54 pages • 1-hour read
Sisters Under the Rising Sun
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Background
Historical Context: Japanese Invasion of Singapore and its Aftermath
Heather Morris’s novel is set against the backdrop of Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia during World War II. As Japanese campaigns in China and French Indochina increased, their resources depleted, and because the Allies had imposed trade embargoes, they began to plan invasions of Allied territories, including Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore, to obtain more resources. Singapore had been a British colony since the early 1800s and was a major strategic base in WWII, yet British defenses there were relatively weak as they had considered Singapore’s terrain too difficult for Japanese troops to fight through. After a major military disaster, the British surrendered Singapore on February 15, 1942.
The attack on Singapore is depicted in the novel when Norah sends Sally away for her safety. Many evacuees, like Norah, tried to escape on the SS Vyner Brooke, which the Japanese bombed and sank. Some survivors were massacred, and Vivian Bullwinkel, a character in the novel, was a real-life survivor of this massacre. Japanese forces captured thousands of Allied civilians and military personnel and established brutal prisoner-of-war camps across the region. In the women’s internment camps on Sumatra, where the novel takes place, internees faced extreme hardship, including starvation, rampant disease, and forced labor. Of the 65 Australian Army nurses who boarded the evacuee ship Vyner Brooke, only 24 survived the war, a statistic noted in the Author’s Note which underscores the lethality of the conditions.
Sisters Under the Rising Sun dramatizes how, in response to this historical reality, captive women forged a new, self-governing society. As depicted in the novel, survival depended on collective action and the sharing of skills. Women with leadership experience, like the character Mrs. Hinch, established committees to manage camp life (118), while those with medical training organized makeshift hospitals with no supplies. A prominent real-world example of this communal spirit, central to the novel, was the creation of a voice orchestra by internees Norah Chambers and Margaret Dryburgh in the Palembang camp (Balcombe, Judy. “The Women’s Camp Vocal Orchestra.” Muntok Peace Museum, Sept. 2015). By vocally recreating complex classical scores, these women provided a powerful source of cultural and spiritual resistance, demonstrating how creativity and social organization became essential tools for survival.
Authorial Context: Heather Morris’s Method of Fictionalizing Historical Testimony
Heather Morris is a New Zealand author known for writing biographical fiction based on the real-life testimonies of survivors of World War II and the Holocaust. Her international bestselling debut, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, established her method of conducting extensive interviews with survivors or their families and then crafting a narrative that adheres to the core facts of their experience while fictionalizing dialogue, characterizations, and emotional arcs to create an accessible novel. This approach, sometimes termed “testimony fiction,” positions the author as a storyteller bearing witness to historical trauma.
Morris’s works thus occupy a space between historical record and imaginative literature, and Sisters Under the Rising Sun follows this same model. While the copyright page contains a standard fiction disclaimer, the dedication page thanks the families of Norah Chambers and Nesta James “for sharing [their] mother and grandmother’s story” and “[their] cousin’s story” (vii), respectively. The detailed Author’s Note reminds readers that the novel’s central characters and events are based on the lives of real women who were interned in Sumatra. Understanding Morris’s method of dramatically reconstructing true events allows the reader to approach the novel as an act of remembrance that uses the techniques of fiction to convey the emotional truth of the survivors’ experiences.Heather Morris is a New Zealand author known for writing biographical fiction based on the real-life testimonies of survivors of World War II and the Holocaust. Her international bestselling debut, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, established her method of conducting extensive interviews with survivors or their families and then crafting a narrative that adheres to the core facts of their experience while fictionalizing dialogue, characterizations, and emotional arcs to create an accessible novel. This approach, sometimes termed “testimony fiction,” positions the author as a storyteller bearing witness to historical trauma.
Morris’s works thus occupy a space between historical record and imaginative literature, and Sisters Under the Rising Sun follows this same model. While the copyright page contains a standard fiction disclaimer, the dedication page thanks the families of Norah Chambers and Nesta James “for sharing [their] mother and grandmother’s story” and “[their] cousin’s story” (vii), respectively. The detailed Author’s Note reminds readers that the novel’s central characters and events are based on the lives of real women who were interned in Sumatra. Understanding Morris’s method of dramatically reconstructing true events allows the reader to approach the novel as an act of remembrance that uses the techniques of fiction to convey the emotional truth of the survivors’ experiences.
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