When Genzaburo Yoshino penned How Do You Live? in 1937, a work of anti-authoritarian genius that remains on the classical arts curriculum today, it was an exercise in sociopolitical legerdemain. For purposes of stealth, Yoshino packaged an ethics book of then-outlawed Western ideas as a coming-of-age children’s novel to avoid the prying eyes of the TokyoImperial Japan’s “Thought Police.”
If one were to read only the chapters narrated by an omniscient voice that follows the protagonist, a 15-year-old boy in interwar Tokyo nicknamed Copper, the sleight of hand wouldn’t be so apparent. These chapters are often as not wholesome,