It is 1841, the height of America’s Golden Age of Whaling and the waning days of the rule of the Shogunate in Japan, which has been closed to foreigners for 250 years. In G.L. Tysk‘s novel “The Sea-God at Sunrise,” a young Japanese fisherman named Shima, and his younger brother Takao, are out on a routine fishing expedition when a freak typhoon hits. They wind up shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Their rescue by a…
