This section contains spoilers. If you haven’t read The Garden of Dead Dreams and plan to, please proceed with caution!
Vincent Buchanan is an entirely fictional character, but he became so real to me while I was writing that I found myself typing his name into search engines. He is loosely based on some of the famous writers of his era, especially Ernest Hemingway, who is a larger-than-life legend in so many people’s eyes, and John Steinbeck, whose book The Moon is Down inspired some of the plot line. I was especially inspired by Donald V. Coerrs arguments in John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propoganda.
I studied history in college, and I was fascinated by how we create mythological heroes out of historical figures and lose sight of who they actually were. We are endlessly arguing over the actions of figures like Christopher Columbus, and often different people’s interpretations of them are radically opposite.
Throughout much of the book, Vincent Buchanan is portrayed as a legendary American patriot whose book helped the United States triumph against the Japanese in the Second World War. Some believe he was a propagandist, blame him for Japanese internment, and credit his book with Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb. The novelist Isabella Pena asks the Buchanan Academy students to consider that Buchanan was a “patriarch, an imperialist, a racist” based on her interpretation of one of his stories.
But Etta discovers that Buchanan was not the person most Americans assumed. He actually had strong ties and sympathies to Oregon’s Japanese American community in the 1920s, and then with a family who returned to Japan in 1929. He may have been working for America’s Office of Strategic Services, but if so, he was using that position to get information for his ultra-nationalist Japanese friend as a spy for the Japanese.
Is this a plausible scenario? Maybe. Maybe not. The Japanese government was reportedly eager to recruit spies in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Buchanan’s actions are loosely based on a number of actual spies, most notably Valvelee Dickinson who spied for Japan through Buenos Aires using her New York City doll company.
Why do we often interpret the past (and literature) so inaccurately? Could a “legendary” historical figure bury his past because of our tendency to create mythologies and worship heroes? Do we care if our literary heroes are “blemished and raw, deranged and narcotized” in their personal lives? These are some of the questions Vincent Buchanan helped me explore.
Learn more:
Hynd, Alan (1943). Betrayal From the East: The Inside Story of the Japanese Spies in America.
Seth, Ronald (1957). Secret servants: a history of Japanese espionage
Deacon, Richard (1990). Kempei Tai: A History of the Japanese Secret Service
Matthews, Tony, 1949- (1994). Shadows dancing : Japanese espionage against the West, 1939-1945