In Japan, often the only way to deal with history is to forget it. This defective resort deprives some people of the opportunity not only to learn from history but also to be absolved of it. Akira Yoshimura's novel about the American campaign to capture Okinawa deftly reflects the quandary faced by many postwar Japanese whose detestation of the savagery of American troops in the Pacific War was matched only by a sense of betrayal and shame at the conduct of Japanese imperial forces. The solution for many has been self-imposed amnesia.

The events in "Typhoon of Steel" take place between May and July 1945 and are related by Shinichi Higa, a 14-year old schoolboy drafted with many others into service during the war's desperate endgame, made to wear the several-sizes- too-large uniforms of dead men.

Yoshimura's high school-age characters, members of the stirringly named Blood and Iron Student Corps, are too fired up with visions of a glorious martyrdom to grasp the extent to which the islanders have been duped. Anyone who had cared to look at Kushi Fusako's "Memoirs of a Declining Ryukyuan Women," published in 1932, would have benefited from the prescient comment, "We always seem to be at the tail end of history, dragged along roads already ruined by others."