Empire of the Sun

Empire of the Sun
John Lanchester

J. G. Ballard

The heartrending story of a British boy’s four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War.Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai – a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.Rooted as it is in the author’s own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.

J. G. BALLARD

Empire of the Sun

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk (http://4thestate.co.uk)

This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

Previously published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2006,

Flamingo 2001 and (as a Modern Classic) 1993

First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz in 1984

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1984

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Introduction © John Lanchester 2014

Interview © Travis Elborough 2006

‘The End of My War’ © J. G. Ballard 1995

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Cover by Stanley Donwood

Photograph of atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy © Corbis. Background colours from strontium and caesium/methanol combustion carried out by Dr Roy Lowry at Plymouth University, and photographed by Anna Walker.

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007283132

Version: 2014-08-15

Contents

Title Page (#u062103d0-4f5d-5ad3-9510-6335a1a5cf9d)

Copyright (#ub91ef742-5d62-54a7-b64f-a92e067a23e5)

Introduction

Epigraph (#u8db4deab-814a-5705-9767-6c0698ab64f7)

Part I

1: The Eve of Pearl Harbor

2: Beggars and Acrobats

3: The Abandoned Aerodrome

4: The Attack on the Petrel

5: Escape from the Hospital

6: The Youth with the Knife

7: The Drained Swimming-Pool

8: Picnic Time

9: An End to Kindness

10: The Stranded Freighter

11: Frank and Basie

12: Dance Music

13: The Open-Air Cinema

14: American Aircraft

15: On their Way to the Camps

16: The Water Ration

17: A Landscape of Airfields

18: Vagrants

19: The Runway