Asian literature on World War II hardly brims with sympathetic images of Japanese soldiers, and that makes Indonesian writer Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana's 1978 epic Defeat and Victory something of a cultural curiosity. The Japanese translation earned its author the Order of Sacred Treasure, but with its first English rendition a wider audience has the opportunity to absorb its tragedy and romance.
The protagonist, Hidayat, is a Jakartan intellectual caught up in the Japanese occupation. The conquerors use Bahasa Indonesia, the archipelago's lingua franca, as an administrative tongue in their polyglot...
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