Martha Sherrill's 'Dog Man'

Westerners writing about Japan tend to fall into two camps - those enraptured with its modernity, the idea that frenetic, hypertrophied Tokyo somehow represents the future, or others, like Martha Sherrill, the author of "Dog Man," who find in Japan's remote regions an anachronistic respite that harks back to our rustic past. Both are promising settings, yet each, in the wrong hands, can reduce the Japanese to caricatures, either salaryman robots living in their capsule hotels or zen master naturalists who live in perfect wa (harmony) with their picturesque countryside. It is a tribute to Sherrill, author of two novels and a previous nonfiction book called "The Buddha From Brooklyn," that she depicts her protagonist, Morie Sawataishi, a legendary breeder of prize-winning Akita dogs, as much more than an anime rendering of a mountain man, even if that means leaving the reader to grapple with a mysterious and sometimes dark central character.

Morie, an engineer who spent his life building and managing power plants in rural Japan, is an obsessive collector of Akitas, the muscular, stout hunting breed descended from animals domesticated by the Ainu - the aboriginal tribe of the Japanese archipelago. In his compulsive compiling of data about dogs, in his theorizing about which traits (long or short nose, round or triangular eyes, short or long fur) make for a perfect Akita and in his raising of the dogs themselves, he elevated the breeding of Akitas into a kind of Japanese art form, similar, in its rigid doctrine and hierarchy, to the tea ceremony or flower arranging.

Morie's mastery may also have saved the breed from extinction. During World War II, the Japanese Army paid a bounty for Akitas, skinning them and using their fur to line officers' coats. Impoverished farmers who by 1945 could barely feed themselves turned over their dogs by the thousands. By the end of the war, when Morie was living deep in the mountains of Akita Prefecture, there were fewer than two dozen Akitas left in all of Japan. Life in Japan during the cataclysmic finale of the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere was rough - my mother, the Japanese writer Foumiko Kometani, has told me stories of her evacuation to the countryside, where she subsisted on soy beans and a kind of wild fern. Yet Morie, even as his family struggled to buy rice, sheltered and raised an Akita puppy of good lineage; one of its ancestors was a famous prewar dog that eventually graced a postage stamp. Much to his wife's annoyance, the dog was soon consuming six pounds of food a day. As his house filled up with relatives taking refuge from America's bombing campaign against Tokyo, Morie's family was soon "speechless with disgust. You weren't supposed to feed dogs when people were starving." The Akita breed as we now know it survives in part because Morie did precisely that.

I should state that I am not a particular lover of purebred dogs - perhaps because I'm a "mixed breed" myself, half Japanese and half American - and so I do not share some of the passions of those who might read in Morie's careful breeding and cataloging of Akitas an interesting and thoughtful recent history of a beautiful dog variety. (I am fond of Akitas, however. Back in the '80s I housesat for a friend who owned a majestic Akita with whom I felt perfectly safe venturing through the remote reaches of Central Park at all hours of the pre-Giuliani night.) Yet I suspect even some fans of purebreds will find in Morie's genetic fine-tuning - his thoughts about the purity of "snow country" dogs, his listing of desirable traits, the discussion of what breeders were "trying to eliminate in their dogs" - a discomfiting suspicion that Morie stealthily transposed Japan's prewar eugenic obsession with racial purity to another species. In other words, Morie believed that too many of the Akitas in postwar Japan were impure, having been interbred with foreign dogs. As I read "Dog Man," I wondered at the connection between Morie's obsession with purity and his managing a power plant that employed American and English prisoners of war as slave labor. "Their clothes were in shreds. They barely had shoes," Morie's wife remembers. "Their beards were long, and their hair was greasy and matted. You've never seen people so thin ... and they were forced to work outside in the cold." In fascist Japan, it must have been too easy to dismiss prisoners of war as lacking positive kisho, the vitality and personality Morie so prized in his purebred dogs. It would have been enlightening if Sherrill had written about his thoughts on using slave labor. That silence is troubling.

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