Books: “Twilight Territory” by Andrew. X. Pham

As history buffs know, Japanese forces occupied Indochina during the 1940s, trying, often vainly, to win the hearts and minds of the villagers—and stepping on the toes of the French colonial rulers, both Vichy and Free French. They bristled at Japanese rule but give the shifting political winds, were powerless to resist.

This is the setting for Andrew X. Pham’s latest novel, “Twilight Territory,” an unlikely romance between Tuyet, a young Vietnamese widow and Takeshi, a handsome Japanese major.

When Takeshi meets Tuyet, he is smitten and she is guarded, sensing the townspeople might regard her as a traitor. Slowly but surely she is won over by his humanity and warmth. They marry and eventually start a family.

But politics has a way of intruding into everything, including their romance. As Japan heads for defeat, Takeshi deserts. He learns Vietnamese and becomes a fighter with the new Resistance (the Viet Minh, aka the Viet Cong) This not only incurs the wrath of the French who are back in power, but also puts his wife and her family in danger.

This is perhaps the only novel in memory that describes the horrors of the Vietnam war from the POV of a Vietnamese—and the chaos that reigned on all sides. The French come off as bumbling fools who can be bribed at the drop of a baguette. You find yourself rooting for the villagers who live in “twilight territory” and who simply want to be left alone to determine their own futures.

Pham’s prose is clunky and often descends into cliches. But when it comes to battle scenes, nobody tells a more vivid story. The long marches through the jungle, the hand-to-hand combat, the wretched prison conditions—they seem unfathomable but sadly are probably not. The descriptions of visceral horror—trying to stuff a dying girl’s intestines back into her stomach, cleaning infected sores on prisoners’ bodies—make the story even more searing.

“Twilight Territory” ends abruptly in 1951 as the Indochina war was winding down for the French and things were beginning to ramp up for the Americans. In short, an interesting snapshot of a country that was torn apart by war well before we arrived.

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