After Darkness Study Guide

Christine Piper was born in Seoul, South Korea to an Australian father and a Japanese mother. Her family moved to Australia when she was a baby, and Piper grew up in Sydney. She has lived in Japan multiple times, teaching English and studying Japanese. She studied creative writing in Australia and the U.S., including at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She completed her debut novel, After Darkness, while working on her Doctor of Creative Arts degree at the University of Technology, Sydney. In between studying and writing, Piper has had a successful career as a magazine journalist, serving as an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine Australia.

As a work of historical fiction, After Darkness is tied to many real-life events. Most prominently, the novel tells the story of Japanese internment in Australia during World War II. After Japanese forces bombed the American military base of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States forced its Japanese residents into internment camps. As a colony of Britain and therefore ally of the United States, Australia did the same thing, forcibly relocating its Japanese residents and making them live in internment camps. Another part of history that features prominently in the novel is the research of Unit 731, which was a real unit of the Army Medical College in Japan. This research unit is infamous for its use of human subjects to test biological weapons and other deeply inhumane practices. The unit was responsible for killing thousands of people, whom they subjected to a wide range of bacteriological, chemical, and surgical experimentation.

In 2014, Christine Piper won the Calibre Prize for her essay “Unearthing the Past.” The essay deals with her interest in Japan’s history as the child of a Japanese immigrant, drawing on much of the same subject matter as After Darkness. On another note, Four Years in a Red Coat: the Loveday Internment Camp Diary of Miyakatsu Koike is relevant to After Darkness, as it details Miyakatsu Koike’s real-life experience of the Loveday internment camp. For another perspective on Japanese internment during World War II, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson is a novel partially set in a Japanese internment camp in the United States. Furthermore, The Imperial Japanese Army: The Invincible Years 1941-42 by Bill Yenne is a historical text about the Japanese army during World War II during the time period that Dr. Ibaraki would have been interned at Loveday camp.