The Iconoclast.
74
Books & arts
The Economist
September 5th 2020
2
purpose of self-defence).
Mr Abe may have drawn on his grand-
father’s ideas but he learned his trade at his
father’s side. Shintaro visited 81 countries
in the 1980s; the younger Mr Abe served as
his secretary. “His father’s globe-trotting
personal diplomacy impressed upon his
son the importance of building trust with
foreign leaders,” Mr Harris writes. That has
been one of Mr Abe’s main achievements
(see Leader). He also inherited his father’s
unfinished business: Shintaro died of can-
cer while trying to settle a territorial dis-
pute with the Soviet Union in 1991.
After Mr Abe followed his father into the
Diet, Mr Harris shows how he came to be a
leader of a “new conservative” movement.
He argued for a more equal alliance with
America in which Japan could bear a great-
er burden, and latched on to the cause of
Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea
to prove his bona fides as a defender of his
country. He also engaged in some appalling
whitewashing of Japan’s wartime
atrocities. Mr Abe’s allegiance to the new
conservative ideas helped doom his first
short-lived term as prime minister in
2006-07, which became bogged down in
ideological battles over the past.
Belonging to a political dynasty gave Mr
Abe a big head start. He rose fast despite
having been an average student who
whizzed around in a red Alfa Romeo and
played a lot of mahjong. Yet it has also been
a heavy burden. The reader cannot help but
quake alongside Mr Abe when his mother
tells him, “The
ldp
of the present was made
by my father Kishi Nobusuke, and you
must never forget those great footprints.”
His mother is an enduring presence: they
live in the same apartment building, and
even as prime minister, he and his wife,
Abe Akie, ate breakfast with her.
That, in part, explains why changing Ja-
pan’s constitution was so important to Mr
Abe. He cited his failure to do so as one of
his biggest regrets when he announced his
resignation on August 28th. Yet history will
remember Mr Abe more fondly for his
readiness to subsume his ideology in fa-
vour of a pragmatic approach to national
interests during his second stint in office.
(Such as with his conciliatory statement on
the 70th anniversary of the end of the sec-
ond world war.) Even what Mr Harris dubs
an “Abe Doctrine”—building up Japan’s de-
fence capabilities and ties with other re-
gional powers—is less a break with the
Yoshida Doctrine than an offshoot.
As Mr Harris notes, Mr Abe was a keen
reader of the German sociologist Max We-
ber. “With regard to what one should do as a
politician, my grandfather consistently
acted according to ‘responsibility for con-
sequences’,” he wrote in 1996. “That is, Max
Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’.” Mr Abe
was too kind to his grandfather. The de-
scription fits him better.
7
“I
n the west
the economy was not
working well, mental illness was rife,
and social classes were still locked in strug-
gle.” This familiar diagnosis comes from
“Three to Kill”, a French noir novel by Jean-
Patrick Manchette, published in 1976. As he
wrote, far-left terrorists in Europe were
bombing and kidnapping their way to-
wards revolution. He turned this unrest
into a series of politically engaged pulp fic-
tions as smooth as a well-oiled revolver.
In his youth Manchette, who died in
1995, had been a left-wing activist. Inspired
by this milieu, he created a cast of assas-
sins, anarchists and ideologues. Martin
Terrier, the hit-man at the heart of “The
Prone Gunman” (published in 1981 and
adapted into a film starring Sean Penn in
2015), is trying to go clean after a decade of
profitable murder, only to be pursued by
old enemies. Georges Gerfaut, the militant
turned middle-manager in “Three to Kill”,
stumbles into a bitter vendetta involving
an old fascist from the Dominican Repub-
lic. Manchette’s tightly wound plots move
inexorably towards bloody denouements.
Along the way he portrays a society riven by
a class war that has devolved into a grisly
procession of tit-for-tat murders.
Manchette wastes no time on psycholo-
gy. His books are all action, unfolding with
a laconic efficiency that would make his
killers proud. One minute Gerfaut is enjoy-
ing a dip in the sea, the next a killer in
swimming trunks is punching him “mat-
ter-of-factly in the solar plexus”. Man-
chette dispatches his victims with grim
specificity: a woman’s chest becomes “a
glob of crushed bone, pulped flesh, frag-
ments of bronchial tubes”. His characters’
interests are narrow but deep—in particu-
lar, what bullets do to bodies and the weap-
ons that fire them.
Flashes of lyricism illuminate the
murk. Manchette describes a burning
house collapsing “just as matter collapses,
or so they say, in the hearts of distant stars”.
There are touches of black comedy. As Car-
lo and Bastien, a pair of bickering assas-
sins, trail a target to the south of France,
Bastien plans a holiday excursion: “We can
stop at Le Lude,” he says. “It’s charming, Le
Lude. It has a delightful castle.” When Bas-
tien dies in a shoot-out, Carlo’s eulogy is a
passage from “Spider-Man”.
The blend of action, ideology and hu-
mour comes together best in “Nada” (1973).
The most overtly political of Manchette’s
novels, it tells of a ragtag group of left-wing
terrorists planning to kidnap the American
ambassador to France. Manchette skewers
its members—only one is a true believer;
the rest are there for the kicks—as well as
the quarrelsome vanity of left-wing fac-
tions. Needless to say, the group’s plan goes
awry in a stupendously violent way. Just
when you think all the corpses have
dropped, another head explodes.
7
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