This is the first Japanese war novel this reviewer has read. Having
personally experienced the Japanese "heitai" at a tender
age, reading the book was a challenge in understanding. It is much
like an Iraqi soldier reading/hearing that he is going to be "liberated"
by the Americans!
The catalogue
of man's inhumanity is endless. The mass media parades the Iraqi war
into our living room, nausates right thinking and sensitive watchers.
The singular value of the novel is perhaps it makes us think of the
age-old problem of how to eradicate war.
The novel is
narrated by the main character, Private Tamura. The time, the closing
days of October 1944 in Leyte. Tamura is isolated from the main body
of Japanese forces. He struggles to remain humane amidst the terrors
and exigencies of war. He hears of a port still in Japanese hands
and attempts to walk to it. One by one, the sensitive man's ties with
humanity are severed. He falls into hallucinations (hunger?). Devoid
of hope and isolated from human contacts, his mind close to insanity,
he driven to the ultimate sin of cannibalism.
One can appreciate
the twin task of fear and survival in the midst of enemies. The other
stragglers were in a sorrier state than Tamura. The inner conflict
was between his innate desire for physical survival and his desire
to preserve his humanity. In the end, he had to surrender to the ultimate
abomination, eating "monkey meat" , dead and dying Japanese
soldiers.
The surrender
in the name of survival seems understandable, as one sees the unfriendly
forces arrayed against him...Filipino guerrillas, and hostile civilians,
and American soldiers. His remorse at eating monkey meat knew no bounds.
This reviewer could almost be in Tamura's body and mind. Tamura was
an educated Christian.
The book's thesis is hard to dispute. The enemy was "war
itself, the ultimate breakdown of the precarious structure of human
life." Everything is seen through the lense of direct experience,
makes it highly personal and gives it psychological intensity. The
symbolisms are distinctly Japanese and yet universal.
The recurrent
themes and symbols are MEMORY and FALSE RECOLLECTIONS. The NOBI (original
title) "denote the continuation of normal, human life."
They are also symbols of life's continuity, of danger, fear, and death
itself."
On another level,
it is a highly moral work. The morality lies in Tamura's "persistent
effort to avoid total degradation, to retain a grip, however, tenous,
on human dignity."
The translation
is excellent. It is crisply written. On the negative side, it has
a prolix introduction.The introduction, while it lays the background,
may exhaust some readers, before he gets into the core ideas. This
reviewer, found NOBI (fFIRES ON THE PLAIN) riveting. He has read it
so many times over. He keeps it as a valued book in his collection.
