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Certain books have the potential to extend beyond their covers: They can affect readers so dramatically that they spur change, whether in readers’ heads or across society. Some of these titles are well-known. The popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin made it impossible for many white northerners to ignore the abolitionist cause; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique put into words women’s stultifying place in society, “the problem that has no name”; George Orwell’s Animal Farm gave the world a rich new metaphorical vocabulary for totalitarianism. Each helped readers recognize conditions they may have taken for granted or assumed were intractable, and gave them the conceptual tools for pushing back on them.

In ways large and small, the nine books on this list also do a version of this consciousness-raising. They examine different aspects of the status quo—the makeup of a country’s highest courts, everyday life under a government in turmoil, even how the art we consume is marketed to us. Then they use those distinctive elements of literature—its varied perspectives, its focus and clarity, the sense of scale it can provide—to illuminate injustice as well as what might just be in our capacity to correct.

Verso

We Want Everything, by Nanni Balestrini (translated by Matt Holden)

Admired by writers such as Umberto Eco and Rachel Kushner, this 1971 cult classic by Balestrini, an Italian novelist and poet, dives deeply into the long hours and stifling working conditions faced by employees at the Fiat factory in Turin that fueled strikes in 1969 that briefly paralyzed Italy and preceded the Years of Lead. The story is told from the perspective of a nameless factory worker originally from the south of Italy, whose narrative I compellingly transforms into a collective we in the novel’s second half as the employees band together in protest. The concern here is with power: who has it, who lacks it, and how the latter might wrest it from the former—in this case, by flooding the streets with the strength that can emerge from acting as a collective. “Now the thing that moved them more than rage was joy,” Balestrini writes triumphantly of the striking crowds toward the book’s end. “The joy of finally being strong. Of discovering that your needs, your struggle, were everyone’s needs, everyone’s struggle.”

[Read: How to make change, slowly]

Zed Books

Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi (translated by Sherif Hetata)

“They said, ‘You are a savage and dangerous woman,’” says Firdaus, an imprisoned woman awaiting execution for murder in a jail just outside of Cairo, to the psychiatrist visiting her in this 1977 novel by El Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist writer and activist. “‘I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous.’” Purportedly based on a similar testimony given to El Saadawi by a woman she encountered at the Qanatir Prison while working as a doctor in the early ’70s, Woman at Point Zero follows Firdaus as she describes her impoverished childhood, her disastrous marriage to a man 40 years older than her, and her subsequent escape into a life of sex work. She’s pressed in on all sides by misogyny and desperation; ultimately, when a pimp steals her hard-earned money, she murders him—and ends up imprisoned, though she remains unbowed. The novel portrays how society can grind women into doomed, twinned roles—either a caretaker or a sex object—and use those categories to justify further violence against them. Firdaus’s electric, often disturbing account points out the hypocrisy in that system, and remains chillingly relevant.

Mariner

Three Guineas, by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own might be the best-known of Woolf’s nonfiction works, but I’ve always been partial to her book-length essay Three Guineas, written on the eve of World War II. Scattered with illustrative photos of men in uniforms, this is a thought-provoking deconstruction of patriarchy in all its various guises—the military, the court systems, the universities. The book is structured as a letter to an unnamed gentleman; the cool anger of its chapters first began as a mixture of alternating fact and fiction, before Woolf would go on to separate the fiction into its own freestanding book, The Years, the last novel she would publish in her lifetime. What is left is Woolf at her most radical, even bordering on anarchic, as she explicitly links the very existence of the state and the institutions that support it to the oppression of women. “As a woman I have no country,” she declares. “As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

[Read: Trauma is everywhere. Write about it anyway.]

Semiotext(e)

Seasonal Associate, by Heike Geissler (translated by Katy Derbyshire)

Like a few of the other titles on this list, the 2014 novel Seasonal Associate, by Geissler, a German writer, is concerned with work, and how our jobs shape our lives. But it’s the rare book that portrays the early days of the gig economy, which has come to define millions of lives. Her protagonist, a woman whose creative labor as a writer isn’t quite paying the bills, starts a decidedly newer sort of job: She’s a seasonal shift worker at the Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Switching between the first and second person as a way to draw the reader immediately into the tedium of sorting and packing delivery boxes filled with goods, Geissler weaves scenes culled from her own experiences working at the Leipzig Amazon warehouse together with thoughtful meditations concerning the meaning of economics, art, and a life well lived, drawing on writers and thinkers such as Elfriede Jelinek and Karl Marx. Seasonal Associate offers a lucid portrayal of the changing nature of work in the 21st century.

Soft Skull

Broken Glass, by Alain Mabanckou (translated by Helen Stevenson)

When one is faced with an absurd situation, the most logical solution might be to act absurdly in turn. Or so argues the Congolese writer Mabanckou in his 2005 novel, which follows a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass as he spends his days drinking in a run-down bar in the Republic of the Congo called Credit Gone West, observing the lives of his fellow patrons and riffing on Congolese politics, everyday life, and various works of art. Broken Glass takes a critical view of governmental corruption after the country’s postcolonial independence, although the novel’s fragmented style is satirical and not entirely straightforward: The book details the lives of its working-class characters, such as Printer, whose experiences attempting to gain a better life in Paris lead to humiliation at the hands of his French wife, Robinette, whose literal pissing contest with a male patron turns into a surreal battle of the sexes; and the con artist Mouyeké, whose brief appearances at the bar Broken Glass are comparable to the cameos of Alfred Hitchcock in his own films. Throughout, Mabanckou’s writing seesaws across the page as though it, too, were under the influence.

[Read: Is literature 'the most important weapon of propaganda'?]

Open Letter Books

Thank You for Not Reading, by Dubravka Ugrešić (translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Damion Searls)

The Croatian writer Ugrešić was known for her sharp, sometimes verging on sour, view of the world, in works such as American Fictionary, her series of essays on visiting the United States in the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the ’90s, and novels like the devastating The Ministry of Pain, with its meditations on language, conflict, and placelessness. In her 2003 essay collection, Thank You for Not Reading, Ugrešić lays out a critique of the 21st-century publishing industry and the commercialization of literature, arguing that a world that favors content over literature will lead to a culture that is just as generic as the humdrum best sellers promoted on talk shows. Ugrešić is hilariously rude about the modern publishing industry, targeting book proposals, agents, and blurbs (which are “only apparently innocent”). In a cultural moment in which the pervading critical argument more often than not seems to boil down to “let people enjoy things,” Ugrešić refuses to sit by passively. Twenty years on, her book provides a refreshing, welcome perspective—and asks readers to take up their own provocative and sincere defense of art.

Clydesdale Press

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

First published in serial form in 1905 and then as a complete book in 1906, Sinclair’s The Jungle is a muckraking classic, and one that effectively uses some of fiction’s singular strengths—its interiority; its ability to conjure empathy for its characters; and its construction of vivid, detailed scenes, sometimes in the same paragraph—to create a shocking account of Chicago’s early-20th-century meatpacking factories and the labor they exploited. The novel follows a group of Lithuanian immigrants, including the just-married Jurgis and Ona, as they land in America and quickly have their fantasies of a better and easier life dashed: Jurgis, at one point, turns to alcohol to deal with cruelties of factory life, while Ona is sexually assaulted by her boss. The Jungle infamously sparked a federal investigation into the sanitary conditions of Chicago’s meatpacking facilities, and it’s still worth reading today, if only—considering the recent, shocking reports about the amount of child labor in America’s slaughterhouses—to track how little has actually changed.

[Read: Fairy tales for young socialists]

Seven Stories

A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie)

Since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, the French writer Ernaux’s global popularity has exploded, leading to renewed interest in her intense explorations of her own past. Two titles in particular have received most of the attention: Happening, detailing her illegal abortion in the 1960s, and Simple Passion, a novel based on her affair with a diplomat in the early ’90s. But her books preserving, and mourning, the working-class lives of her parents—A Man’s Place, first published in France in 1983, and A Woman’s Story, which came out five years later—are equally arresting. In both, Ernaux travels back in time to her childhood in Normandy, portraying, in spare, precise sentences, her mother’s push for her daughter to secure a better life than her own and her eventual death from Alzheimer’s, as well as her father’s struggles working in factories and farms before eventually running a local grocery store and café. She transcended their class through education, so in each, Ernaux tracks the familial divide that arose when her path ceased to resemble theirs. And she commits their history to paper as a protest against the slow erasure of their particular milieu: As she said in her Nobel-prize speech, “I will write to avenge my people.”

We live in an overwhelmed age when attention spans are short, distractions are many, and a lot of people, even dedicated book lovers, find their entertainment and occasional enlightenment in the latest TV series, whether it be Succession or The White Lotus. It takes grit and a certain amount of single-mindedness on the part of a novelist to write against this tide and treat literature as a potent category unto itself, apart from the demands of the marketplace or the restless spirit of potential readers.

I have been thinking about this lately because of my own experience with a decade-long book group mostly composed of writers and editors, types who are ostensibly receptive to the demands and complexities—and length!—of ambitious novels. And yet, they are all fiercely resistant to reading fiction that is more than, say, 350 pages, citing a lack of time as the main reason. I have no argument with this feeling; I spend far too many hours clicking around the internet checking out expensive clothes on sale. Still, even while navigating breathlessly busy routines, and with scant leisure time, people in Victorian times found the interior space to read capacious novels such as those by Charles Dickens and George Eliot—novels that went on and on, creating numerous pivotal events and fashioning idiosyncratic characters, bringing news of the larger universe as well as alternative modes of being. It may well be that such expansive works of fiction, in this time of information overload and incessant podcasts, no longer have the primacy they once had and no longer fill our need to hear about other people and places the way they once did. What we get instead are recursive autofiction and slivers of novels that aim not to encompass as much as possible, but to explore small tracts of interior landscape.

That Nathan Hill comes charging onto this depleted fictional scene with Wellness, a behemoth of a novel (624 pages, or nearly 19 hours of audio, if that is your pleasure), is all the more noteworthy as a result. The book swarms with characters, ideas, and sociological evocations, taking place over several decades: At one level, it is the straightforward up-and-down-and-up-again story of a relationship between two lonely souls, Jack Baker and Elizabeth Augustine, but it detours to reflect on the art market, real estate, interior design, parenting, sex, and many other topics. Hill, whose 2016 debut novel, The Nix, was as epic in scope as Wellness, is more reminiscent of the aforementioned Victorian novelists, with their energy and range, than he is of contemporary ones.

Hill’s ambition put me in mind of two other 20th-century novelists, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but Hill is less gnomic than the former and more humane than the latter. Wallace has always struck me as a show-off about what he knows, delighting in the arcane for its own sake. And Pynchon is a bit like a brainy scoutmaster, taking his readers along all of the highways and byways he’s discovered, initiating them into his vision of the universe. Hill brings more humility to his enterprise, a sense that there are things that he will never succeed in tracking down despite his diligent sleuthing. And his book makes a better case than I’ve come across in a long time for the uniquely transporting experience of reading a long, digressive novel bursting with ideas and observations.

Hill keeps his lofty intentions under his hat; only after one is well into the novel does one begin to realize that there are tales within tales, such as Elizabeth’s amoral robber-baron family legacy, that keep popping up ingeniously around the main narrative, gradually imbuing it with ever greater complexity. Wellness begins with a rom-com-like love story set in 1993, in Chicago. We are introduced to Jack, who is studying photography at the School of the Art Institute, and Elizabeth, a bookworm and polymath (with five majors under her belt) at DePaul University; they watch each other, unobserved, through apartment windows across an alley. They both idealize the other, projecting glamorous images from the bits and pieces of each other’s life they pick up on, as well as from their deflated sense of themselves. Elizabeth views Jack as “a man so defiant and passionate [that he] would never be interested in a girl as conventional, as conformist, as dull and bourgeois as her.” Jack, meanwhile, is busy creating his own scenario of rejection: “She’s exactly the kind of person—cultured, worldly—that he came to this frightening big city to find. The obvious flaw in the plan, he realizes now, is that a woman so cultured and worldly would never be interested in a guy as uncultured, as provincial, as backward and coarse as him.”  

The couple finally meet at a local venue known for alt-rock music, where Jack approaches Elizabeth despite the fact that she’s on a date with a classmate who has spent the night lecturing her about esoteric bands and his collection of “sacred records that almost nobody else had heard of or properly appreciated.” Hill is excellent on the look and feel of such places, describing a lead singer who wears “thick plastic sunglasses and what looks to be a ruffled baby-blue tuxedo shirt from the seventies—conspicuously uncool, which of course makes it really cool,” and who “says ‘Thank you, Chicago!’ as if he’s talking to a sold-out Soldier Field and not a dozen people in a dive bar hiding from the cold.” Jack and Elizabeth fall easily into step with each other, sharing secrets, a love of deep-fried Twinkies, and an overriding wish to escape the shadows of their pasts—“their families, their mislaid childhoods, their whole ugly evolution. They are in Chicago to become orphans.”

[Read: What to read when you’re feeling ambitious]

From this rather standard opening, the novel swoops around, driven by the author’s adrenaline and curiosity about seemingly everything. It moves backwards—to Jack and Elizabeth’s very different but equally traumatic family histories—and forward, to their life together as a more and more incompatible married couple, circa 2008, with a young son named Toby, whom Elizabeth anxiously hovers over, far from her “fantasy of quality parenting.” Hill frequently stops to offer up sociological nuggets, describing a picture-perfect kitchen that Elizabeth covets, “where all the dishes matched, where there were no greasy streaks on any surfaces…. It was a kitchen that seemed designed more for reflection and meditation than actual food prep.” Or he provides chunks of information, diving into the history of condensed milk (interesting) or, as it may be, algorithms and websites (less interesting).

Elizabeth works at a very meta-sounding lab called Wellness started by a psychology professor at DePaul, which studies clients’ responses to placebos and simulated experience. Jack, meanwhile, teaches photography and continues to take desolate photos of landscapes that, we will learn, emanate from his experience growing up in an emotionally sterile family in Kansas, where a prairie fire set by his father accidently killed his sister. Elizabeth becomes more and more alienated from him, sleeping in a separate bedroom, where she takes up with a vibrator, and suggesting that they try polyamory; she has decided that their meet-cute story is “just another highly embellished placebo, just a fiction they both believed because of how good and special it made them feel.” Jack tries ever more desperately to please her, to no avail, only to come up against her resistance to being lumped together with him even in the most basic of locutions: “It was one of her pet peeves, that thing that happens to couples when they stop saying ‘I’ in favor of ‘We,’ as if they’d developed a shared couple-brain, a consciousness that was not quite either one of them but somehow abstractly both of them. Their togetherself.”

Because of Hill’s desire to hold up all of contemporary culture, including farmers’ markets, book groups, and neural networks, to the light of his edifying and witty perspective, Wellness intermittently slides into too-muchness, with the longueurs this inevitably entails. (The novel concludes with an eight-page bibliography, as if Hill felt the need to document his facts—a touch that one can find charming or irritating or both.) There are moments when even the most appreciative reader, like myself, will find herself stuck in the hyper-articulateness of the novel (in my case, it was page 463) and wish it would just move on. And it is indeed possible that this extraordinary book might have been improved if someone had edited it down a bit and lost, say, 100 or so pages. But in the end, this is just a quibble.

It can be a bit disconcerting, even disorienting, to go from short, undemanding novels to Hill’s take on as much of the world as possible, and to his desire to link incongruous details and events in inventive ways. The fine details of Jack’s childhood, for instance, dovetail unexpectedly with his view of the purpose of art, which is to evoke an absence rather than a presence, and his investment in remaining part of the family he has brought into being, even when it seems no longer to hold together. From the first paragraphs on, it is clear that we are in the hands of a gifted stylist and an original thinker on whom, as Henry James had it, nothing is lost. This is Hill’s conjuring of Jack as Elizabeth initially sees him: “His hair is a few years past clean-cut and now falls in oily ropes over his eyes and down to his chin. His fashions are fully apocalyptic: threadbare black shirts and black combat boots and dark jeans in urgent need of patching. She’s seen no evidence that he owns a single necktie.”

Although there are whole sections of Wellness in which the thread that pulls along the romance at the heart of the novel seems to fray almost to the point of disappearing, Jack and Elizabeth’s relationship survives many detours as well as many setbacks and disappointments, emerging intact if imperfect, having evolved into a complex and poignant comment upon the always-fragile creation of intimacy: “Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them. So he says, ‘Yes I believe you,’ and she smiles. She stretches. She touches his face, and makes it splendid.” All of which is to say that I read Hill’s novel with excitement and close to a sense of disbelief that there is still a writer out there who is intrigued by amplitude and by what fiction can do if pushed far enough. You just have to find the hours to read it in, which might mean skipping a new TV series or two.

When Chinese officials and elites berate Japan, as they frequently do these days, they often pointedly mention the atrocities that Imperial Japan committed after invading their country in the 1930s. In March, Qin Gang, then China’s foreign minister, warned the Japanese that forgetting their history meant denying crimes that they then might repeat. China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, uses the memory of World War II to justify the present-day bluster of a rising global power. “Chinese people who have made such a great sacrifice,” Xi said in 2014, “will not waver in protecting a history written in sacrifice and blood.” When nationalistic Japanese politicians such as Shinzo Abe and Junichiro Koizumi have paid their respects at a Tokyo shrine whose honorees include convicted war criminals, Chinese patriots have exploded with state-sanctioned rage.

One reason that East Asia’s two greatest economic powers are still sparring about a bygone war is that the most important international attempt to confront that past—the Tokyo war-crimes trial after World War II—failed to promote a common understanding of who was guilty of what. The trial of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg has taken on an almost sacred status in democratic Germany and its neighbors. By contrast, the Tokyo proceedings left behind ambiguities and grievances more than sufficient to fuel not only geopolitical struggles in Asia but also political intrigue within China itself.

This article is adapted from Bass’s new book.

From 1946 to 1948, the victorious Allies prosecuted General Hideki Tojo and 27 other top Japanese leaders for aggression and war crimes. Although General Douglas MacArthur, the American potentate who ran the occupation of Japan, originally proposed to try Japanese leaders before a U.S. military commission only for attacking Pearl Harbor, the Tokyo tribunal was strikingly international. Its prosecutors and judges were drawn from 11 different Allied countries, among them important Asia-Pacific powers including China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as Japanese and American defense lawyers. Spectators heard harrowing testimony from Chinese and American eyewitnesses to massacre and rape at Nanjing, Filipinos who saw slaughter in Manila and elsewhere, American survivors of the Bataan Death March, and Australians forced to build the notorious Burma-Thailand death railway.

The Chinese judge, Mei Ruao, insisted that his colleagues put Asian suffering at the center of their deliberations and, amid fierce battles among the judges about whether aggressive war was a crime under international law, fervently supported the tribunal’s jurisdiction over Japan’s wartime leaders. The tribunal ultimately voted to send Tojo and six other top officials to the gallows, an outcome that Mei subsequently described as a “source of satisfaction and comfort to those [who] suffered from Japanese aggression, particularly the Chinese who suffered the most.”

[From the October 1960 issue: Why Japan surrendered]

But, fatefully, the Tokyo judgment was far from unanimous. To Mei’s horror, the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed American defense lawyers to challenge the verdicts in fiery oral arguments before the justices in Washington. The Philippine judge and the Australian chief judge had concurred with the convictions but filed separate opinions; the Dutch and French judges had written dissents; and the Indian judge had voted to acquit all defendants, including Tojo himself. Although his massive dissent, which portrayed the trial as victors’ justice by colonial powers, is utterly forgotten in the United States, it resonates today in Japan and also in Asian nations with bitter memories of British, French, Dutch, and American imperialism.

Ever since, memories of the trial have pulled China—the only non-Western and anticolonial country in the first rank of Allied powers—in opposite directions. Xi himself extolled the Tokyo convictions in a major speech in 2014, as well as China’s own military tribunals for lower-level Japanese war criminals: “The righteous nature of the trials is unshakeable and unassailable!” But the Chinese Communist Party that Xi leads didn’t always feel that way, as Mei’s own experiences after the trial demonstrated.

Born in 1904 in a suburban village near Nanchang, the eldest son of a farmer, Mei at age 12 won a coveted place at Tsinghua College in Beijing—now China’s premier engineering university. Next he went to Stanford University, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and followed that with a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1928.

He had good reasons to be wary of the United States. Like predatory European empires, the United States had held extraterritorial rights in China. Chinese people had been explicitly barred by nationality from the United States in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained in effect well into World War II. Yet Mei’s American sojourn left him with an abiding fondness for the country, its constitutional system, and its people, whom he saw as friendly, fair, well educated, democratic, scientific, and efficient, although sometimes childishly naive. (Chinese remembrances of him today blot out the politically awkward fact of his American affections.)

Mei believed in accountable, progressive government under law. Yet when he returned to China in 1929, it was in turmoil. The last emperor had been overthrown more than a decade earlier, and the Republic of China had been declared, but the government headquartered in Nanjing struggled to unify the country. Imperial Japan marched troops into Manchuria in September 1931, and then in 1937 launched a massive invasion of the rest of China. At least 14 million Chinese would die in the war; some scholars put the toll at 20 million to 30 million. Perhaps 80 million were displaced from their homes.

In 1934, despite some private misgivings, Mei joined Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling National People’s Party. Mei served at the Ministry of Judicial Administration, was appointed legal adviser to the Interior Ministry, and became a legislator in Nanjing. Soon before Japanese troops stormed the city in December 1937 and began the notorious massacres and rapes there, he fled inland with the remainder of the Nationalist government to the wartime provisional capital at Chongqing, in the humid mountains of Sichuan province. Swollen with desperate hordes of displaced people, Chongqing suffered some of the worst Japanese aerial bombardment of the war. Some 12,000 Chinese were killed, almost all of them civilians.

Chiang’s Nationalists weren’t just fighting Japan; their bitter contest against the Chinese Communists was spiraling toward civil war. The Communists, led by Mao Zedong and others, demanded revenge for Japanese atrocities, but were not about to bother with anything so bourgeois or slow-moving as war-crimes trials. Referring to a feudal warrior who had chivalrously refused to attack a vulnerable enemy force, Mao once declared, “We are not Duke Xiang of Song and have no use for his idiotic virtue and morality.”

After Japan finally surrendered in 1945, the Allies resolved on an international military tribunal for the top Japanese leadership. Despite Mei’s lack of practical judicial experience, Chiang’s government, wanting someone familiar to American lawyers, chose Mei as its judge.

Judges in the Tokyo war-crimes trial. Mei Ruao, the Chinese judge, is second from right in the front row. (Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho / Getty)

As the trial opened, Mei glared at the defendants with patriotic rage. Although he was privately worried that the debilitated Chinese authorities had not managed to gather enough evidence of Japanese atrocities in places other than Nanjing, he pressed his fellow judges for a stern verdict. He insisted that aggressive war was already a war crime, not a new offense willed into existence by the Allied powers. He bristled at the fact that Emperor Hirohito kept his throne even as his underlings and his closest aide went to trial. “From a purely legal perspective,” Mei wrote in his diary, “I can’t see how the emperor could take no responsibility for Japan’s war of aggression.”

After the trial ended in November 1948, the obviously crumbling Nationalist government offered Mei a lofty position as justice minister. Yet rather than following his Nationalist patrons into exile on Taiwan, he joined the Communists as they neared their victory on the mainland in 1949. “He has hope in the Chinese Communist Party’s governance,” his son told me years later. Praised by Zhou Enlai himself, the premier and foreign minister of the revolutionary new People’s Republic of China, Mei was appointed as a Foreign Ministry adviser and later became a member of the People’s Congress. Abandoning his elegant English and fondness for the United States, he now adopted the stock jargon of Maoist propaganda, reviling “the American imperialists’ single-handed domination over Japan and their ambition to rule the world.”

[From the October 2023 issue: The bizarre story behind Shinzo Abe’s assassination]

He still could not fit in with Mao’s new order. In 1957, Mei was branded as a “rightist” after politely suggesting that the Communist Party should give the People’s Congress more power and defer less to the Soviet Union. And as Communist China sought to normalize relations with Japan, Mei’s well-known resentment of Japanese war crimes became a distinct political liability. The Communist Party insisted that only a small clique of Japanese imperialists had caused the war, casting the Japanese masses as innocent victims. “You have apologized,” Mao told visiting Japanese legislators in 1955, in an astonishingly conciliatory statement that no Chinese cadre could say today. “You cannot apologize every day, can you? It is not good for a nation to sulk.”

In 1962, Mei dared to challenge that party line. He boldly wrote an article for a government journal that excoriated Japanese leaders and troops for the Nanjing massacre. For that, he was accused of stirring up national hatred and revenge against the Japanese. A few years later, during the Cultural Revolution—Mao’s bloody mass political campaign, beginning in 1966, to break the power of bureaucracy, intellectuals, and professionals—Red Guards came to his home to search for anti-revolutionary materials. Because his article about the Nanjing massacre had warned against forgetting past suffering, he was denounced for “slandering the party as being forgetful.” He was forced to perform self-criticism, endlessly denouncing his own reactionary and bourgeois tendencies and promising to remake himself as a better Communist. He was put to forced labor, meant both to make him understand the working classes and to humiliate him: a Stanford-educated lawyer cleaning offices and scrubbing toilets.

Mei despaired. He was rocked by terrible news of old colleagues being killed and old friends committing suicide. He smoked too much—it was the one thing he liked that he could still do. His health deteriorated; he suffered from hypertension and heart disease. He was too sick to write. On April 23, 1973, he died at 69.

After Mao died and the Cultural Revolution came to an end, Mei was written out of Chinese history. Yet his reputation was revived more than a decade later under Deng Xiaoping, when Chinese elites went through a searing introspection about the Cultural Revolution. In 1985, Mei was reintroduced to the Chinese public in a long magazine profile.

Since then, his legend has grown. His devoted children have looked after his legacy, getting his works published posthumously. Newspapers run admiring stories about his achievements at the Tokyo trial. Disdainful of the trial at the time, the Communist Party now celebrates it as an act of historic justice, thereby rebuking Japan’s conservative governments. In 2006, to mark the 75th anniversary of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, a big-budget Chinese film called The Tokyo Trial was released in major theater chains, telling the story from his viewpoint. The bookish Mei was played by a dashing Hong Kong action-movie star, Damian Lau, who usually plays assassins or cops. “Mei Ruao is a person with a strong sense of ethics and national pride,” Lau said in a story for Chinese state radio. “I really respect him.”

Today the Chinese government is preoccupied with history. Since taking power, Xi has established two official days of commemoration for the war. As the Chinese Communist Party embraces a xenophobic nationalism, Mei’s star has risen as an anti-Japanese champion. His anti-Japanese sentiments, so ruinous for him during the Cultural Revolution, have now become the basis for his posthumous renown. As tensions rise between China and Japan, and as wars rage in Ukraine and in Israel and Gaza, upholding the laws of war promoted at Nuremberg and Tokyo has a fresh urgency.

Yet for an authoritarian government, the memory of historical wrongs can also provide a welcome distraction. Xi and his underlings would rather call public attention to Imperial Japanese cruelty than to the social and economic failings of their own governance. At a lavish museum and memorial to the massacre in Nanjing, Mei is extolled for the very words that got him in such trouble when he wrote them in 1962, about the need not “to forget the suffering of the past.”

Wadea al-Fayoume was laid to rest in a Chicago suburb as the family's landlord was charged with murder.