Holding on and fighting on when your society is falling away
Mainstream Western alternate history fiction has a tendency to view Imperial Japan as a sidekick to the Nazis. This is doubtless because most writers in that tradition are Western and as such are more culturally comfortable writing about Germans rather than Japanese (and it’s not like the Italians get much devoted to them either). In Axis victory works, the Japanese are vaguely mentioned as ruling the Pacific most of the time when the action is set in America or Europe; the only major narrative alternate history about this that comes to me is Peter Tieryas’s trilogy beginning with The United States of Japan. That trilogy is very much influenced by anime, and has an accelerated pace of technological development to allow for mecha. Here, on the other hand, is what I believe to be the first instance of published alternate history involving a relatively realistic victorious Japan: Manchukuo 1987 by Yoshimi Red (published on Itch).
The novel is set somewhere between the fourth and fifth paintings of Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. In this world, Japan has waged a number of costly, bloody, and ultimately pointless wars as it tries to hold onto its empire, which has only lasted as long as it has by virtue of never having to fight the Americans. Korea has already wrested its independence. Now, understanding that this last vestige of empire is now a sunk cost, the puppet state-cum-settler colony of Manchukuo is now about to be handed back to the Republic of China. But, of course, something goes wrong, and the wrong people end up in the wrong place.
This is a very grotty novel, and by virtue of its grottiness it refuses to engage in the common allohistorical trope of giving losers of a war in our world technology beyond our own. The novel is the story of a community and a way of life, that of Japanese settlers in Manchukuo, that is rapidly becoming superfluous. They are now encountering the fate which has encountered pied-noirs or Ulster Loyalists or Russians in the Baltic in our world: they love their imperial masters far more than their imperial masters love them back, and their identity is falling out from under them. What is the point in your way of life, when the object of your devotion openly views you as a drain? The Emperor becomes the butt of jokes and the segregation laws are now laxly enforced. Japanese youth now eat McDonald’s and pepper German slang liberally into their spoken Japanese. What is to be done, when their whole worldview is imploding?
This novel, in one sense, does something very common in mainstream alternate history, and it is in making a good chunk of its plot a detective novel. This only makes sense; the whole point of reading alternate history (and, let us be frank, the whole point of writing alternate history, as I can personally attest) is to poke around in another world, peeking in nooks and crannies for odd little details. On the novel’s Amazon page, Robert Harris’s Fatherland is openly cited as an influence; I can also detect more than a whiff of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which likewise involves a political order that is about to end for good. Our investigator, a Japanese settler, a soldier-turned-Kempeitai investigator with skeletons in his closet, is a bit more Xavier March than Meyer Landsman. He knows what he has done is wrong, and is ever-so-slightly beginning to realize that the whole basis of his life, indeed the whole basis of his identity as a Japanese settler in Manchuria, is based on something atrociously evil. This is coming into conflict with his own basic sense of decency, and it is that conflict that drives him deep into the underworld of Manchukuo, where he meets powers both Japanese and Chinese looking upon the ever-nearer handover with trepidation and fear.
But to call this simply a detective novel is to reduce a sprawling panorama of a society about to be liquidated to merely one of its several parts. It is a crime story, with a complex criminal underworld. There are the remnants of the military, who show up mostly as Kempeitai officers, who are dragging the embers of war with them wherever they go. There is the portrayal of a small teenage social circle whose life is upended by something shocking. There is the Chinese underclass that interacts with great trepidation with their Japanese overlords, and looks forward to the day that the Japanese will simply no longer be overlords. This novel takes the intimacy of a few characters, a few situations, and a whole little world slipping away and turns it into an epic of a time that never was. What makes this so compelling is that the novel’s characters feel both universal, with broadly equivalent situations throughout history, but also very of their world. Murakata could not exist in our world, even if he resembles a jaded French policeman in Algiers on the eve of Algerian independence; this novel is a very good demonstration of K. S. Villoso’s argument about how the best characterization and best worldbuilding in speculative fiction are deftly woven into one another.
Another thing that struck me about this novel is just how rich it is, on a literary level. There are plenty of little details that concatenate into something astounding, of course, but just on a prose level, it is striking. I expected this book to take me three days or so, but it ended up taking me four. I have a hard time pointing my finger at exactly what makes the prose like this (one user on a forum I’m on attributed the effect to run-on sentences that work surprisingly well), but I found this novel’s prose to be a rich, immersive experience, one that can’t be wolfed down too quickly. It has to be savored. It has to be taken a bit more slowly than other novels like it.
Thematically, one could say that the core of this novel is striving, or struggling, or enduring. Everyone here is looking towards the future with great anticipation, some positive, some negative. Criminals want to rule more, as does the Japanese ascendancy in Manchukuo, whereas the regular Chinese folk simply want to live free as the masters of their own destiny. Imperial Japan promised Asia a ‘co-prosperity sphere,’ but there are too many holes in the sphere that have, by the time of the setting of the novel, made themselves glaringly apparent. The Japanese, in particular, are facing the fact that all is vanity, that everything is temporary, that all empires fail. To quote a song about another historical empire: “what’s the point of it all/when you’re building a wall/and in front of your eyes it disappears?” The novel seems to make the case that there is a profound narcissism, a profound vanity, in trying to maintain an empire, a theme that is quite poignant as America lashes out to stave off obvious decline, as Russia turns Ukraine into a charnel house in a desperate attempt to remain relevant, and Israel razes Gaza to the ground and drags the Middle East into a conflagration in the search for an ever-more elusive permanent state of security (and we ought to remember what A. Dirk Moses said about ‘permanent security’).
I have not felt this way after reading an alternate history novel since I read Arturo Serrano’s novel To Climates Unknown back in 2021 (a series of events which culminated in Serrano becoming a good friend of mine, and me joining the staff of this illustrious blog). I have seen in Manchukuo 1987 what I want the genre of alternate history to be in the coming decades: a genre more human, more willing to see that history is not merely the province of stultifying, dreary, power-worshipping history books. I for one would look forward to a sequel to this book, and I certainly want to see more by Yoshimi Red.
Reference: Red, Yoshimi, Manchukuo 1987 (self-published, 2025).
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
