About the Author and the Text

Pearl S. Buck

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (1892–1973) was an American writer who spent much of her early life in China, where her parents worked as missionaries. Growing up between two very different cultures gave her an unusually sympathetic and intimate understanding of the East, and Asian life became the great subject of her fiction. Her best-known novel, The Good Earth, about a Chinese peasant family, won her wide acclaim. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and, in 1938, became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her writing is admired for its clear, humane storytelling and for its steady insistence that ordinary human decency reaches across the barriers of nation, race and creed.

The story and its setting

The Enemy is a short story set on the Japanese coast during the Second World War, at a time when Japan and the United States were fierce enemies at war. The action takes place at the seaside home of a distinguished Japanese surgeon, Dr Sadao Hoki, whose house stands on a rugged shore near the sea. The wartime atmosphere is crucial: to shelter or help an enemy soldier is not merely awkward but treasonous, punishable by death, and the whole community's loyalty is bent towards the war effort.

The central dilemma

The heart of the tale, as the chapter's own Before You Read note asks, is whether Dr Sadao should save the drowning man as a doctor or hand him over to the Army as a patriot. One evening Dr Sadao and his wife Hana discover a badly wounded man washed up, half-drowned, on the beach below their home. To their dismay they realise he is a white American — an escaped prisoner of war, and therefore, by the definitions of the moment, their enemy. Sadao is instantly caught between two duties that pull in opposite directions. As a doctor, trained in America and bound by the physician's obligation to save any human life, he cannot let a wounded man die. As a loyal Japanese subject in wartime, his patriotic duty is to hand the enemy over to the authorities. The story unfolds this quiet but intense struggle between the claims of conscience and the claims of country.

Why the text matters

Buck uses this single, tightly focused situation to ask a large and lasting question: when law, war and prejudice all demand one thing, and simple humanity demands another, what should a decent person do? The story is valued in the CBSE Class 12 English Vistas NCERT syllabus precisely because it dramatises that clash so cleanly, and because it lets compassion, rather than hatred, have the final word.