Amaterasu Takahashi thinks she is the last member of her family. Her husband has died. Her son-in-law was killed on New Guinea. Her daughter and grandson were killed when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. But when a man shows up on her doorstep claiming to be her grandson at the beginning of Jackie Copleton’s novel, A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, it is as though she’s been shot through the heart. Everything she believes about her family’s life and her own life is suddenly called into question.
Amaterasu finds it impossible to believe the claims of Hideo. After all, she found her grandson’s metal name tag on the ground on August 9, 1945. Perhaps the biggest strike against the man who calls himself Hideo is the fact that he comes bearing letters by Amaterasu’s nemesis, Jomei Sato, to her daughter, Yuko. Hideo’s arrival and the letters send Amaterasu back into the past, where she reexamines everything she’s believed since the day the bomb dropped.
Over the course of A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, Amaterasu reveals her secrets. She shows us how her life, Yuko’s life, and Jomei’s life tangled together in the 1910s and 1930s. Jomei is portrayed as a villain throughout the novel; Amaterasu blames him for her daughter’s death and most of what has gone wrong in her life. At times, I thought the novel was trying too hard to make Jomei an evil man. His letters reveal that he was recruited to Unit 731, which conducted appalling medical experiments on captured Chinese people, and taking advantage* of the Japanese Army’s “comfort women.” But we also learn about Amaterasu’s mistakes. By the end of the book, I’m not sure who bears the greater blame for Yuko’s tragedies.
I thought that A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding would be a story about reunion, with a particularly interesting setting. What I found was an incredibly complex tale about people who make things worse by trying to make things right**. I’m not sure I sympathize with either Amaterasu or Jomei. I can understand why they do what they do, but they are both so very stubborn and so convinced that they are right that they only have second thoughts when it’s too late the make amends. I wish that I had read this with my book group, because I want to talk this book over with someone.
* This is not the right verb, but I’m not sure English has the correct verb for what happens in that particular scene.
** Funny enough, there’s a German verb for this: verschlimmbessern.