"I will survive and return to my wife."
As Japan's defeat in the war loomed ever closer, one Zero fighter pilot dared to voice his desperate clinging to life without shame — and was branded a coward by his fellow soldiers.
Kentaro Saeki, a young man who has lost his sense of purpose, and his older sister Keiko, a freelance writer, begin investigating the life of their grandfather, Kuzō Miyabe, who died in the Pacific War. Almost nothing of his story has been passed down — only that he died on ...
Basic plot: A brother and sister find out that their biological grandfather is actually a man who died in the war and their grandmother remarried after. They go around interviewing war time colleagues of their heretofore unknown relation to find out what sort of person he was. For me it had a lot of sections which dragged, and then it'd come out of nowhere and punch you in the feels.
The book is mostly monologues which means the grammar is less literary and more everyday. You could probably squeeze by with a solid understanding of N3 grammar with a smidge of N2. There is a section with a bit of non-Tokyo dialect but it's one of the more straight forward ones I've read so far. Ex: 何ちゅうか = 何ていうか and the ね at the end of sentences becoming な. That sort of thing. The vocabulary is extensive and nearly all war-related. If you're a war buff this book will probably be a breeze, but if you're not (like me) reading this as an ebook for easy lookups is probably wise. I mentioned this book to two Japanese people I know and both said they read it years ago when it was quite popular. One of them mentioned that the author has fallen out of favor recently though because he's been posting unpleasant things about Koreans on Twitter. Google 百田尚樹 差別 if you want to read about it.