The Sea and Poison was the first Japanese book to confront the problem
of individual responsibility in wartime, painting a searing picture of
the human race's capacity for inhumanity. At the outset of this powerful
story we find a Doctor Suguro in a backwater of modern-day Tokyo
practicing expert medicine in a dingy office. He is haunted by his past
experience and it is that past which the novel unfolds. During the war
Dr. Suguro serves his internship in a hospital where the senior staff is
more interested in personal career-building than in healing. He is
induced to assist in a horrifying vivisection of a POW. What is it that
gets you, one of his colleagues asks. Killing that prisoner? The
conscience of man, is that it?