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David C. Stahl. The Burdens of Survival: Ooka Shohei's Writings on the Pacific War. Honolulu. University of Hawai'i Press. 2003. x + 374 pages. $49. ISBN 0-8248-2540-3
OOKA SHOHEI (1909-88) was both an author of fiction and a writer of critical essays whose writing career spanned four decades and ranged across numerous genres. He is, perhaps, most closely associated with memories of World War II, however, for it is his autobiographical, fictional, and historical writings on that conflict that come most readily to mind when people hear his name. Heavily dependent upon the work of Robert Jay Lifton and building on Japanese scholarship that reads the author from his texts, The Burdens of Survival is an attempt to recover and explain the survivor psychology of Ooka through his writings on World War TI, a task at...