MANCHUKUO 1987

The year is 1987. It is decades since the German Reich won the Great War and the era of great power competition never ended. In Asia an aging, democratising Japanese Empire faces its sunset, as its last major colony, the puppet state of Manchukuo, is to reunify with the Republic of China.

Keizo Munekata is an officer of the Kempeitai - the military police - with no policework left to do. As the colonial dictatorship he has served his whole life uneasily prepares for the future, Munekata spends his days drinking, sleeping, doing odd detective jobs, and being in futile love with Hana, the young woman he pays for company, who hates him. But when an old army comrade tasks him with investigating the sexual assault of a Japanese student in the Chinese part of town, Munekata finds himself on the tail of a political conspiracy that goes right to the dark underside of his sleepy seaside community and into the bloody history of Manchukuo's fascist past.

He and Hana, his reluctant partner, Jintian, a closeted, collaborationist Chinese novelist, and Mizuki, a model Japanese schoolgirl and the best friend of the victim, are gradually drawn together as the politics of Manchukuo reach boiling point, and forced to confront not only what the Empire has made of them, but whether there will even be a place for any of them, oppressors and oppressed both, in whatever world it is that comes next.