Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 306
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-1-4422-2352-3 • Hardback • September 2014 • $44.00 • (£34.00)
978-1-4422-2353-0 • eBook • September 2014 • $41.50 • (£32.00)
Kathryn Meyer is professor of history at Wright State University. Her books include Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade.
Introduction
Chapter 1: In the Garden
Chapter 2: Ice City
Chapter 3: Settlers
Chapter 4: Dirty Work
Chapter 5: Contested Land
Chapter 6: Conflict
Chapter 7: Manchukuo
Chapter 8: Control
Chapter 9: Working Girls
Chapter 10: Harbin Vice—Drugs
Chapter 11: Harbin Vice—Gambling
Chapter 12: The End of the Road
Chapter 13: Punishing the Police
Conclusion
Appendix A: Character List
Appendix B: Cursing
Appendix C: Flophouse Names and Franchise Owners
Appendix D: Currency
Appendix E: Cost of Scavenged Goods
Appendix F: Smuggling Costs
Bibliography
This is real history. Drawing on impeccable Japanese-language first-hand documents, Kathryn Meyer has given us a story never before told in English. She sets the action in the larger context of events in Asia and in North Manchuria as World War II approached, yet she also recounts the scenes of alleyway sex that provided enough cash for another hit of opium. Written in a lively and colorful style, this is a book you won’t be able to put down.
— Ronald Suleski, Suffolk University, Boston
Life and Death in the Garden is riveting. Kathryn Meyer leads readers on a tour de force visit to a long-forgotten Manchurian ghetto in which people sought any means possible to survive foreign occupation, economic dislocation, and social decline. This is history at its best, teeming with characters that Meyer carefully recreates to locate in their local, national, and international contexts. Their lives are as fascinating as they are tragic and they bring to life this time and place with unprecedented clarity. Meyer’s decades of research are reflected in equal measures of effective storytelling and historical reconstruction. An outstanding addition to the growing fields of Manchurian and Manchukuo studies, her book will inspire great interest in a part of China most often overlooked. And it is a great read.
— Norman Smith, University of Guelph; author of Intoxicating Manchuria: Alcohol, Opium, and Culture in China’s Northeast
Here is something new: a history of hell frozen over. Kathryn Meyer takes us on a Dickensian tour of Harbin’s "Garden of Grand Vision," a frigid Manchukuo slum where thieves snatched rags from the dying; pimps beat fourteen-year-old prostitutes; and everyone sought oblivion in narcotics, sex, and gambling. Along the way she tells of the dismemberment of China, the perils of frontier migration, the workings of underground economies, and the collapse of Japanese imperialism, blending a unique microhistory with a narrative of one of history’s great tragic dramas.
— David Courtwright, author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World
Life and Death in the Garden introduces readers to the Manchukuo experience, one that receives little attention among the vast literature describing the Second World War. In doing so a reader will discover:
-Problems faced by an occupying police force trying to maintain order in a foreign and often hostile land
-Details of Japanese espionage in Northeast Asia
-Harbin, a frozen city of international importance in the 1920s and 1930s
-Methods tried by Japanese authorities to control gambling and drug abuse, all of which have echoes in today’s world
-Brutalities of life faced by Chinese streetwalkers—these women were not the high-class geisha or sing-song girls of popular literature
-Amazing entrepreneurial skills shown by the down-and-out of Harbin who created thriving businesses under the harshest conditions
-Life on Harbin streets—including gaming, begging, foodstalls, and ghost markets specializing in stolen goods
-Developing professionalism of the Manchukuo police service in spite of an on-going war
-Desperate last-ditch Manchukuo attempts to control vice through labor camps in appalling conditions