James McNaughton's amusing thought-experiment

Wellington writer James McNaughton. Photo / Grant Maiden

In the prevailing climate of heightened risk-aversion among New Zealand book publishers, it's always a welcome thing when someone is prepared to offer the market something different. It's hard to imagine anyone but VUP publishing James McNaughton's interesting debut novel, New Hokkaido. But there you go: from the house that brought you Nigel Cox's peculiar mash-up, Tarzan Presley, some years back, here is that other odd bird, a counterfactual novel.

Imagine, the author invites us, that the United States had not entered World War II. Nazi Germany was defeated by the Soviets - the USSR incorporates Western as well as Eastern Europe - and Japan was victorious in the Pacific theatre. Since the mid stages of the war, New Zealand has been under the brutally repressive regime of the occupying Imperial Japanese Army, serving as a dairy farm and skiing destination for the conquerers.

Chris Ipswitch is a young New Zealander of European extraction, who is in the comparatively privileged position of a teacher of English (the teaching of which the Japanese grudgingly admit the necessity, for economic reasons). Like most red-blooded Kiwi males, he's more interested in meeting women and playing rugby than in politics, but his life isn't destined to be so quiet because of his professional closeness to the occupiers and because his brother is The Night Train, a former Pan-Asian sumo champion, the only European ever to have earned this honour.

Complications set in when his brother's daughter (by his Japanese wife) is found murdered, and on his way south, one of his students, the beautiful and baffling Hitomi Kurosawa, turns up and takes an unexpected (and forbidden) erotic interest in him.

Chris finds himself on the fringes of local resistance to the occupation: it turns out members of his rugby team are deeply implicated in a plot to hijack an interisland ferry and make a dash for freedom in Australia. And his determination to try to help his brother get to the bottom of his daughter's murder exposes him to the lunatic fringe of that resistance - a white supremacist-cum-religious separatist movement called The Lord's Angels - and to the very soul of Japanese nationalism in the form of one of his brother's former great sumo rivals and his shady entourage.

Like Geoff Cush's Son Of France, a broadly similar novel published by Random House in 2002 (a historical novel set in a New Zealand colonised by the French rather than the English), the central conceit of New Hokkaido seems to have absorbed the author more than the plot, which is a trifle hackneyed. It proceeds jerkily, with major developments occurring without preamble and without taking the characters (principally Chris) along with them.

A significant subplot - the ferry hijacking - serves more as a diversion than anything else. The other major strand to the story, the love interest between Chris and Hitomi, is rendered in surprising, almost pornographic detail, but the equation of exotic equals erotic all but eclipses any emotional depth whatsoever.

It is, in short, difficult to care about any of the characters, and apart from a few chuckles along the way (Roger Douglas as the fearless leader of Free New Zealand),

New Hokkaido

becomes little more than an intriguing thought-experiment.

New Hokkaido
by James McNaughton
(Victoria University Press $30)

John McCrystal is a Wellington writer.

- Canvas