ZERO OVER BERLIN READING GUIDE

1.
As demonstrated in interviews, his website, etc., author Joh Sasaki is unambiguously critical of his country’s militarist past and has energetically countered revisionist attempts to downplay or deny the ills that Japan wrought during World War II. (In postwar Japan, this staunch rejection of militarism is the dominant “liberal” position.) At the same time, Sasaki has said that as a writer of entertainment fiction he had always wanted to set a story during that period and felt frustrated that in Japan—as in Germany—the subject was considered “taboo” or off-limits except for authors of serious or literary fiction (that is to say, adventure stories about the war seemed obscene in the context of guilt). In Zero Over Berlin, his first WWII novel, Sasaki attempts to reconcile his two instincts—the liberal’s and the entertainer’s. How does he do so? What elements does he introduce to be able to tell a rousing adventure story from the Axis point of view? To what extent does he succeed at the reconciliation?

2.
No flight of Zeros to Berlin actually took place or was ever planned. Of all the extensive and meticulous research that the author did for the novel, ascertaining that there really was no such flight (so he may tell it as fiction) turned out to be the most difficult and laborious. Much of the novel, on the other hand, corresponds with historical fact. Can you tell, for instance, which characters were actual people? Chandra Bose? The ace pilot Galland? The radio technician Morita? Without doing any research, how might you guess just from reading the text? What factors or ways of treatment in the text itself make you decide one way or the other?

3.
Zero Over Berlin includes a wide cast of non-Japanese characters, from the American pilot of fortune Jim Parvis to the Indian maharaja Gaj Singh. Sasaki spent almost a year in New York City immediately prior to writing Zero Over Berlin, a novel that he’d long planned to start on but could not. According to the author, it was his living in a foreign metropolis, in the cultural hodge-podge of NYC in particular, that finally gave him the necessary experience to take on the ambitious story of a cross-Eurasian flight. Do you find the various non-Japanese (and Japanese) characters in Zero Over Berlin convincing? What is your basis for your feeling? In the case of characters from cultures you aren’t familiar with, what is serving as your point of reference?

4.
Japanophilic Asians—or more accurately, subjects of British colonialism who seek an ally in militarist Japan—play important roles in Zero Over Berlin. Historically, there was indeed a robust pro-Japanese faction in the Indian independence movement, and Japan served as an inspiration for many modernizing Asian countries. How does Zero Over Berlin enhance your understanding of the geopolitics of WWII? In addition, does the novel affect your interpretation of recent international affairs—the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, for instance? What arguments might be culled from the novel both for or against that intervention?

5.
What does the novel say about “modernization” in all its facets? Is it Westernization? How is the “liberal” postwar Japan, as evinced in Part One, different from or similar to the militarist Japan of the rest of the novel?

6.
The “real adventure”—the flight itself—does not begin until we are fully two-thirds into the novel. Moreover, the Prologue and Part One seem to give away the outcome long before the action gets underway. Why is the story told in such a way? What does Part Two accomplish? What is done to build up and sustain narrative tension before and during the flight? If you were a movie director adapting this novel, where would you begin and how would you end? Given the difference in medium, what would you take out, and what might you add?

7.
Author Sasaki also writes urban love stories. Discuss the relationships in Zero Over Berlin. What other relationships—friendships, etc.—flavor the novel?