The Game in the Past

An off-hand speculation by ex-pat and professor, David Moran, sends his celebrated historian colleague, Graham Guade, on an investigation that peels back American use of, and protection for, Japanese doctors who committed unspeakable medical experiments in WWII. The inquiry into the legacy of those atrocities churns up murder and madness in both countries, and toys with the interplay of intimacy and career success, as well as accident and causality in history. Get ready for a thrilling, fun, and thoughtful read. Japan in the postwar period; conspiracy; Japanese and Americans fooling each other and themselves; sex; American complicity in covering up Japanese war crimes; murder. Zeugner knows well the people, place, and times, and has the literary ability to bring them all alive."" --Bruce Stronach, Dean, Temple University, Japan Campus I have read most of John Zeugner's always-engaging, creative prose, and The Game in the Past is the best of the lot. Here, we get classic Zeugner: continent-hopping, culture-jumping, language-switching . . . . [T]his is highly suggestive stuff, presented as an imagined history, which, if it had happened in the way that Game entices us to believe it did, is a terrifying message about human nature . . . . Game leads us to see that history won't bring the horror to light, but novel might."" --Lee Fontanella, Screenwriter of The Gray Man; retired Professor of Humanities and Arts ""There are things in the past too traumatic to be told. Worse, power knows how to mask its own unseemly roots. How and why the U.S. and Japan colluded to hide Japanese atrocities during World War II is a story that literally cannot be told--not as long as truth-tellers can be silenced. In this poignant and chilling novel, Zeugner shows why the historian's craft can only be completed in fiction. A stunning accomplishment."" --Joseph P. Lawrence, Professor of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross ""Historian David Moran meets Graham Guade, a far from quiet American colleague, at a 1978 conference in Japan. When Guade falls off a ferry and drowns, Moran inherits his translator/girlfriend and his obsession with a State Department personnel file that disappeared. In the file Moran discovers long suppressed accounts of Japanese experiments on live human subjects during WWII. He subsequently learns it would pay him to turn his research in another direction."" --Chandler Thompson John Zeugner, Emeritus Professor of History, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, taught in Japan for five years, and has published two other novels: Manila Gambit and Soldier for Christ; two collections of short stories: Under Hiroshima and Life-Arc Teaching Tales; and one collection of three short novels: Food for Jackals.