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Shohei Ooka's novel Fires on the Plain (1952), a remarkably realistic account of those driven to extremes, captures the experience of Japanese troops on Leyte. Demoralized and despairing, these men are also starving. The desire for food is their driving force, blunting even the instinct for survival. For the novel's protagonist and first-person narrator, Tamura, an infantry private, the quest for food sets him off on a hunt that becomes a kind of spiritual odyssey.
Diagnosed as tubercular, Tamura has been cut loose both by the military hospital and his own army unit for the same reason--he is seen as just another mouth to feed and therefore is left to fend for himself. Thrust out into nature, accepting his imminent death, Tamura becomes aware of the beauty and power of the natural world. He experiences a brief, edenic peace, which is abruptly ended when he accidentally kills a Filipino woman. Cast out of Eden, he connects with another group of retreating Japanese soldiers, who have been reduced to animals of prey, driven by hunger to cannibalization. Tamura meets his strongest temptation when a dying officer offers him his own flesh. Once the man dies, Tamura begins to dismember the body in order to eat it, but at the last minute he resists this final moral collapse. Later, however, he discovers that he has unknowingly eaten human flesh.
In the novel's epilogue, we learn that Tamura is now a voluntary patient in a mental hospital in Japan, having been repatriated from a prisoner-of-war hospital. He is writing his memoirs on the advice of his psychiatrist. His memoirs conclude with the recollection of prairie fires in the Philippines. Whenever he sees these fires, they serve as omens of some approaching evil. But this time they set the stage for a joyous epiphany, as Tamura remembers and reinterprets his interaction with the officer on the verge of death: "He had offered me his own flesh to relieve my starvation. . . . If this was a transfiguration of Christ himself . . . then glory be to God." Ambiguity surrounds this Christian resolution to a Japanese novel. Is the final revelation an ironic underscoring of Tamura's schizophrenia, or is it to be taken at face value? If the latter, it may be that Tamura's journey has been a spiritual quest in which the dehumanizing experience of cannibalism has been redeemed and transformed into a form of Christian communion. The interpretive choice is left to the individual reader.
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