content: This is an excellent book, and of the Clavell books I have read (all except Gai-Jin), this has the most interesting, if not the best, ending. It seemed to me that Clavell got slightly redundant with the "natural disaster" ending, but he managed to avoid it in this book. I found that the way the story and the character's individual stories were resolved (or rather unresolved) fit perfectly with the insanity that would be occurring in a WWII prison camp. Oh yeah, the rest of the book is pretty cool, too