Empire of the Sun

Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard

The heartrending story of a British boy's four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballard's own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

The book was the subject of an oscar-winning 1987 film directed by Stephen Spielberg (and starring a very young Christian Bale).

Here is the opening of the novel:

WARS CAME EARLY to Shanghai, over-taking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese bund.

Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theater. During the winter of 1941 everyone in Shanghai was showing war films. Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city; in the foyers of the department stores and hotels the images of Dunkirk and Tobruk, Barbarossa and the Rape of Nanking sprang loose from his crowded head.

To Jim’s dismay, even the Dean of Shanghai Cathedral had equipped himself with an antique projector. After morning service on Sunday, December 7, the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the choirboys were stopped before they could leave for home and were marched down to the crypt. Still wearing their cossacks, they sat in a row of deck chairs requisitioned from the Shanghai Yacht Club and watched a year-old March of Time.

Thinking of his unsettled dreams, and puzzled by their missing sound track, Jim tugged at his ruffled collar. The organ voluntary drummed like a headache through the cement roof, and the screen trembled with the familiar images of tank battles and aerial dogfights. Jim was eager to prepare for the fancy-dress Christmas party being held that afternoon by Dr. Lockwood, the vice-chairman of the British Residents Association. There would be the drive through the Japanese lines to Hungjao, and then Chinese conjurers, fireworks and yet more newsreels, but Jim had his own reasons for wanting to go to Dr. Lockwood’s party.