Unhappy Soldier chronicles the writings of Hino Ashihei, Japan's most popular World War II writer. Ashihei rose to national celebrity status during the Pacific War for his accounts of campaigns in China and Southeast Asia, works that identified and sympathized with the common soldier. Despite being linked to the nationalistic ideology of the wartime state and purged during the Occupation, Ashihei proved to be an enduring literary and cultural phenomenon, reinventing himself with new, postwar writing that confronted the sunny patriotism of his wartime work. David Rosenfeld's book—the first in-depth study of wartime Japanese literature in English—provides a wealth of new material on how writing about the war was read during and after the conflict and new insight into the formation of Japan's national discourse on the war experience.
