Quotes of the Day

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 territory. Hidayat — drawing on Alisjahbana's actual wartime employment in occupied Indonesia's language office — is put in charge of formalizing its grammar and syntax. In the novel (as it was in life), the office is a meeting place for nationalists who seize on Japan's defeat in 1945 to declare independence and adopt Bahasa Indonesia as the new nation's official tongue.

So far, so factual. But it is the character of Okura, a Japanese officer steeped in samurai values, that gives the novel real soul. Alisjahbana hits a rich seam of tragedy in Okura's battle to reconcile defeat with honor. Only by rejecting the samurai tradition of seppuku, or ritual suicide, can Okura see a future in his shattered country. Dearest to Alisjahbana's heart, of course, is Indonesia's independence, declared in the language he codified. But his depiction of Okura — as a metaphor for Japan's rebirth in a new, humanist world — is evidence of a magnanimous and rare sensibility among Asian writers of the wartime generation.

• Simon Montlake