Customer Reviews

Fires on the Plain (Tuttle Classics)

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Both a soldier and professor of literature in his lifetime, Shohei Ooka weaves in his own experiences as a POW during WWII to present the story of Private Tamura in the unforgettable war story Fires on the Plain. Abandoned by his company on Leyte Island, in the Philippines, as it is losing in a slow, agonizing battle with American forces, Tamura has nowhere to go, nothing to do. As he becomes further and further removed from the "society" of his regiment, his peers, Tamura begins to fall apart. He has come down with consumption and as such is no longer of any use to his platoon, which is facing annihilation. Food is the primary obsession of Japanese commanders - there simply isn't enough. The dying and wounded are therefore sent to the field hospital to be kept until they expire - or are kicked out when their food supply runs out. When Tamura, however, returns from a brief visit to the hospital, his commander slaps him brutally. "You damned fool! D'you mean to say you let them send you back here?" He is thus sent back again; the hospital, however, will not let in patients who don't have their own food. Without food, patients are pronounced "cured" and sent on their way. And thus begins an existential and brutal journey into a heart of darkness.
The story focuses on the gradual and permanent removal from society of Private Tamura. Slowly but surely, his ties to society are severed. Tamura, an intelligent and decent man, is thus completely alone in a war zone. He doesn't have a reason to die, so he stumbles about the Philippine countryside in search of food. While searching for sustenance, he must avoid both the local people and American soldiers. During his trials, Tamura carries on an internal dialog on his situation, which reads like a treatise on the existence of God. The imagery is poetic and horrifying, a portrait of a man's descent into hell. Haunting and powerful.

Ooka Shohei's Fires on the Plain (Nobi) is vividly transcribed and will leave readers with a lasting impression. The author manages to merge stunning literary description with the horrors of war as seen from the point of view of a losing army. The protagonist's slow descent into madness is sublimely rendered -- at once painful to read yet impossible to put down. Like another reviewer posting here, I too read this on a plane and found myself transported 50 years and thousands of miles to the Philippines, amid lush jungles and the fallout of armed conflict. The impact of this novel's stunning end must be experienced to be appreciated. An engaging and educational read that speaks eloquently to our most basic human needs, desires, delusions and taboos.

I originally picked up "Fires on the Plain" because the story takes place on the island where my grandparents resided and during the time when my father was born. It took a while for me to finally get around to reading it. Unwisely, I chose the plane ride from the Bay Area to Hawaii (so that's about 5 hours) to finally do so...the heavy and heady themes of this amazing novel did not make an easy start to my much-too-short and much-too-irregular vacation. I must have looked silly to my fellow passengers who, during the course of the flight, observed me undergo various emotional planes. In the end, I closed the book, let out an audible sigh, and allowed myself to cry silently. I trust (and hope) that I am not alone in expressing my gratitude to having experienced Mr. Ooka's writing in this manner...I intend to share this with my father; hopefully, we will share a similar love for the sadness in this story.

Abandoned by his company, Private Tamura wanders Leyte Island with neither a reason to live nor a reason to die. Ooka's starving Japanese soldier is absolutely captivating in his determination to analyze the horrors of warfare objectively while he witnesses them first hand. Stumbling through countless forests and mountains, the poetry that seeps from his reasoning is all the more powerful given his completely numbed and desensitized state. There's simultaneous beauty and terror in every one of Tamura's insights all the way through to his confrontations with cannibalism and his struggles to discern between God and himself. My only hope is that on second reading I might better understand some more of the abstract themes Ooka tackles. It's so beautiful...do read it!

This is quite possibly one of the most gripping, devastating novels I've ever read, and certainly one of the most compelling books to come out of World War II from any cultural standpoint. The style of narration (and the psychology of the narrator) will be familiar to those who've read The Stranger (there's even a scene midway through that startlingly evokes Camus' masterpiece), and we not only sense, we LIVE the narrator's increasing despair, degradation, and misery as his situation steadily worsens and he is subjected to increasingly bizarre and grotesque displays of violence. The portrait of a demoralized, defeated army, literally starving and grasping at any potential straws for survival, is possibly startling for American audiences, who may be accustomed to seeing World War II from a different viewpoint altogether. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys fiction, period.

Explores an aspect of the (in)human condition that few writers have ever dared to explore, let alone been capable of exploring with such exacting psychological skill. I found myself so completely enmeshed with the narrator's plight, the story read like nonfiction. The conflict is so extreme--survival by cannibalism or death. I had to know how it ended.

The part that gave me a shiver was when the protagonist's own left hand stopped him from cutting up a dead soldier's body to eat the flesh and he found it God's hand, not his. Such a beautiful scene. It still makes me cry.

It has been over twenty years since I read Fires on the Plain. It is one of those books that always stays with you, an exceptional anti-war novel on a par with All Quite on the Western Front. The publisher should reprint it, I would certainly buy it.

The main character resorts to an analysis of his vomiting towards the end of the novel. He concludes he must be an "angel of God, an instrument of God's wrath." "A story is like the wind" -- says an old bushman saying coming from Laurens van der Post -- "it comes from a far place and it moves you."
This novel moved me. I think it left a hole in my heart. After finishing it, I stand in awe of the author. The central character continuously walks a tightrope between life and death, and between mental and spiritual breakdown on one side and moral integrity on the other. The author, a POW during the Japanese debacle of the battle on Leyte in the Philippines, October to December 31, 1944, miraculously lived to convert it into instructive art.
According to Wikipedia's article on "Battle of Leyte" during WWII, the Japanese forces of 55,000 were reduced to 6,000.
As the Second World War recedes in consciousness, this novel will stand as testament among other monuments, novels, movies and histories of the war.
I have been also moved by two movies of the WWar II, Downfall about Hitler's last days and the psychopathic downfall of the Third Reich, and The Thin Red Line adapted from James Jones' novel; both were very unsettling but beautifully realized. Erich Maria Remarque and Heinrich Boll, a German Nobel Prize winner, especially his stories in Mad Dog, wrote masterful and unsettling stories. There are probably many others I don't know about.
This novel by Ooka will live on and on. The other amazon.com reviews all agree, five stars.

This is a different look at the war in the Pacific as told by one Japanese soldier who was trying to survive.