The Game in the Past

An off-hand speculation by ex-pat and professor David Moran sends his celebrated historian colleague Graham Guade on an investigation that peels back American use of and protection for Japanese doctors who committed unspeakable medical experiments in WWII. The inquiry into the legacy of those atrocities churns up murder and madness in both countries and toys with the interplay of intimacy and career success as well as accident and causality in history. Get ready for a thrilling fun and thoughtful read. Japan in the postwar period; conspiracy; Japanese and Americans fooling each other and themselves; sex; American complicity in covering up Japanese war crimes; murder. Zeugner knows well the people place and times and has the literary ability to bring them all alive. --Bruce Stronach Dean Temple University Japan Campus I have read most of John Zeugners always-engaging creative prose and The Game in the Past is the best of the lot. Here we get classic Zeugner: continent-hopping culture-jumping language-switching . . . . [T]his is highly suggestive stuff presented as an imagined history which if it had happened in the way that Game entices us to believe it did is a terrifying message about human nature . . . . Game leads us to see that history wont bring the horror to light but novel might. --Lee Fontanella Screenwriter of The Gray Man; retired Professor of Humanities and Arts There are things in the past too traumatic to be told. Worse power knows how to mask its own unseemly roots. How and why the U.S. and Japan colluded to hide Japanese atrocities during World War II is a story that literally cannot be told--not as long as truth-tellers can be silenced. In this poignant and chilling novel Zeugner shows why the historians craft can only be completed in fiction. A stunning accomplishment. --Joseph P. Lawrence Professor of Philosophy College of the Holy Cross Historian David Moran meets Graham Guade a far from quiet American colleague at a 1978 conference in Japan. When Guade falls off a ferry and drowns Moran inherits his translator/girlfriend and his obsession with a State Department personnel file that disappeared. In the file Moran discovers long suppressed accounts of Japanese experiments on live human subjects during WWII. He subsequently learns it would pay him to turn his research in another direction. --Chandler Thompson John Zeugner Emeritus Professor of History Worcester Polytechnic Institute taught in Japan for five years and has published two other novels: Manila Gambit and Soldier for Christ; two collections of short stories: Under Hiroshima and Life-Arc Teaching Tales; and one collection of three short novels: Food for Jackals.