I've long been a fan of Joseph Kanon. Several of his novels have already been reviewed on this blog. Picking up Shanghai (2024) was pretty much a no-brainer.
Actually, it is step forward for Kanon. It's shorter, for one thing, focussing solely on the central relationships; Daniel Lohr, an active German Communist, forced to leave Nazi Berlin in 1939; his uncle Nathan, who funds his passage from Trieste to Shanghai; Leah Auerbach, also on the boat, who is fleeing Vienna with her mother; and Yamada, high-ranking officer of the Kempeitai, the Japanese equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo.
You can always be confident that Kanon has done deep research. I knew where things stood in China in the late Thirties - the Japanese invasion, the Rape of Nanking - but I had never heard of the Kempeitai. Likewise, I knew Shanghai was a British outpost and therefore assumed it was highly corrupt, but I had no idea of just how corrupt.
Nathan (with the assumed surname Green) came to Shanghai from America where, it is suggested, he may have run up againt the mob. Now he runs a night club casino and is about to open a major new one, appropriately called the Gold Rush, in partnership with the rival gangsters Wu Tsai and Xi Ling. On opening night, Nathan is shot. Daniel suddenly finds himself in charge. Leah, who he fell for on the journey East, has been taken up by Yamata, thus instantly becoming unacceptable to any eligible westerner.
Getting Nathan medical assistance has brought Daniel back in contact with his old comrades in the Communist underground. They want him to carry out a special mission...
To say more would be to give the game away. The point is, Kanon builds a tremendous amount of both detail and nuance into a highly compressed plot. The prose is much tighter than in previous books. Kanon was always a classy prosodist but his Shaghai style packs extra punch. Like I say, I was always a fan. Shanghai is the best of Kanon I have read so far.
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