Matthew Legare - Thriller Author

Website for Matthew Legare, writer of historical, thriller, and noir novels, including the Reiko Watanabe/Inspector Aizawa series set in 1930s Japan.

The Bitter Peace by Philip S. Jowett – Conflict in China 1928-1937

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The Bitter Peace by Philip S. Jowett

Chinese history has long been ignored in the West, but a few spotlights do shine out from time to time on certain events, even if only to provide superficial understanding. These usually point to the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and, recently, the Sino-Japanese War. However, there is a small window of time in Chinese history that contained multiple smaller wars, which has almost been completely ignored by Western scholars. This brief era is what The Bitter Peace – Conflict in China 1928-37 by Philip S. Jowett illuminates.

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Japan’s Greatest Victory, Britain’s Worst Defeat By Masanobu Tsuji Review

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Japan's Greatest Victory by Masanobu Tsuji

It’s often said, “history is written by the victors,” and this only half true. While the narrative of World War II is definitely constructed from the Allied lens, this does not mean that the vanquished were unable to tell their stories. German officers and soldiers pumped out volumes of memoirs during the postwar years, many of which were consumed voraciously by readers in America and Britain. Japanese memoirs were more sparse, at least regarding translations that made it to the West. One notable exception was Masanobu Tsuji’s memoir Japan’s Greatest Victory, Britain’s Worst Defeat.

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Japanese Destroyer Captain – A Memoir of The Pacific War

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Japanese Destroyer Captain by Tameichi HaraJapanese Destroyer Captain is the postwar memoir of Tameichi Hara, a Japanese Navy officer who earned the nickname the “Miracle Captain.” He is one of the only Japanese captains to have survived the entire Pacific War from its beginning in 1941 to its end in 1945. Of the 175 destroyers the Imperial Navy possessed during World War II, 129 were sunk.

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All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe Review

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All She Was Worth by Miyuki MiyabeAll She Was Worth is a 1992 noir mystery written by Miyuki Miyabe, one of Japan’s most famous genre writers, including crime fiction. Taking place in the early 1990s, the novel captures the zeitgeist of the Bubble Economy of the 80s/early 90s, which would soon pop and led to the infamous “Lost Decade.”

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10 Japanese Film Noir Recommendations

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Dragnet Girl Japanese noirFilm noir is a tricky thing to define, and some still question whether it’s just a style relying on distinct lighting and shadow play or if it’s a genre unto its own. The term derived from French critic Nino Frank who, in 1946, saw many American crime movies like The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Double Indemnity (1944) for the first time, and dubbed them film noir – black films, both for their heavy use of shadows and dark subject matter.

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