From Japan With(out) Love

“That’s how I would picture fascists: this never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.” — David Baerwald

Earlier this month, the historian James M. Scott came on the show to talk about those three deadly days in August 1945 when the Americans dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Today we return to that war in the skies above Japan. Only with a fictional twist.

Behind this fiction, however, is the kind of family saga that few novelists have either the nerve or imagination to invent. It concerns three generations of the Baerwalds. In the Thirties, a German Jewish organic chemist called Ernst Baerwald worked for (of all people) I.G. Farben, the company that manufactured the gas used at Auschwitz. A sophisticated Japanophile, Baerwald was Farben’s man in Tokyo, where he hobnobbed with a member of the royal family. American intelligence turned Ernst Baerwald into a spy, using his intimate knowledge of Japan in their firebombing of Tokyo. In exchange, Baerwald fled to the United States with his wife and son Hans, who became a leading authority on 20th century Japanese politics. Hans’ son, David Baerwald, meanwhile, became a platinum-selling musician who has worked with Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow, and Bruce Springsteen.

Growing up in California, David knew little about Ernst. But seven years ago, while clearing out the family home after the Los Angeles fires, he discovered his grandfather’s diaries, photographs, and letters. He found a 1943 speech to the American Intelligence School proving that Ernst, a German Jew who loved Japan, knew the details of the Tokyo firebombing in which 140,000 people died, two years before it happened.

“I have no qualifications as a historian,” David Baerwald confesses. So what followed was The Fire Agent, a 624-page novel loosely imagined around his grandfather’s enigmatic life. But what David brought to this epic was a lyricist’s skill in the kind of musical composition that enabled him to keep characters in play like sections of an orchestra. No wonder then that The Fire Agent is one of the most acclaimed literary debuts of the year. And no wonder that, in our age of looming fascism, The Fire Agent reads as more than just history.