Wartime Diet

WHEAT AND SOLDIERS -- Corporal Ashihei Hino -- Farrar & Rineharf ($2).

For months rumors of a Japanese All Quiet on the Western Front have trickled into the U. S. The book's author, so rumor ran, was a Japanese corporal serving in China, but the book was antiwar, its sales large* (500,000 copies in Japan). Last week U. S. readers could see for themselves "Corporal Ashihei Hino's" gun-sight ac count of the Japanese invasion of China.

If Wheat and Soldiers was not written to order for the Japanese Ministry of War, there is nothing in its 191-page saga devout patriotism to make samurai over in their urns. Anti-war in general, is certainly not anti-Japanese-war-in-China. Announcement that 500,000 have been sold is a backhanded way saying that Japanese are behind army. Sole resemblance to All Quiet the Western Front is that both books are about fighting.

Corporal Hino's main point: war is uncomfortable. Even a dictatorship cannot keep this cold and muddy fact a secret, with 10,000 soldiers writing home every week. Smart Japanese know it is better to have the fact heroically stated by a soldier who is doing his bit, especially when he also reports his comrades begging their officers to forgive them for getting wounded, dying with a shout of "May our Emperor live a thousand years!" They may do these things better in Moscow and Berlin, but Japan is catching up with the West.

The story, as told by a simple Japanese infantryman in letters to his family, has a naive charm until readers recall that "Ashihei Hino" is really Katsunori Tamai, known to a highbrow handful of Japanese readers for his The Warship on the Mountain, The Fish with Poison, for which in the past two years he has won Japan's highest Akutagawa Prize for literature. Translater is pacifist Birth-Controller Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto, who translated the book out of "deep devotion to my country."

That the Japanese Government finds Wheat and Soldiers wholesome wartime diet is made plate-glass clear by one further fact: the book is being made into a movie in Japan.

* But not nearly so large as first reports --5,000,000.

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