CHILDREN ON THEIR BIRTHDAYS Truman Capote

　　This is a very entertaining story. Miss Bobbit, a ten-year-old, precocious, clever girl, attracts every boy, especially Billy Bob and Preacher, in the town. On the day she was leaving for Hollywood, a bus runs over her, finishing all the fuss around her suddenly.
　　This story entertains the reader with a lot of humorous episodes: fight over Miss Bobbit between Bob and Preacher; Sister Rosalba’s rescue, Manny Fox’s scam (The Fan Dancer without the Fan) followed by Miss Bobbit’s similar scheme to collect money to go to Hollywood.
　　The first sentence of the story makes the reader want to read to the last page where Miss Bobbit is run over by a bus. The reader is under a constant pressure because he or she wants to know when the girl will be run over. After all, she is killed at the end of the story. The last sentence of the story is almost the same with the first one, an excellent way to hook the reader. It goes: “Yesterday afternoon the six-o’clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit. (the first); That is when the six-o’clock bus ran over her.(the last)
　　The writing style of this fiction and that of “In Cold Blood” are quite different. The former is casual, light-hearted, humorous, but the latter is formal, rigid, newspaper reporting style with a lot of legal jargons. “In Cold Blood” gave me a strong impact because this is a non-fiction novel while “Children on Their Birthdays” is a fiction.
 

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote 1966

   This is a non-fiction novel that deals with the murder of four members of the Clutters: Mr. Clutter, his wife, his daughter and son, that took place in the village in Kansa in 1959. The criminals, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, broke into Mr. Clutter’s house just because they had heard that there was a safe containing 10,000 dollars in the house. After they missed to find it, Perry cut the throat of Mr. Clutter and shot the four members. The motive for the crime is, as I understand from reading the book, no vengeance. It was only to steal money. But murdering four people for just 40 dollars was incomprehensible. The motive lay deep in their childhood memory. Especially Perry got an extreme abuse by his father. He grudged the happy people. He resented society. He was on the verge of mental disorder. They were executed by hanging in 1965. It took as long as six years till the execution from the verdict, guilty—death.
     I admire Capote’s hard, persistent, continuous, perseverant, and difficult work in collecting documents, in interviewing inumerous numbers of people related to the crime including criminals’ family members, policemen, jurors, village people, and reporters. It took him six years before he published the book. I saw the movie about how he had made research into the crime, frequently meeting the criminals in the prison. He even watched them being hanged.
     The whole story depresses you, but the ending is somewhat written forward-looking way that saves you from gloomy feeling: “And nice to have seen you, Sue [a girl victim, Nancy’s friend]. Good Luck,” he [Dewy, the policeman responsible for capturing the criminals] called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining---just such a young woman as Nancy might have been.”

Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Nitobe Inazo

I don’t know any other book that is as rich as Bushido: The Soul of Japan. It is rich because Nitobe Inazo explains what Bushido is by referring to the words of historical figures and events from the East and the West, and from the ancient and today’s worlds. They cover almost all Eastern and Western cultures the peoples have accumulated: philosophies, religions, politics, literatures, poems, and music. He is so well versed in things past and present, one cannot read Bushido: The Soul of Japan without enough knowledge on many and various things that have taken place in the world history. Let me just give you some of the eminent persons that appear in the first 10 pages of the book (304 pages altogether): Edmund Burke, Dr. George Miller, Commodore Perry, Carl Marx, Minamoto Yoritomo, William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar, Cornelius Tacitus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Alphonse de Lamartine, Yagyu Munenori, Theodor Mommsen, Émile Boutmy, and Arther May Knapp.

The English language he uses is so difficult that I had to consult a dictionary several times in reading even a single page. I also had to read the same sentence several times to grasp its meaning. Honestly speaking, some vocabulary was new to me, who has taught English at a senior high school and have a highest grade in the proficiency examination conducted by the Society of Testing English Proficiency supported by the Ministry Education.

How could he have gained such vast and deep knowledge about the world and such proficiency in English? He must have studied hard in Tokyo Imperial University, Johns Hopkins University in the US, and in Halle University in Germany.

Bushido, in my understanding, consists of loyalty to one’s lord, spirit of self-sacrifice, and compassion for the weak. More than 100 years have passed since he published this book in 1900, the spirit of Bushido is still alive in the Japanese. Just a few years ago I remember Bushido: The Soul of Japan sold well. The spirit of Bushido still remains in the Japanese hearts as Nitobe predicted in the last page of the book: “Bushido as an independent code of ethics may vanish, but its power will not perish from the earth; . . . . its light and its glory will long survive their ruins. Like its symbolic flower, after it is blown to the four winds, it will still bless mankind with the perfume with which it will enrich life.”