The Typist

Rife with the crisp dialogue, complex characters, and economy of language for which Knight’s previous work has been praised, The Typist chronicles the early rehabilitation of the Pacific theater of the Second World War—specifically occupied Japan, where Western bureaucrats flooded into Tokyo, taking charge of their former enemies.
When Van joins the army in 1944, he expects his term of service to pass uneventfully. After all, the war is winding down and Van’s singular talent—typing ninety-five words a minute—keeps him off the battlefield and in General MacArthur’s busy Tokyo headquarters, where his days are filled with paperwork and letters of dictation.
Little does Van know that the first year of the occupation will prove far more volatile for him than for the Army. Bunked with a troubled combat veteran cum-black marketer and recruited to babysit MacArthur’s son, Van is suddenly tangled in the complex personal lives of his compatriots. As he brushes shoulders with panpan girls and Communists on the streets of Tokyo, Van struggles to uphold his convictions in the face of unexpected conflict—especially the startling news that reaches his barracks from his young war bride, a revelation that threatens Van with a kind of war wound he could never have anticipated.

Michael Knight is the author of the novel, Divining Rod; two collections of short fiction, Dogfight And Other Stories and Goodnight, Nobody; and a collection of novellas, The Holiday Season. His fiction has appeared in publications such as Esquire, The New Yorker, and Oxford American. He teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee.