Thicker Than Forget

A postwar love story

By: James Roth

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

“A powerful evocation of post-war Tokyo, Japan's rebirth during the American occupation under General MacArthur, and the endurance of the human heart.” The Japanese-American Friendship Society.

She stared at him, her lips pursed together, appearing a bit angry, and then she spoke to him in Japanese, “Your Japanese is very good. Why?”

“I've lived here most of my life.”

“When are you returning to America?”

“I don't know.”

“There's going to be a war,” she said.

With war between the U.S. and Imperial Japan looming in the fall of 1941, Colton Hancock, who grew up in Tokyo, returns to the U.S., reluctantly leaving his Japanese lover, Yasuko, an independent, free-thinking woman, behind. During the war, he serves as an interpreter in the interrogation of Japanese prisoners. Soon after Japan's surrender in September of 1945, he flies into war-ravaged Tokyo as an army lieutenant, hoping to pick up where he has left off with Yasuko, but the course of their romance does not continue in a way that he could have imagined. This tersely written love story has as is setting the destruction of much of Tokyo by B-29s, the occupation of the country by American GIs, the complexities of Japanese society, and a thriving black market, as the two lovers overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges in their effort to reunite. The title, "Love is Thicker than Forget," is taken from a poem by one of the twentieth century's most renowned poets, E. E. Cummings.