Summary
Teddy Maki grew up in Los Angeles and plays jazz in a band led by his friend Jimmy. In 1941 the musicians are in Tokyo when Pearl Harbor is bombed, and as Japanese Americans they are stranded there, drafted into the Japanese army and shipped to the Philippines. They try to hold themselves apart from the savagery around them, and it does not work. When Jimmy refuses an order from Major Nakamura to shoot an American prisoner, the major kills him, and Teddy then carries out the order his friend died refusing.
The novel moves between the war and the years after it. Thirty years on, Teddy is a celebrity on Japanese television, married to Jimmy's widow, Kazuko, and raising a son who is Jimmy's child, and he has never told either of them what happened in the Philippines. His guilt poisons everything. A chance sighting of the aging major offers a chance at revenge, or at release, and Ike, the band's old manager and Kazuko's brother, long believed dead in the Philippines, resurfaces to push the story toward a confrontation that plays out in front of television cameras at a Noh drama.
This is a short, controlled first novel, and its power is in Teddy's numb, private remorse rather than in battle scenes, although the wartime bombing of Tokyo is vivid. Kirkus, which heard Graham Greene in the morally divided hero, called it a "mature first novel" and found the ending heavy with symbolism. Publishers Weekly praised its portrait of Teddy's "listless remorse" but thought his long despair outweighs his recovery. It suits readers interested in Japanese American history or in war novels about conscience rather than combat.
Historical Context & Significance
Soldiers in Hiding won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1987. It was Wiley's first novel, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 1986, and it beat Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, Charles Johnson's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Janet Kauffman's Collaborators and Maureen Howard's Expensive Habits. Publishers Weekly called the debut "an auspicious one."
Wiley, born in 1944, studied at the University of Puget Sound, took a master's degree at Sophia University in Tokyo and an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the novel draws on his knowledge of Japan. He joined the English faculty of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1989 and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 2005. Hawthorne Books later brought the novel back into print in its Rediscovery series, with an introduction by the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.
Where to get it
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