Twilight Territory by Andrew X. Pham

On the cusp of going to Vietnam for the first time I am immersing myself in books about it--both fiction and non-fiction. This is the former, but meshes nicely with the Stanley Karnow book we are reading that is a thorough history of the events leading up to US involvement in the was there. This is set in the WWII period and the immediate aftermath. The French occupation was an unmitigated disaster with a terrible ending. Built on this backbone, this is a novel of love and loss, betrayal and war that starts during the Japanese occupation of Vietnam. France has ruled the colony of Indochina for three generations by the time the Japanese army invades. In 1942, Le Tuyet is a young, divorced mother who confronts a local French bureaucrat and catches the attention of Yamazaki Takeshi, a major in the Imperial Japanese Army. The major admires her beauty and spirit and eventually begins to earn her trust. The two honorable people both speak the language of loss and loneliness, and they fall in love and eventually have children. The shifting tides of the French and the Japanese, with the Vietnamese always and forever squeezed between two warring factions, and always on the losing end, play out across the 1940's, setting the stage for more tragedy to come.