Harp of Burma
Translated by Howard Hibbett
About
A company of Japanese soldiers fights a losing campaign in the jungles of Burma. Among them is a private who plays a Burmese harp to boost morale β his music the last thread of beauty in a landscape of disease, hunger, and death. When the war ends, this soldier makes a choice that separates him from his companions forever: he will stay behind, not as a deserter, but as a monk who buries the dead. Winner of Japan's prestigious Mainichi Shuppan Bunkasho prize, Michio Takeyama's novel is Japan's answer to All Quiet on the Western Front β a requiem that transforms the brutality of war into a meditation on compassion, duty, and the sacred obligation to honor those who didn't survive. A war novel that finds, in the act of mourning strangers, the beginning of something that might, eventually, deserve to be called peace.
