Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1957 (1990 printing) ISBN 0804813795
I'm glad that my reading of Embracing Defeat by John Dower led me to this novel by one of the most well-known writers of Post-War Japan. Shohei Ooka was drafted into the Japanese army in 1944 and sent to the Philippines - Fires on the Plain is loosely based on his experiences there.
We first meet the protagonist of the story - he definitely doesn't see himself as a hero - Private Tamura, as he is being upbraided by his commanding officer from returning to his unit from hospital. It's made clear that food, not fighting, is the number one priority, and he is just an extra mouth to feed. So he heads back to the hospital, where he is unable to enter as without food he is not welcome. So he camps with the other hospital rejects, where he meets the unscrupulous old soldier Yasuda, and the young soldier he has under his sway, Nagamatsu.
When the hospital is bombarded by the Americans, he escapes into the hills. Sure that he will soon die, he wanders aimlessly until he finds an abandoned field of potatoes, and recovers his health. One day he explores a little further, and sees from the top of a hill the cross on a church in a village down by the shore. Seeing the cross makes him think of his own early-life battles with the concept of God, and he makes the decision to head down to the village to meet his fate.
When he gets there he finds the village deserted, apart from dogs and the corpses of some Japanese soldiers that have been massacred. He enters the church, but finds himself unmoved by the experience. When he is resting in the vicarage, he is disturbed by a Filipino couple who enter the house: there is a confrontation and Tamura (accidentally?) kills the woman, while the man escapes. He finds what they were looking for - a cache of salt - and leaves the village, discarding his rifle on the way back to his hilltop garden.
When he gets back there he finds a group of Japanese plundering the garden. He befriends them by offering some of his salt. They inform him that all soldiers have been ordered to fall back to the coast where they will be evacuated by the Navy. As they head toward the rendezvous point the stragglers become a stream of bedraggled, starving and dying troops. Tamura runs into Yasuda and Nagamatsu again, trying to swap tobacco for potatoes.
The troops mass to attempt a night-time crossing of the main highway, now under the control of the Americans. It turns into a massacre that Tamura escapes by heading back the way he came. Looking down on the highway from the hill he has escaped to, Tamura sees an American Red Cross truck arrive at the scene of the previous nights massacre: he sees the medics collect those still living, and tend them before taking them away. He then decides to surrender, and heads back down to the highway. When he gets there, he witnesses another Japanese soldier being shot while attempting to surrender, and flees to the hills again.
Now starving, his thoughts turn to cannibalism, and when he comes across a dying Japanese officer who offers his body to Tamura for food, Tamura has a crisis, and decides that not only will he not eat human flesh, but he will no longer eat any living thing. He eventually collapses, but is rescued by Nagamatsu, and taken back to the camp he is sharing with Yasuda. They have been surviving on "monkey meat", which Tamura soon realises is human flesh: Nagamatsu has been hunting surviving Japanese soldiers for food. In the madness that follows Nagamatsu kills Yasuda, and Tamura kills Nagamatsu, before beginning his wanderings again, collapsing and being taken prisoner.
The book ends with Tamura being in a mental hospital, trying to process his experience.
When the book was originally published in 1951, it was a sensation in Japan, with it's clear-eyed view on personal responsibility for death, the horrible truth of the final months of the Japanese Army, and the smashing of the myth of troops willing to die gloriously for the Emperor.
Ooka dwells on a few themes in this book, mainly what it means to be human, what is God and how is God relevant to humans in situations such as that described in the novel. This translation, by Ivan Morris, reads well and fluently, and the book is quite gripping - I read it in two sessions.
Recommended.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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