Book Review of The Enemy’s Wife by Deborah Swift

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(Fair review based on a review copy from the publisher.)

The second novel in a series about surviving war rather than winning it.

This well-researched story is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai just before and for several months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (and many other places, including Shanghai’s Western enclave). Two of the central characters are female refugees; one of them a Polish Jewess forcibly separated from her Japanese husband and the other an orphaned teenage Jehovah’s Witness from Austria. From that premise, the author does an excellent job of sustaining the reader’s hope in an ending which is not unbearably bitter, and that hope is not quite dashed, either. But in doing this the author redefines success as someone who has been through the struggle still being alive after it.

There have been many accounts of how brutal the Japanese armed forces were during WW2 (which started in China years before it was happening anywhere else) and most of these are true, but the author here goes the necessary distance to show that this was not a natural behaviour for many, probably most, of the men in question and that the brutality of their training and subsequent harsh discipline conditioned the men to accept that sort of thing as normal -and to do to those weaker than themselves what those stronger than themselves were constantly doing to the soldiers in the middle. The author does not labour the point, but she makes it. The methods described resemble those of the Ottoman Empire as documented by T.E. Lawrence (from his personal experience when he was mistaken for a potential conscript) except that the Imperial Japanese Army perhaps went further in the direction of making the killing of helpless victims a standard TRAINING exercise. But both the Japanese and Ottoman Empires sought to recalibrate the sexuality of recruits towards violence and exploitation. In the present day this is being done by online lifestyle influencers rather than drill sergeants and it is possible to foresee serious trouble brewing, or actively being brewed.

The author also presents the various different peoples and factions as collections of individuals making moral choices, or else acting solely in their own interests or even on their very worst impulses. There is no tarring with the same brush. The most despicable character of all is, ostensibly at any rate, a senior member of the CCP rather than the Japanese Army, but on balance the CCP itself gets a pretty good press, though that’s partly because there’s no other group in Shanghai offering organised resistance to the Japanese. Many of the people helping the resistance are not “members” of any party and that causes them to help others with a degree of impartiality the CCP itself has never been noted for.

And a Japanese officer does win his battle with addiction, even if he loses everything else.

The Enemy’s Wife by Deborah Swift is published by HQ on the 9^th of April 2026