Anatahan; The True Adventures of Twenty men and One Woman on a Jungle Island

New York: Hermitage House, 1954. First American Edition. Octavo. 21cm. Publisher's blue cloth spine over yellow cloth covered boards, titled in black to spine. Dustjacket. 206pp. Bumping to spine ends, some light soiling and discoloration of the cloth in some areas and some minor sunning to the spine, in a bright pictorial dustjacket with some marginal wear and creasing to extremities, a couple of small closed tears, and some small areas of shallow chipping to the spine ends. Internally clean, top edge stained blue, fore-edge untrimmed. An autobiographical account, in a translation by Korean-American scholar and author Younghill Kang, describing the bizarre (truncated) circumstances by which a group of Japanese military were marooned on Anatahan Island in 1944. They remained marooned for 7 years, rejecting the news that the war had ended as enemy propaganda and only finally surrendering to the US Navy when the Americans dropped mail from their families asking them to come home. The story was filmed by Josef von Starnberg in 1953 from an earlier draft of this account, and the story itself attained a degree of notoriety when it was discovered that the men had spent a lot of their energy competing for the one woman on the island, Kazuko Higa, to the extent that several men died in their pursuit of her, and she had to escape into the jungle in fear of her life when the men decided they were no longer going to fight over her, and thought they should kill her instead. (Inventory #: 81033)