The Storm on Our Shores

March 1, 2019
A poignant chronicle of the deeply complicated emotions surrounding the American-Japanese hostility stoked by World War II.Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik (Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled--and Knuckleheaded--Quest for the Rocky Mountain High, 2009, etc.) narrates the multilayered tale of an aged American veteran of the ferocious battle of Attu Island who, decades later, visited the daughter of a Japanese surgeon he killed during that horrendous episode. This began a confluence of truth-seeking and reconciliation, a remarkable story that the author ably pieces together. He begins with the recovered diary that the Japanese surgeon, Paul Tatsuguchi, had left in his effects after his death. Tatsuguchi was raised by Japanese parents in California and became a devoted Seventh Day Adventist; as an adult, he returned to Japan with his new bride just before the war in 1939. The timing, of course, was terrible. Tatsuguchi was inducted into the Imperial Army as a physician, but due to the intense suspicion about his American background, he was not given the suitable rank of an officer. After the Pearl Harbor attack, Tatsuguchi was deployed overseas, ending up on the remote, forbidding Aleutian island outpost (and American possession) of Attu, which was seized by the Japanese in 1942. During the harsh winter he was stationed there, Tatsuguchi wrote his war diary, delineating the brutal conditions of his surgical duties amid the chaos of battle. Meanwhile, on the American side, Charles "Dick" Laird, a scrappy GI from Ohio, became part of the waves of invading U.S. troops determined to extract the Japanese from the island, but they were thwarted by their entrenched positions in foxholes and caves and mystified by their refusal to surrender. Obmascik has carefully and fairly sifted through the layers to this complex story, offering a tightly focused examination of the different, misleading translations of Tatsuguchi's diary as well as Laird's efforts to get the diary back to his family.An evenhanded, compassionate portrayal of the two deeply wounded sides to this story.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from March 18, 2019
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Obmascik (The Big Year) serves up a moving, intimate tale of two men, two families, and two countries that intersected at the forgotten WWII battle of Attu, an Alaskan island. Against a backdrop of racist fearmongering (the New York Times referred to the Japanese as “aboriginal savages,” and of immigrants from Axis countries only Japanese Americans were singled out for internment), Obmascik introduces readers to Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, a Japanese man who moved to California for medical school, and Dick Laird, an Appalachian coal miner who joined the armed forces to escape a dangerous, dead-end life underground. Tatsuguchi returned to Japan during a family crisis and was conscripted into the Japanese military in 1941; the two men’s paths crossed at the battle for the sparsely populated island of Attu in 1943. Tatsuguchi kept a diary—one that Laird would find after killing him with a grenade. The diary was copied and avidly passed around throughout the American military as a surprising insight into the humanity of the enemy. Laird, still haunted by having killed a man who loved America as much as he did, sought out Tatsuguchi’s daughter in 1983. Obmascik’s account of their relationship’s growth reinforces the compassion of everyone involved. This poignant, dramatic tale will captivate both younger readers less familiar with the details of WWII history and those who are passionate about it.