Books like The Sea and Poison

Set largely in a Fukuoka hospital during World War II, this novel is concerned with lethal vivisections carried out on downed American airmen. It is told from the first-person point of view of one of the doctors and the third-person perspective of his colleagues who cut open, experiment on, and kill the crew members. The novel is based on a true incident. It was made into the 1986 movie Umi to dokuyaku, directed by Kei Kumai and starring Eiji Okuda and Ken Watanabe. A movie which has not been translated and released to the English-speaking world. I’d love to see it.The book seems an object lesson in how much may be omitted from a narrative without evicerating it. (Sorry.) The characterizations are quite thin yet they work. You might say the approach is minimalist. In his non-Christian novels, Endo always seems to do a lot with very little. The Christian novels (Silence and The Samurai) seem bloated by comparison. The Girl I Left Behind, Deep River, and The Sea and Poison are all quite honed with very little waste. This is one of Endo's earliest novels, though not his first. It seems a little choppy in execution but this might be the translation.