The incredible story behind Chloe Adams' debut fiction novel
Chloe Adams' biological grandmother Mary became pregnant during post-war military service in Japan, and has inspired her debut novel The Occupation.
Three years after Hiroshima was destroyed by an American atomic bomb. a young Australian woman named Mary arrived in the nearby city of Kure to work for the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF).
Back in Melbourne the next year, pregnant and single, Mary's intense meeting with another young woman in a fashionable cafe is the opening scene for Chloe Adams' debut novel The Occupation.
In 1949, unwed women very rarely got to keep their babies, Adams says, and Mary was forced to promise her unborn child to her cousin Tess, who was married but had been unable to conceive.
An air attack near the Japanse city of Kure on 24 July 1945.
Public domain
"Dolled up to the nines and in their nice dresses and jewellery", the cousins met at Hotel Australia, Adams says, which was the place to be in Melbourne at that time.
Yet Mary was in deep anguish as she agreed to not only give her unborn baby to Tess but also "teach" her cousin how to be a mother.
"The idea of having to do that on top of giving the child up is just sort of like so brutal and awful."
As a white Australian woman witnessing the shocking fallout of war on her first trip overseas, Adams says Mary had learned a lot about suffering in Japan.
Three years earlier, cities were bombed, and many people lived on the brink of starvation, but when Mary arrived in Japan in 1948, the country was "quite stable and secure".
Around 12,000 New Zealanders (known as J Force) played a role in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) in Japan from early 1946 to September 1948. Here New Zealand troops are inspected by BCOF commander-in-chief J. Northcott on 17 April 1946.
Public domain
In letters to friends from the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces HQ in Kure, Mary describes a sort of "expat" experience, Adams says.
"She's writing about going to parties, dances, and picnics, and her house girl, who was a Japanese domestic labourer, pressing her dress so she could go to the officers' club."
The juxtaposition of these two realities of extreme suffering for Japanese people and an enjoyable life for visiting members of the Allied is "unfathomable" to Adams.
"As a white Australian myself, I have a profound sense of responsibility to be faithful to the "intense racism" of the time, [but] I was thinking, I wonder if anyone's gonna publish this, because it felt so transgressive.
"I felt wrong to write it, except it was the truth… I just tried to continue to have that in mind, finding that balance between the truth and sensitivity."
A group portrait of officers and Japanese women employees at the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF).
Public domain
In The Occupation, Adams explores power dynamics across cultural lines, across gender lines and also the profound experience of being adopted, which she knew a "softened" version of through her mother, who only discovered in adulthood that "Aunt Mary" was actually her biological mother.
Although Adams only ever met Mary once as a child, on the first night of a research trip to Japan, the former journalist re-read her biological grandmother's letters and realised an interesting point of connection.
She had flown into Japan on the exact day that Mary had landed in the country 75 years before - just as the famous cherry blossoms were blooming.
"I had this quite uncanny feeling that Mary was there with me all the time."
