Island in the Centre is a 1995 novel by Eurasian Singaporean writer Rex Shelley, which tells the story of a Japanese, Nakajima Tomio, working in Malaya from the 1920s until the Japanese Occupation of Singapore and Malaya in the 1940s.
[2] Nakajima Tomio is a Japanese electrical engineer working for a British firm at an estate in Kluang.
In Singapore, he meets and later marries Hanako Ohara, a young Japanese prostitute from Nagasaki.
After sending his wife back home during the imminent war of the Pacific, he starts an affair with Eurasian Victoria Viera, a brusque, direct girl who sells sports equipment.
Parts of the novel are written in the form of diaries kept by Nakajima, as he attempts to learn the English language.