Brett Walker feels passionately about wolves and even more passionately about feelings. His book recounts the history of Japan's predacious canines, a history that ends with their extermination during the Meiji Restoration. Yet he wants to do more than survey the carnage that modernization wrought. He wants to resurrect wolves as active participants in the history of their demise, and emotions supply the jolt that brings them back to life. While careful not to anthropomorphize the beasts, Walker urges readers to accept a bedrock assumption: Animals think and feel. They resemble us, and eradicating them is insensible when we grant this common ground of sentiment.
Walker knows the precariousness of the terrain he has entered. In the past, critics have howled when writers have conjured up the emotional lives of animals, labeling them “nature fakers.” Ernest Thompson Seton, the author of animal stories such as “Lobo: King of the Currumpaw,”...