The Emperor of Any Place

The Emperor of Any Place is a young adult novel by Tim Wynne-Jones. Generically, the novel spans both historical fiction and fantasy, or magical realism, depending on how one interprets the book's fantastic elements. The story follows Evan, a stereotypical teenager in a nameless Toronto suburb, in the wake of his father's sudden death. After finding a mysterious book among his father's possessions, the story splits into two: an account of Evan's life, and the supernatural story his father was reading at the time of his death. Although superficially very different, the story-within-a-story elaborates and explains many of Evan's familial struggles, and in so doing, dramatizes how the effects of war echo across generations.

Evan Griffin is sixteen years old when his father, a draft dodger who belonged to the counter culture of a bygone era, dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. After his father's death, Evan receives a mysterious phone call asking if his father had read a certain book. Intrigued, if still disoriented by his grief, Evan searches his father's den, picking through his things until he finds a mysterious yellow book. The book contains two tales, each the account of a solider: one Japanese, Isamu Oshiro, and one American, Derwood Kraft, both stranded at the close of World War II on Kokoro-Jima, a small South Pacific island. The book is apparently Isamu's memoir addressed to his new bride. Realizing that this is the story his father had been reading at the time of his death, Evan begins to read the book. To his shock, he soon discovers that the grandfather he has never met, a lifelong marine named Griff, is a character in the story.

Not long after this discovery, the grandfather in question – a nonagenarian with an abrasive manner – appears in Evan's life, his new guardian. The Emperor of Any Place then dives into the novel-within-a-novel: Isamu is a soldier of the Imperial Japanese Army and Derwood the survivor of a crashed American cargo plane. The soldiers recount their harrowing struggles for survival – struggles that take their timeline far beyond the generic boundaries of Evan's own story, following the conventions of historical fiction. Isamu and Derwood's island is, for example, swarming with grotesque monsters: wraiths and demons, innocuous childlike ghosts that Isamu calls his ghostly family, and memory-stealing zombies called jikininki.



The story begins with Isamu's tale. He describes how the jikininki lead him, in a way, to a crashed cargo plane with two dead bodies inside it. The navigator, Derwood, however, has survived – if not unscathed – and when Isamu finds him, he, too, is surrounded by a ghostly family. Isamu considers killing him, but Derwood is about to be attacked by a Tengu – a monstrous creature from Japanese mythology with the head of a vulture and body of a bear – and is forced to address this larger threat. Isamu is able to wound, but not kill the monster. Suspecting afterward, that Derwood is responsible for attracting the Tengu, he takes Derwood prisoner. The next day, he awakes to find that Derwood has escaped his shackles and is making both men tea. Slowly, largely out of necessity, and without the benefit of a common language, the men develop a kind of friendship. Eventually, they are found by commander Griff – Evan's grandfather – who helps Derwood off the island, promising the hesitant Isamu that he will come back for him. Whether or not Griff kept his promise, however, is left in doubt.

Back in Evan's timeline, in Any Place, Canada, things are not nearly as heroic, but in some ways just as fraught. Evan struggles to overcome his grief, and his relationship with his grandfather suffers from both men's emotional baggage. Evan comes to suspect that Griff was responsible for killing Isamu and that he stole the Japanese man's memoir after killing him, which would explain how it eventually ended up in Evan's father's possession. The novel ends with an intense dialogue between estranged grandson and grandfather. Evan confronts Griff about his role in the Kokoro-Jima affair, who claims that, in fact, the Tengu was responsible for killing Isamu. Evan, at first, has a hard time believing this, but then experiences a “memory” of the incident – it turns out that he was one of the “preincarnated” child ghosts on the island, and he had seen the whole thing, It also turns out that the reason Griff never truly loved his son, is because he was in love with an Icelandic woman, with whom he had a child. Griff and Evan make plans to seek out the woman and her child, Evan's last remaining family.

The banality of most of Evan's storyline, and Wynne-Jones's sustained attention to its details is a jarring contrast from the style of the novel-within-the-novel, and critics have been divided over how successful the juxtaposition is. Nonetheless, The Emperor of Any Place is a unique meditation on the long-term familial and personal ramifications of the phenomena of war that is often thought of in sweeping terms.