparing the behaviour of two people in my circle was formative. One would turn out to help in any situation, from raking dirt on the local school oval in a working bee to stopping the car late at night to check on an old man hanging over the rail at a city tram stop. He never talked much about these actions, nor dramatised the recipients’ needs, beyond saying, if asked, that it was the ‘right thing to do’. The other person would become so upset by other people’s troubles, and feel their pain so intensely, that she would end up a teary, hand-wringing mess and require calming herself, taking away attention and care from the person in need.

Twenty pages from the end of his New Selected Poems, Geoff Page imagines being ‘an heir of Whitman’, and muses that ‘I think I could turn awhile and write like the Americans, / they are so at ease in their syllables, irregular as eyelids, / various as the sea’. These lines are so cleverly Whitmanesque that the idea seems momentarily plausible. Only an astute reader will stop to think that the sea is hardly various at all – and how irregular are eyelids? Page’s poem, we might realise by this stage of the book, is presenting wry, understated humour, and this is one way in which he seems a deeply Australian poet, utterly unlike the Americans.

A good picture book melds a well-crafted text with illustrations that interpret and extend the narrative. The illustrator’s choice of artistic style is central to how effectively this combined narrative is communicated to readers.

Australian Children’s Laureate Jackie French and illustrator Bruce Whatley have had a long and successful collaborative relationship. Their latest picture book is Fire (Scholastic, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781742838175), a companion book to the award-winning Flood (2011). French poetically charts the fire’s progress, as it grows from a winding, creeping snake to a ‘blood-red wall’ that swallows all before it. Whatley interprets French’s text with a series of impressionistic double-page spreads that capture the growing horror of the bushfire. Caught up in the burning landscapes are those whose lives are affected: native animals fleeing the flames; firefighters struggling to cope with the enormity of the disaster; families grieving for what they have lost. In the end there is hope; the fire is extinguished, the bush regenerates, lives are rebuilt.

Why do you write?

To find expression for my thoughts, stories, and dreams;  to entertain, and sometimes to persuade.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, but I don’t write my dreams down. I let them sparkle and disintegrate.

Where are you happiest?

In the harbour, the sea, pools, the bath. When I was little I wanted to live in a house where all the furniture floated and you could swim from room to room. I still do.

Stephen Berkoff has always been the bad boy of British theatre. At East’s London première in 1975, the critics howled. Berkoff’s first play was filthy, with explicit references to sex and violence. Yes, the 1950s had spawned Kitchen Sink Drama, exposing the lives of the lower classes to a predominantly middle-class British stage. But Berkoff’s characters weren’t just battling East Enders. They were angry. They blamed the system. They were articulate.