num_pages: 320
description: First published in Japanese in 1966, the debut novel of the critically acclaimed author of Singular Rebellion is an unusual portrait of a deeply taboo subject in twentieth-century Japanese resistance to the draft in World War II. In 1940 Shokichi Hamada is a conscientious objector who dodges military service by simply disappearing from society, taking to the country as an itinerant peddler by the name of Sugiura until the end of the war in 1945. In 1965, Hamada works as a clerk at a conservative university, his war resistance a dark secret of the past that present-day events force into the light, confronting him with unexpected consequences of his refusal to conform twenty years earlier.
language: English
title: Grass For My Pillow
titlecomplete: Grass For My Pillow
genres: Asian Literature, World War II, Japan, Asia, War, Japanese Literature, Historical Fiction, Fiction
ratings_count: 58
publisher: Columbia University Press