When Ian Buruma was growing up in the Netherlands, a comforting mythology shrouded the traumatic German wartime occupation of the country. Though it was acknowledged that a minority of the Dutch had “collaborat[ed] actively with the enemy”, he recalls, such “symbols of depravity” only served to “highlight the glowing virtuousness of the plucky majority”. Rejecting such simplistic narratives, this intriguing but rather disjointed book sets out to explore moral ambiguity and degrees of guilt.
It does so through the stories of three striking, self-mythologising and elusive figures. All have been seen as heroes and villains, but Buruma sifts their attempts to justify themselves and offers dramatic accounts of their complex careers. He is an authority on Chinese and Japanese culture, so one of his subjects is Kawashima Yoshiko, “a cross-dressing Manchu princess who spied for the Japanese secret police in China”. Sometimes known as “the Mata Hari of the Orient”, she inspired much sensationalist and often salacious fiction and was later one of three women denounced in China as “especially egregious traitors” before being executed in 1948.
