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Synopsis:
Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible Emperor, and nobody believes that Japan’s conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons – a shadowy group of rebels fighting for freedom. Their latest subversive tactic is to distribute an illegal video game that asks players to imagine what the world might be like if the United States had won the war instead.
Captain Beniko Ishimura’s job is to censor video games, and he’s working with Agent Akiko Tsukino of the secret police to get to the bottom of this disturbing new development. But Ishimura’s hiding something… He’s slowly been discovering that the case of the George Washingtons is more complicated than it seems, and the subversive videogame’s origins are even more controversial and dangerous than either of them originally suspected.
Part detective story, part brutal alternate history, United States of Japan is a stunning successor to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.
Review:
I am old enough to finally find myself interested in World War II, and one of the things I have always thought too much about is what life would be like if the Allies did not win. There are a few novels about a German occupation of America, particularly The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick and The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth, but I had not seen any novels about Japan claiming the United States as their land. This is exactly what happens in United States of Japan, and Peter Tieryas builds a United States that is vastly different and incredibly dangerous for anyone who dares to resist total allegiance to the Emperor.
The timeline of the story goes in several different directions, but the main story is set in July 1988, forty years after the end of the war. A new video game, called United States of America, can be played with the player being the Americans winning the war against Japan. This video game is illegal, and the Japanese Secret Police has sent Agent Akiko Tsukino to find the secret developer of the game. This leads her to Captain Beniko Ishimura, a member of the video game censorship board because if anyone knows how the game USA was created and distributed, it is him. The two of them go on a mission to find the culprit while also trying to stay alive as they navigate the underground groups, making them angry by poking their noses where they do not belong. The story is interesting enough, but their actual journey through a California filled with secret societies living the best life that they can under Japanese rule makes for so many dangerous situations that the book moves fast.
The novel is very enjoyable, and the development of Ben Ishimura is interesting and fun. He is one of those characters that does not seem like he knows what he is doing, but he always has a plan. He knows people that are willing to help him through the journey to find the developer of USA, and the actual hindrance to his progress is his partner. Akiko, starts the novel with complete devotion to the Empire, but while she goes on this adventure, she learns that not everything is as simple as she wants it to be. She finds herself with many moral conflicts, and in the end she has to learn to grow under the threat of gunfire, torture, and death. The entire novel moves pretty quickly, and I am actually looking forward to reading the next two volumes of the trilogy. Peter Tieryas does a great job of world building and tells a great war/espionage sci-fi story with clear language and no real heroes.
ghostvillehero 