Grass For My Pillow

By Saiichi Maruya

First published in Japanese in 1966, the debut novel of the critically acclaimed author of Singular Rebellion is an unusual portrait of a deeply taboo subject in twentieth-century Japanese society: resistance to the draft in World War II. In 1940 Shokichi Hamada is a conscientious objector who dodges military service by simply disappearing from society, taking to the country as an itinerant peddler by the name of Sugiura until the end of the war in 1945. In 1965, Hamada works as a clerk at a conservative university, his war resistance a dark secret of the past that present-day events force into the light, confronting him with unexpected consequences of his refusal to conform twenty years earlier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2002
• ISBN: 9780231501576

Reviews for Grass For My Pillow

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To be a draft-resister during the Vietnam War was one thing; to be a draft-resister in Japan during WW II was considered a crime worse than murder, and was punishable by death. This novel relates the story of Shokichi Hamada, who successfully evaded military service during the war. He took on a pseudonym, and wandered the country as an itinerant peddler. After the war, he became a clerk at a university. Hamada's life in the present (1965) is interspersed with his life as a fugitive during the war. When certain events occur which highlight Hamada's past, which he has never tried to hide, he suffers the consequences, but also is forced to reconsider which was the better life--conforming to society's norms or living as his "own person."While the book is not antiwar per se (the war is entirely in the background), it is an examination of what it means for an individual to reject society's norms. One important theme is that postwar society in Japan was not all that different than prewar society in its expectations of its populace.This book is one of Haruki Murakami's favorite books, and in a lecture he has described the novel as an account of society at two particular moments in time, which contrasts the life of the "hero" Hamada was when evading the draft, with his current life as an alienated bureaucrat simply struggling to keep his place in society.