CHRISTINE PIPER After Darkness. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
The limits of loyalty and discretion are tested in Christine Piper’s Vogel Award-winning novel about a Japanese doctor interned in South Australia during World War II.
Christine Piper’s provocative and at times confronting debut tells the story of a Japanese doctor, Tomokazu Ibaraki. As a young medical student in 1934, bored by the menial tasks required of him during his hospital training and disillusioned by the realisation that whatever medicine could do, ‘people still died’, he is approached to work for the Army’s new medical research unit.
Four years later, he is in Broome, where he is the doctor at the ‘Jap hospital’, treating the town’s substantial Japanese community.
And then, in 1942, following Japan’s entry into the Second World War, Tomo, like every other Japanese in Australia, is interned. For him, this means being transferred to South Australia’s Loveday internment camp.
After Darkness alternates these three strands of Tomo’s story: his life at the medical research unit and the effect of his work on his marriage and career; his life in Broome, in particular his fragile relationship with the nun Sister Bernice, who assists him in the hospital; and his life in the internment camp.
Tomo is an obedient son and a conscientious worker. He marries the woman his mother introduces him to, and despite his mounting horror as he discovers what the Army’s ‘medical research’ entails, he is nevertheless distressed when he is sacked. Discretion requires he cannot explain to anyone what his work has involved, or why he has lost his job.
Intelligent and observant, despite his passivity Tomo is an engaging and sympathetic character. He finds it difficult to reveal himself to others, and consequently comes across as aloof. His realisation of this, and his attempts to address it, are some of the most moving parts of the book.
On his arrival in Broome in 1938, Tomo is disappointed to find Broome’s Japanese quarter ‘a poor cousin to the vibrant Japtown of Singapore’, but he nevertheless finds a niche for himself there, running a small hospital and tending to his Japanese – and occasionally also Malay – patients with the help of Sister Bernice from the local convent. In Loveday his affection for the place is obvious as he recalls the cinema ‘where the sea was known to creep in during king tides and lap at the audience’s feet’, and his later distress at the possibility that his former neighbours may have been killed in Japanese airstrikes.
Broome’s Japanese community (mainly pearl divers, shopkeepers and their families) celebrates the Bon festival, when paper lanterns are launched onto the sea to honour the spirits of the dead. As Tomo explains to Sister Bernice:
‘The lanterns represent the spirits of the dead. At this time every year our ancestors return to visit us. To guide them back to the other place, we release lanterns on water. It is especially important for those who died in the past year.’
When another of the nuns asks him if he is going to release any lanterns, he laughs: ‘No. Fortunately, I do no need to release any this year. I did that long ago.’
But Tomo carries darkness within him, and it is not until the very end of the novel that he is able to take some action to deal with it in a meaningful way. Instead, his life has been focussed on loyalty and discretion – the two qualities stressed to him when he applied for the job at the Army medical research unit. At Loveday:
My past failings as a doctor became clear … I had been wrong to leave the kindness of the human touch to Sister Bernice and others. In keeping my silence I hadn’t exercised the very quality that makes us human: our capacity to understand each other.
Loveday was a real place and housed German and Italian internees as well as Japanese. Piper shows that among the Japanese interned there (many of them transported from the former Dutch-controlled territories of south-east Asia) were also those who had grown up in Australia and felt themselves Australian, despite having a Japanese parent. In the novel it is this group that is the most disaffected within the camp, keenly feeling the injustice being done to their Australian selves.
During World War II Australia interned 4300 Japanese or part-Japanese prisoners. The men at the Loveday camp described in the book are all civilians – only one of the inmates we meet in the novel has served in the armed forces and, paradoxically, his service had been in the AIF. For those interested in knowing more about the experiences of Japanese internees, Christine Piper has created a website, the Loveday Project, cataloguing individual experiences.
While the sections at Loveday are the most vivid, and bring Tomo’s conflict between his loyalty and discretion and his humanity to a crisis point, it is the horror of his experiences in the medical research unit that haunts everything since his departure from Japan. As he prepares to operate on a patient in Broome:
I brought the needle close and then stopped. My hand was trembling. My mind was a jumble of images. A swollen node. Black dots on a child’s belly. I was unable to go on.
This is a thoughtful and beautifully put together novel; it is not easy in parts, but its trajectory is ultimately one of hope, and in its humanity glows like the lanterns launched onto Broome’s Roebuck Bay.
Christine Piper After Darkness Allen & Unwin 2014 PB 304pp $19.99
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Great review of a truly special novel. I agree, its humanity glows. I was also really captivated by Piper’s descriptions of the Australian landscape filled with emotion, artistry and a sense of longevity.