John Lanchester - Empire of the Sun

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

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

Title Page J. G. BALLARD Empire of the Sun

Copyright Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 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. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication. 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

Introduction

Epigraph Empire of the Sun draws on my experiences in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C. (Civilian Assembly Centre) where I was interned from 1942–45. For the most part this novel is based on events I observed during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and within the camp at Lunghua. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, but as a result of time differences across the Pacific Date Line it was then already the morning of Monday, 8 December in Shanghai. J. G. Ballard

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

Part II

20: Lunghua Camp

21: The Cubicle

22: The University of Life

23: The Air Raid

24: The Hospital

25: The Cemetery Garden

26: The Lunghua Sophomores

27: The Execution

28: An Escape

29: The March to Nantao

30: The Olympic Stadium

31: The Empire of the Sun

Part III

32: The Eurasian

33: The Kamikaze Pilot

34: The Refrigerator in the Sky

35: Lieutenant Price

36: The Flies

37: A Reserved Room

38: The Road to Shanghai

39: The Bandits

40: The Fallen Airmen

41: Rescue Mission

Part IV

42: The Terrible City

An Investigative Spirit

The End of My War

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

BY John Lanchester

When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, it had a huge and double impact. The first part of this consisted of the effect on its author’s reputation. J. G. Ballard turned fifty-four that year, and had published nine novels and more than a dozen short-story collections. He was regarded as a known quantity: an admired writer, and also the kind of writer who has fans. That implies a passionate, but perhaps rather narrow readership. He was seen as a writer of science fiction – an unhelpfully broad term, and one which perhaps puts off more people than it puts on. When I interviewed Ballard at his home in Shepperton in 1987, en route to writing about his novel The Day of Creation , he specifically asked me not to describe it as a work of science fiction, because that was a limiting and compartmentalizing description. Even those of us who loved his work could see why it didn’t have mass-market appeal. The sentences were clear, the images vivid, but the strangeness of the worlds he described was all the more pronounced for that. The normals out there would never be able to handle Ballard. We fans loved him all the more because of that.