Book Review: Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan

Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan
By Jennifer M. Dixon
Cornell University Press, 2018
276 pp.
$55.00 hardcover

They say never to judge a book by its cover. But if you do, Villanova University professor Jennifer Dixon’s “Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan” is arresting. With its liberal use of black lines, “crossing out” the rest of the typecast font, sitting below a bold red “Dark Pasts,” the jacket design alone packs the suspense of a thriller. Though not a work of literary fiction, Dixon seeks to solve the mystery of why and how some states come to terms with their dark pasts while others do not. She tackles the prompt through a comparative analysis of two cases: Turkey’s narrative of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 and Japan’s narrative of the Nanjing Massacre of 1937-1938, over a nearly 60-year period (1950-2008).