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Title: Great Start, Then Crashes and Burns
Review: I couldn't put the book down, as they say, for its first half. Although I knew I was reading a Japanese view of WWII, it was nonetheless fascinating if terribly incomplete and as one sided as an American WWII propanganda film. Then when the book moves locales to the Basque region and modern times, it tumbles and falls deeply into coyness and predictability. All of a sudden, it's as if some ronin author barged in, drugged the first author and started writing some one dimensional cartoon novel. The characters become cardboard and cute and the protaganist's sermonizing puts him right up there with the Sunday T.V. preachers genre, albeit the protaganist is pushing a different theology.A good writer realizes there is no black and white in any character: within the circle there is the yin and the yang and even within each yin there is a little yang and vice versa. This makes for authenticity, for we see ourselves in the mixture.
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