Shanghai by Joseph Kanon

 

Published by Scribner on June 25, 2024

Having relied on Berlin and Istanbul to provide noir atmosphere in earlier novels, Joseph Kanon turns to another classic setting for espionage novels: the city of Shanghai. Shanghai is set in the 1930s. Wars are breaking out, Germany and Japan are both set on world domination.

Daniel Lohr is a Berliner. Because he is Jewish, his life is in danger. His father has already been taken away. Daniel’s uncle Nathan in Shanghai buys him a first-class ticket on a ship that is crowded with refugees. Daniel’s property is confiscated by Nazis, apart from the ten marks with which he will start his new life.

On the trip to Shanghai, Daniel meets Leah Auerbach, an Austrian who sells her expensive coat at a bargain price to an affluent passenger so that she will have some money to support her aging mother. He also meets Yamada, a member of Japan’s secret police who has his eye on Leah. Other significant characters are communists: Florence, an American passenger on the ship who is too open about her political beliefs, and Tomas (rebranded as Karl in Shanghai), who knew Daniel in Berlin.

Daniel was part of a secretive group of communists in Germany. He isn’t particularly ideological, but he saw communism as an alternative to fascism. He hoped that the group would kill Nazis but he left Germany before he had a chance to make that hope a reality. In Shanghai, he resists overtures to continue helping the communist cause. Communism now is about Russia and Daniel only ever cared about Germany.

Daniel instead turns his attention to two jobs. He sells gossip to the entertainment editor of the local newspaper while helping Nathan operate his casino. To stay in business, Nathan needs to pay squeeze to the Japanese police or Chinese gangs (or both) who assure that Shanghai lives up to its reputation for corruption.

Shanghai politics will eventually drive the plot. As Yamada says, Shanghai makes strange bedfellows. Japan is confident that it will conquer China and come to control Shanghai. Until then, the Japanese are warlords who demand tribute. China is confident that it will outlast Japan. The Chinese have patience learned from centuries of watching one dynasty replace another. Refugees from the Nazis have flooded into Shanghai but often can’t get visas to go elsewhere. The various factions in Shanghai enter into shifting alliances as they try to protect their own interests.

Nathan has Daniel swing a partnership in a new casino with the Chinese, where Yamada will be a silent owner in lieu of paying squeeze. That deal does work out as well as Nathan hope. Violence in the club causes Daniel to return his attention to the communist cause as an alternative to the seemingly inevitable Japanese rule of Shanghai.

A love story is buried in the plot, but it isn’t a story of romance. Nor is Shanghai a traditional spy story, although spies lurk everywhere in the city. While the story defies categorization, it might best be understood as a story about what people will tell themselves to preserve their self-esteem as they struggle to survive. It is also a story about starting over. Some characters start over repeatedly because they have no better choices. You do what you must to survive, but sometimes you do what you can to make life better for someone else.

The story culminates with Daniel’s complicated but credible plan to save Leah and Nathan and maybe even himself from becoming collateral damage in an inevitable Shanghai war between the Japanese military and Chinese gangs. Whether the plan will succeed is the question that gives the novel its suspense. That suspense is considerable as the plot tightens.

Implementing the plan will require more than one character to engage in violence. Kanon invites the reader to weigh the benefit of the violent acts against the guilt that empathic people feel when they cause harm to others. Even if the people who are harmed might have earned their fates, living with the consequences of self-preservation might be a life-changing experience. Guilt makes people into someone new. The time characters spend in Shanghai “had done something to them that couldn’t be undone, or they had done it to themselves.”

Shanghai works on multiple levels — as a love story, an historical drama, a low-key espionage story — but it is more than the sum of its parts. The plot’s resolution leaves doors open to avoid the predictable happy ending I feared. The historical and geographic setting will help the reader stay engaged with Shanghai, while sympathetic characters and the risks they face will assure that the reader continues to turn the pages.

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