Brinkely-Rogers was a 19-year-old member of the US Navy in 1959 and his ship was the USS Shangri-La. It roamed the Western Pacific and one of the ports it periodically stopped in was Yokosuka, Japan, where a major US naval base is located. While in port there, Rogers meets a bar girl who, seeing him carrying a book into the bar, asks him what he is reading. Turns out it's a book of poetry (Dylan Thomas) and from there a relationship blooms. Yukiko (not her real name, which Rogers never reveals) turns out to be literary herself and teaches him much that he doesn't know, not only about literature but classical Japanese cinema and more. She believes in him, tells him he must go to college, get an education, and become a writer. He credits her with the fact that he did do all that -- although the writing turned out to be reporting for various news outlets as he traveled the world.
Yukiko is more than ten years older than Paul and her history is a history of the trauma of Japan at the end of the war. She was born in Manchuria at the time Japan occupied it and was repatriated after the war but lost both her child and her father. She subsequently lived in Hiroshima and had a relationship with a gangster (yakuza) but we never learn her whole story, as Rogers himself did not know it.
But the center of the story is their relationship. It is chaste -- she seems to want it that way and he doesn't ask why. But it is also passionate. Now, decades later -- the book was published in 2016 -- Rogers has only Yukiko's letters to refresh his memory of their time together, but they are enough to recreate their love from so long ago.
The memoir evokes not only the youth of Brinkley-Rogers but a whole era. On the Shangri-La, ironically, are atomic weapons -- weapons such as were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fourteen years earlier. Paul and Yukiko are aware of the irony of their love, and that of many other service members who in fact consummated their relationships and perhaps married their Japanese girlfriends -- girlfriends they would never have met but for the war and American victory.
Later in his life, Paul returned to live in Japan as a reporter for a couple of years. He tried to find Yukiko but couldn't. But what he knows is that his life was fulfilled because of the encouragement of a bar girl he met by chance when he was still a teenager.
And we, as readers, can experience a long-ago time and its mark on one of those who lived through it thanks to Brinkley-Rogers' efforts.
