Another war book

When a Japanese who studies English reads an English book, he will face a lot of difficulties. Vocabulary and unknown idiom are of course one of the biggest problems among them. Although people would stress a necessity to guess unknown words from context, after all, you wouldn’t have any clue about what you can guess if you don’t know half of words in a sentence. Then, even though you could overcome this primary problem, another headache is waiting for you: name.

It is very difficult to remember names of people or names of towns in another language. Because I have been exposed to English-speaking cultures through my study or friends, English names are getting familiar to me. However, when I try to read different cultures in English, I would feel as if I became a foreigner who is at a loss where to go at the basement of Shinjuku station. Encountering a name such as “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”, my brain is always stuck. “Jeeess. How is it pronounced?”

For a month, I have struggled to read a book about the Bosnian War. On top of vocabulary and name problems, complexity of the way and the author’s peculiar writing-style, (he tends to depict final scenes at first in each chapter and then amplify the processes which lead to those culminations mentioned earlier), make the book one of the most difficult books I have ever read. But, I couldn’t help but read one page after another, sometimes going back to the first page again and again, due to the compelling tales which the author saw or felt.

I have to admit now how little I knew or pretended to know about the war. My broad picture of this conflict was, it was a war between the Serbs and a Muslims-Croats coalition. Serbs who wanted to create a Greater Serbia out of the swathes left by the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Muslims-Croats who wanted to live in a multi-denominational secular Bosnia. But actually, Croatians and Muslims fought with each other in some stage of the war. There was a mention of the coalition between Serbs and Croatian against Bosnian Muslims. Muslims who are loyal to multi-national force in Sarajevo and those who believe fundamental religious ideology. There are references to the history also. Cetniks, Ustasa, Ottoman empire. Yoship Tito, Ante Pavelic, and Milosevic. All mixed up, I nearly snapped.

This is the book about the author’s experiences in Bosnia and Chechnya during the wars in late nineties. At first, he is presented as a fledgling journalist who just graduated university and couldn't find any decent job. Bored with daily tedium and starving for excitements, this guy walked into battlefields under the guise of journalism. It seemed at first that to go to wars is no more than to go to clubs for this unemployed English man. But as the story goes on, you will find that this guy is preordained to go to wars, destined even before he started having his own ideas about wars. Coming from the family with a history of legendary soldiers, he is a born war-correspondent or war-witness or war-by-stander or whatever status you would think.

I was really captivated with his change as the story goes on. At the beginning, he had the value not to kill anyone without reasons. There were times when he pondered the reason why he was in their war, not his war, sticking nose into other’s tragedy. And there were times when he was agonized with dilemma between politeness and safety, whether he should show some decency not to embarrass local people at the risk of his life or he should just run away. But soon enough, those morality or consideration were blown up into millions of pieces and replaced by description of battlefields. His identity problem just came down to how to deceive the authority, rather than some introspective question. Transforming from a trainee journalist to a seasoned cameraman, he started looking in from the outside, rather than looking out from the inside. Incredibly horrendous scenes, the complex nature of the war, his drug problem, his family estrangement, his honest description of the situations, I was capitalized with those things in this book.



a trace of struggle...