Japan's Violent Past

In an interview with Salon, Haruki Murakami, born in Tokyo, Japan, during the waning years of the American occupation, admitted to being heavily influenced by World War II:

I have drawers in my mind, so many drawers. I have hundreds of materials in these drawers. I take out the memories and images that I need. The war is a big drawer to me, a big one…. My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories—not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

The Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Manchurian Incident, the Rape of Nanking, the Pacific War, and the subsequent occupation of Japan by American troops are...