Improbable Rendezvous

by Tom Ferry

While war historians may disagree over whether Japan had plans to invade Australia in WW2, they will all agree three Japanese midget submarines came into Sydney Harbour with serious intent in 1942. But little has surfaced [until now] of a fourth midget submarine and the extraordinary story of survival of one of the Japanese crew.
Adrift with death circling, the young submariner was hauled aboard a coastal steamer, only to be dumped with another unwelcome passenger on remote Lord Howe Island. The two outcasts survived in the wild until a wily island woman came on the scene. Denied the pleasures of island life, the submariner was inhumanely interned, until a dangerous liaison clinched his passage to freedom.
In 2006, 64 years after the Japanese attack of 1942, another Japanese man came to a novelist to speak at a writers’ seminar. From the moment a beautiful young woman stepped into his hotel room he was on an emotional rollercoaster. The hotel receptionist was an added distraction, though it was a mature woman with her own agenda who took him in hand. A harbour cruise and a dive on a wreck of a Japanese midget submarine led to an improbable rendezvous with the past, rocking the novelist to the core of his being.

275 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Ben Chenoweth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel's shtick is wondering how the two timelines interact: one is set in Australia during WW2, the other in Sydney in the present. The writing style is pretty good. But I was left puzzled by some of the characters' motivations quite often. All in all, an interesting read.