The Sea and Poison: A Novel - Couverture rigide

Endo, Shusaku

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0800870212 ISBN 13 : 9780800870218

Editeur : Taplinger Pub Co, 1980

Synopsis

Book by Endo Shusaku

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

The novel The Sea and Poison won the Akutagawa Prize when it was published in Japan in 1958 and established Shusaku Endo in the forefront of modern Japanese literature. Today it remains as startling and, sadly, as relevant as ever. Based on the real life war crime of vivisection of American prisoners of war that took place in 1945 at Kyushu University's medical school in Fukuoka, The Sea and Poison was the first Japanese book to confront the problem of individual responsibility in wartime, painting a searing picture of the human race's capacity for inhumanity. At the outset of this powerful story we find a Doctor Suguro in a backwater of modern-day Tokyo practicing expert medicine in a dingy office. He is haunted by his past experience - a past which the novel unfolds. During the war Dr. Suguro serves his internship in a hospital where the senior staff is more interested in personal career-building than in healing. There he is induced to assist in the horrifying vivisection of a POW. There one of his colleagues ridicules him for showing compassion to an elderly patient, saying, 'Oh come off it! Killing a patient isn't so solemn a matter as all that. It's nothing new in the world of medicine. That's how we've made our progress! Right now in the city all kinds of people are dying all the time in the air raids, and nobody thinks twice about it. Rather than have the old lady die in an air raid, why not kill her here at the hospital. There'd be some meaning in that, boy!'

Présentation de l'éditeur :

This story, set in a hospital in a Japan demoralized by Allied air-raids, concerns an intern, Dr. Suguro, who is coopted by an ambitious senior surgeon to participate in medical experiments involving vivisection of captured American airmen. The experiments are to determine how much lung tissue can be removed before the patient dies, how much saline solution, and how much air can be injected into the blood before death occurs. Ostensibly this knowledge will improve treatment of tuberculosis which is ravaging the country. The real motivation arises from the brutality of the military, from competition among hospital department heads, and from an atmosphere of nihilism in the face of almost certain defeat by the Allies. Dr. Suguro's acquiescence humiliates him. Paralyzed by moral conflict into non-action in the operating room, he succumbs to deeper shame and humiliation. The novel begins many years after the event, when a narrator comes as a patient to Dr. Suguro's dilapidated clinic.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Taplinger Pub Co
• Date d'édition: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0800870212
• ISBN 13: 9780800870218
• Reliure: Relié