The Twilight World by Werner Herzog (translated by Michael Hofmann).
Title: The Twilight World.
Author: Werner Herzog (translated by Michael Hofmann).
Genre: Fiction.
Country: Germany.
Language: German.
Publication Date: 2021.
Summary: At the end of 1944, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the island until the Imperial Army's return. ..You are forbidden to die by your own hand. So began Onoda's long campaign, during which he became fluent in the hidden language of the jungle. Soon, weeks turned into months, months into years, and years into decades—until eventually time itself seemed to melt away. All the while, Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war, at once surreal and tragic, at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making. In this novel, the author, a friend of Onoda, immortalizes and imagines Onoda's years of absurd yet epic struggle.
My rating: 8.5/10
My review:
♥ Saegusa came late one day, and in a state of high excitement. "Herzog-san," he said. "High Highness, the Emperor had indicated he would receive me to a private audience, if I wasn't too busy with the upcoming premiere. I replied, "My goodness, I have no idea what I would talk about with the Emperor; it would be nothing but banalities." I could feel my wife Lena's nails digging into my palm, but it was too late. I had declined.
It was a faux pas, so awful, so catastrophic that I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up. Around the table, everyone present froze. No one breathed. All eyes were fixed on their plates, no one looked at me, a protracted silence made the room shudder. It felt to me as though the whole of Japan had stopped breathing. Just then, into the silence, a voice inquired: "Well, if not the Emperor, whom would you like to meet?" I instantly replied: "Onoda."
"Onoda? Onoda?"
"Yes," I replied. "Hiroo Onoda." And a week later, I met him.
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♥ Suzuki feels encouraged. "The war ended twenty-nine years ago."
Utter expressionless incomprehension from Onoda.
"That can't be."
"Japan capitulated in August 1945."
"The war is not over. I couple of days ago, I saw an American aircraft carrier, accompanied by a destroyer and a frigate."
"Heading East, I expect," says Suzuki.
"Don't try to trick me. I see what I see."
Suzuki remains insistent. "Lieutenant, the Americans have their biggest naval base in Subic Bay. All their navy ships are refitted and equipped there."
"The Bay of Manila? That's only ninety kilometers away."
"Yes."
"That base existed at the beginning of the war. How do American ships now come and use it?"
"The US and the Philippines are allies."
"What about the planes, the fighters and bombers, I see them all the time."
"They're headed for Clark Air Base, North of the Bay of Manila. With such huge forces, "Lieutenant, why wouldn't the enemy simply overrun Lubang? After all, Lubang controls access to the Bay of Manila."
"I'm not privy to the enemy's plans."
"There are no more plans, the war is over."
Onoda struggles with himself for a moment. Then slowly he gets to his feet, takes a step toward Suzuki, and presses the muzzle of his rifle against his forehead.
"All right, tell me the truth. The time has come."
"Lieutenant, I am not afraid of dying. But it would be miserable to be killed for telling the truth."
♥ "No, says Onoda, "the war went on, and it went on in the West as well. What I saw is proof."
"Proof? Wat do you mean, 'proof'?"
"I saw wave after wave of American warplanes flying overhead. Right here, going that way, West."
"When was this?"
"It went on for years."
"Beginning when?"
"In 1950. Also bombers and troops transporters, naval ships."
"That was the Korean War."
"Korean War? What Korean War? Korea belong to us."
"The Communists threw out the Japanese. Then the US started a war with the Communists."
"And America evidently lost."
"Half won, half lost. Today, Korea has been partitioned. There is a Communist North and a Capitalist South."
Onoda is finding it difficult to process so much information.
"But those waves of warplanes, they never stopped."
"What warplanes? When?"
"Always going West. American bombers directly overhead. More and more all the time. From 1965, in vast formations. Whole convoys of ships, bigger all the time, more and more of them. And you're trying to tell me, the war has ended?"
"That was the Vietnam War."
"The what?"
Onoda leans back. The night is long. The crickets, not caring about war or peace, or who gets to name wars and for what reason, intensify their monotonous screaming, this is their war, perhaps also their peace negotiations, equally unbeknownst to us. The moon. The early light of the coming day makes it still paler, a heavenly body without any deeper meaning that has been around for millions of years before there were any humans.
♥ Major Taniguchi and Onoda, thirty years his junior, in the shade of an empty hangar. Onoda, standing at attention, is receiving orders from his superior officer. The Major is formal.
"Lieutenant Onoda, I have orders for you from headquarters." Onoda stands a little more stiffly.
"Yes, sir, Lieutenant Onoda at your command."
"You are the only man here who has had training in secret warfare, in guerrilla tactics."
"Sir. Major."
"These are your orders. As soon as our troops have been withdrawn from Lubang, it is your duty to hold the island until the Imperial Army's return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs. You will have to make your own decisions. No one will give you orders. You must be self-reliant. Henceforth there are no more rules, you make the rules."
Onoda is impassive. "Yes, sir. Major."
"There is only one rule," Taniguchi continues. "You are forbidden to die by your own hand. In the event of your capture by the enemy, you are to give them all the misleading information you can."
..The Major wants no possibility of misunderstanding. "Your base of operations will be the judge. Your campaign will be one of attrition. Skirmishes, ambushes, unpredictable attacks. You will be like a ghost, elusive, a continuing nightmare to the enemy. Your war will be without glory."
♥ Lieutenant Hayakawa finds this form of battle unworthy. "I will fight for the honor of our Emperor, and in honorable combat."
"How do you?" Onoda asks. But Hayakawa finds such cowardice undeserving of a reply. In the long years to come, Onoda will repeatedly think about the way creatures defend themselves in nature, how they make themselves invisible like moths taking on the blotches of tree bark, fish whose coloration matches the pebbles on the riverbed, insects that resemble the green leaves of trees, spiders like diabolical harpists plucking irresistible melodies from their strings and thus cause the webs of an enemy species to vibrate just as though an insect had become caught up in them. Consumed by curiosity, the queen spider approaches the web, and her doom. Or the snake whose rattle distracts the rabbit form the mortal danger approaching. The deep-sea fish whose light signal lures smaller fish that thus allow themselves to be trapped. And how do such creature protect themselves? By playing dead, like the beetle that lies on its back. By the spines of cacti and thorn trees or the quills from animals like the porcupine, the hedgehog, the spiny fish that at the same time are able to inflate themselves to such a degree that they are too big to be swallowed. Safety in poison, as is the case with wasps and snakes and stinging nettles; by shocks, as from the electric eel, and by malodorous secretions, as is the case with skunks; by a thick veil of ink from octopi. Misdirection, ruse, mimicry—all elements that Onoda wants to learn from nature, whether honorable or otherwise. The only criteria are effectiveness in battle and achieving one's objective. Instead of a full-frontal attack with banners waving, he wants to make himself invisible, become an impalpable dream figure, an elusive and deadly mist, a rumor, a report. Through him the jungle is to become more than a jungle, a landscape with a deadly nimbus of sudden demise.
♥ "Tilik. Just as we predicted. It's the invasion."
Shimada hesitates to say it, but from now on everything that is is the truth, even if it can still change and develop a life of its own.
♥ Time, time and the jungle. The jungle does not recognize time. They are like two alienated siblings who will have nothing to do with each other, who communicate, if at all, only in the form of contempt. Days follow nights, but there are no seasons as such, at the most, months with vast amounts of rain and months with slightly less rain. There is one unvarying constant: everything in the jungle is at pains to strangle everything else in the battle for sunlight. It may be pitch-black at night, but nothing changes the overwhelming, implacable present tense of the jungle. Bird sounds and the shrill of crickets, as though a great locomotive had applied its emergency brakes and were screaking uncontrollable along the rails, for hours and hours, without stopping.
♥ Onoda and Shimada spend a very long time motionless in the shelter of the forest fringe. Something stirs there, below them, a sound. They stay rigidly still, with the barely possible patience of wild animals. To a panther in the open, it's perfectly natural. And Onoda is now an animal, a flecked animal.
♥ Then a pressure wave, and a split second later the thunder roll of a huge distant explosion. Onoda at once understands that this must have been the field hospital. The wounded men have blown themselves up, no question. Onoda and Shimada bow formally in the direction of the explosion, and hold the position for a long time.
♥ Night. The men, three of them now, tend a small fire in a hollow among thick foliage. Onoda is preoccupied. "My sword attack was drama. I was playing a samurai in a film. An unforgivable lapse. The war is different now, heroic gestures have no place. Our tasks are to remain invisible, to deceive the enemy, to be ready to do seemingly dishonorable things while keeping safe in our hearts the warrior's honor."
♥ Farther, he has found a source of fresh water only a few minutes below their position. One pan full, covered with a banana leaf, he has already boiled. When the members of the garrison were put to flight, they almost all suffered diarrhea from drinking out of streams. In all the years to come, the fight to remain healthy will be paramount. Except when they find pools of rainwater on large leaves, they will always boil their water.
♥ It is perhaps their first moment of levity. The weight of the following decades will completely crush such moments, including this one.
♥ But Onoda is unshakably convinced that all this is just a trick to lure them out of their jungle fastness.
"But what if the war really is lost?" Akatsu pipes up again. But that only reinforces Onoda in his certainty that the Japanese forces will one day gloriously return and retake Lubang. The island was of great strategic importance, and from here the Japanese forces would swarm out to retake the whole Pacific. Their orders were orders.
♥ At this point, incidentally, a new phenomenon begins, a sort of constant, unobtrusive companionship, a natural dream sibling equipped with al the unquestioning certainty of dreams: a shapeless time of noctambulism, even though things carry on as before, immediate, palpable, ghastly, undeniable in their imperiousness—the jungle; the swamp; the leeches; the mosquitoes; the screams of the birds; thirst; the bumpy, itching skin. The dream has its own time frame, it races forward and back, it sticks, stops dead, holds its breath, jumps ahead like a frightened deer. A night bird shrieks and a year passes. A fat drop of water on the waxy leaf of a banana plant glistens briefly in the sun and another year is gone. A column of millions and millions of ants arrives overnight and marches through the trees with no beginning or end; the column marches for days and days and then one day is mysteriously and suddenly gone, and that is another year. Then one single watch under withering enemy fire, and the night seems to go on forever and ever. Only the abrupt flares of tracer bullets while day refuses to break, even though you look at your watch and see the hands moving and see the whole of the night sky wheeling around the North Star. Day will not and will not and will not arrive. Time outside their lives seems to have the quality of a spasm, even though it can't shake the imperturbable universe. Onoda's war is of no meaning for the cosmos, for history, for the course of the war. Onoda's war is formed from the union of an imaginary nothing and a dream, but Onoda's war, sired by nothing, is nevertheless overwhelming, an event extorted from eternity.
♥ "No one is ever to see the least trace of where we made camp. No one is to know where we spent the night, or by what route we marched." The men say nothing, they have understood. And then Onoda explains how he sees their respective roles.
"I am not your commander. You have not been allocated to me by High Command. I am your leader."
♥ It will take weeks more before the soldiers succeed in distilling palm oil. They begin by requisitioning a large cooking pot from a village; then they grind up the flesh of coconuts and mix it with water and heat the rough mash over an unusually large flame. Because the smoke wold be easily visible, they wait for a day; the jungle is misty. First, a thick froth is precipitated, and after that subsides, a layer of oil, which can be carefully scooped up. Thenceforth, Onoda is able to keep his firearm and his family heirloom in good condition for almost thirty years. Bullets, which are also perishable, are kept upright in oil, sealed in stolen mason jars, and buried in the jungle, all in all two thousand four hundred rifle rounds, several hundred pistol rounds, and several hundred large-caliber rounds for machine guns. Onoda insists that they not be thrown away, before long they will prove their use in making fires. Because how do you light a fire without a supply of dry matches? They make many vain attempts to turn a stick in their hands over a piece of dry wood to make enough friction to create a flame. This was the method Onoda learned in his course of specialist warfare, but here everything is too damp for it to work.
Only a few months later, from secretly observing a few Filipino woodcutters through their field glasses, do they pick up the method the islanders use to make fire out of doors. They split an arm-thick piece of bamboo in two lengthwise, and make one of them fast to the ground, like a rail. The other one is carefully cut open, a little cut that barely penetrated the bamboo. Two men on their knees, facing each other, take the free half of bamboo, with the incision, and rub it quickly back and forth over the rail. The pressure and friction produce so much heat that a small pile of bamboo shavings eventually begins to glow. Whenever there is rain or the air is particularly damp, Onoda likes to add a little powder from the machine-gun ammunition, which otherwise would have had no use. After brief, violent rubbing, a small flame shoots out.
♥ A torrential rain begins to fall. The feet of the men, who have sought shelter under a large tree, are covered in mud, mosquitoes, and leeches. Even large leaves, held over their heads, cannot prevent the rain from getting everywhere. The monstrous clatter of water enjoins everything to silence, man and nature alike.
♥ In the thirty years, just under, of his solitary war, Onoda will survive one hundred eleven ambushes.
♥ The rice fields here stretch almost to the edge of the jungle. A couple of water buffalo are wallowing in a pond, submerged up to their backs in the muddy water. Every so often one waggles its ears. On a field track is another, solitary buffalo harnessed to a two-wheeler cart, his head so low he looks to be asleep on his feet. A small group of rice farmers, dressed in wide-brimmed straw hats, shirts, and loincloths, is bending over and toiling away, calf deep in water. Each time one moves his feet there's a smacking sound, otherwise complete silence; they do their work in silence, planting the new rice shoots in the mud under the water. Other than a sense of the day coming to an end, there is no indication of the time. It's as though it were forbidden—there's not even a real sense of present because each performed action is already in the past, and each ensuing one is future. All here are outside history, which in its taciturnity will not allow present. The rice is planted, harvested, planted again. Kingdoms fall into decay. Stillness. In the silence of eternities, shots ring out. The peasants flee.
From the jungle perimeter Onoda and his two men come charging out into the open. Each one knows what he must do. Onoda fires one more shot in the direction of the fleeing peasants, Kozuka kills the buffalo harnessed to the cart with a peremptory shot in the head, Shimada with brisk movements sets about severing the hind legs of the dead beast. They are old hands at this, having done it all many times before. Kozuka cuts long strips of meat along the backbone. There is no attack to be feared from the distant village. The other water buffalo, standing in the mire, bored, show no emotion. Then, laden with their heavy bounty, the men withdraw. In addition to the strips of meat over his rucksack, Onoda is carrying a buffalo leg in his arms, as though bringing a wounded companion to safety. The men know that in the approaching darkness not even a well-armed troop of the enemy will dare follow them into the jungle.
♥ There is a time for meat, a time of coconuts, a time for rice. Onoda attacks the rice harvests—usually taking two sacks of rice, no more. He doesn't want to have too many soldiers dispatched to find him, he would like to keep the island free of Philippine forces, if possible. On its eventual return, the Imperial Army should not have to encounter too many enemy troops. When on one occasion he penetrates the center of Tilik, there is a direct exchange of fire. There are wounded on the Filipino side, and Shimada is hit in the leg, which will bother him for a long time to come. At bottlenecks where Onoda can be counted on to pass through often, there are repeated ambushes, with brief firefights. Onoda's caution is the caution of a wild animal. The steep overgrown slopes are relatively safe, but there is now not one watering place on Lubang that is not without some risk. But there are also moments when Onoda will suddenly come bursting out of the brush, and fire a shot over the heads of the terrified locals, merely to show them that he is still there, still occupying the island of Lubang. He has become a legend. For the locals he is the spirit of the jungle, only to be talked of in whispers. For the Philippine Army, which seems incapable of catching him, he is a permanent reminder of their incapacity, though at the same time the troops speak of him with the degree of affection one might have for a mascot. Two soldiers who purposely aim their guns way over his head during a skirmish are disciplined. But there are dead among the Philippine forces as well, and among the natives. Onoda never spoke about it in detail, nor are there any reliable figures from the Philippine authorities. And in Japan, meanwhile, the newspapers keep his solitary war continually before the attention of their readership, emphasizing the myth of the brave solitary soldier, at the same time keeping alive a painful reminder of Japan's defeat in the World War.
♥ He had dealt frivolously with women and their emotions; from the point of view of today, his behavior was unprincipled. How had he then become the conscientious soldier who at any moment, night and day, rain and shine, under attack and whilst being hunted, stood unshakably to his duty? Kozuka asks. Onoda needs to think about it. It had probably begun with his return to Japan, and particularly when he became interested in martial arts. The turning point likely came with his training in kendo, or stick fighting. With that, he had come to understand something of the Japanese spirit, and his eyes were finally fully opened when he joined the army. But kendo had shown him that all forms of physical combat can be reduced to an essence, two men fighting with two sticks.
♥ Form his study of guerrilla warfare, Onoda knows there was a time once when firearms, though already in widespread use, were given up almost overnight. It is his favorite subject, endlessly fascinating to him. Early in the seventeenth century, without any formal decision having been made, the samurai had given up their firearms. From that time on, all combat was man-to-man, with swords or lances, occasionally bows and arrows. What marked the beginning of this was a great battle in 1603 in which only twenty-six fighters still used firearms. Shimada objects that firearms were used after all, but Onoda points out that in a great battle ten years previous, some hundred and eighty thousand men fought on one side; there was documented proof of this. Roughly one-third of this army had carried firearms, making some sixty thousand men. No one could say with the same precision what the figures for the other side were, but it was safe to say that a hundred thousand muskets were used, plus cannon and falconets. Therefore, a mere twenty-six muskets a decade later was close to the complete absence of firearms. What had happened then, Shimada wants to know. They made a comeback, says Onada. How long people got by without them was uncertain. By and by they had come back into use.
"Sometimes," says Onoda, "it feels to me that there is something about these weapons that takes them out of human control. Do they have a life of their own, as soon as they're devised? And doesn't war seem to have a life of its own too? Does war dream of war?" And then, after a long time mulling over such thoughts, Onoda says something he rarely says, as though the idea were a piece of metal brought to white heat in the fire: "Is it possible that I am dreaming this war? Could it be that I'm wounded in some hospital and will finally come out of a coma years later, and someone will tell me it was all a dream? Is the jungle, the rain—everything here—a dream? Is Lubang nothing but a fantasy that exists only on old mariners' charts, along with sea monsters and humans with the heads of dragons and dogs?"
♥ And so the days go by. The rain pounds on their shelter. Water comes down the mountain swilling leaves and soil and torn-off twigs with it. When the rain lets up, the men check their ammunition that has been stored upright in oil-filled mason jars that were intended for canning fruit and making jam; they work on their boots and their uniforms, which are barely a memory of uniforms. The men cook and eat and sleep and sleep and eat and cook throughout the shapeless gray days of water streaming from the clouds and fogs boiling up in nature's sublime indifference. Every year, Onoda produces his family sword from its hiding place, and carefully cleans and oils it. Even if he was living in fever dreams, the sword remains his most palpable reference point for something that cannot be invented; an anchor dropped in a distant reality.
♥ There are two thousand six hundred rifle bullets left; they have an average annual consumption of forty. But despite all his caution, he has noticed some signs of oxidation, and, of late, some bullets have refused to fire. In theory, the bullets ought to be good for another sixty years of warfare, but Onoda emphasizes economy in their use. What if the foe were to launch a sudden all-out attack? What if one of their caches were to be discovered? How old would he, Onoda, be at the time he used his last bullet?
♥ And the many columns of advertisements are a better alternative than blacking out whole pages. "Aside from the front page," Onoda calculates, "almost half the print surface consists of advertisements. But newspapers have never assigned more than two or three percent of their space for advertising. No one will ever buy all this stuff, that's completely impossible. They've censored the actual news, and replaced it with advertising."
♥ In all his time resisting, Onoda has yet to see sniffer dogs in use, and even sniffer dogs wouldn't stand a chance against armed men. You can only catch unarmed men with dogs, and the Philippine Army seems to have grasped that. As far as Onoda can see, the ineffectual parallel formation is just one more sign that the soldiers are too afraid to enter the jungle.
♥ The two men are spending ever more of their time on the repair and patching up of their equipment. The humidity gnaws at everything, everything rots, frays, crumbles. When they do their weekly laundry in safety, it starts to rain, and they have to stash their half-dry clothing in a plastic sack. It rains the next day, and the next, and by the time it's dry again and sunny, they find their plastic sack pumped up like a rubber balloon about to burst. Everything in it is white and full of fine threads, it resembles a cloud of sugar candy from a children's fair, but what it is is a mold that had proliferated wildly.
♥ Onoda, for the next two years or few moments, is an ambulating piece of the jungle. On one occasion, sensing he can no longer get out of the way of a jogging column of Filipino soldiers, he hurriedly buries himself in foliage, sprinkles leaves over himself at the last seconds. In his haste, a straggler steps on his hand without noticing.
♥ The voice calls out in Japanese: "This is your brother, this is your brother. I am your brother Toishi."
Onoda goes rigid.
"Hiroo, my brother," calls the voice, "listen to me."
Onoda seems without emotion, his inside is stone. The unimaginable cannot be.
"My brother, come out wherever you are, come out, come out." The voice recedes into the distance, can hardly be heard.
Onoda strains everything in himself to follow it.
"I will sing a song now," calls the distant voice, "Hiroo, my brother, do you remember the song we used to sing at cherry blossom time?"
Onoda just catches the opening bar of the song, thereafter the jungle draws the voice into itself.
"See the falling blossoms, they are the souls of the dead, they sail through the air..."
What was that? Was that actually his brother, or some hazy chimera? Onoda is unable to account for the event in the structures of his belief. He is forced to live with the contradiction. In case it truly was his brother, why does he hear the voice for weeks and all over the island? The answer draws him in ever more powerfully: if that was his brother out with a search party, then he was letting him know, so to speak in a secret code, that the men were actually tasked with exploring every nook and cranny of Lubang to make a detailed topographical survey for improved maps to facilitate the imminent reconquest of the island by the Imperial Army. Truth comes with hidden codes, or else the codes are unpredictably enriched with reality, like the veins of ore in rock.
At this point, time stops still for weeks. Or rather, it doesn't stop, it simply no longer occurs. Then it hurries, leaps over weeks and months in the moment it takes a breeze to stir the leaves. Onoda goes around like a sleepwalker, but even that is not a true impression. He harbors two natures. Onoda goes around alertly, sees everything, hears everything. He is always prepared. But he is not allowed to merely be jungle, be a part of nature. He is apart and a part. He must remind the populace in Lubang of his mission, so he steps out into the open on the northern plain outside Lubang township, and fires a few shots into the air. There is no one there. He has no need to take more supplies. He just wants to make himself heard.
♥ A Japanese flag is flapping over a large tent. Large enough for a man to stand up inside it. Beside it is Suzuki's smaller tent. Onoda is well hidden by the rushlike grass at the confluence of the two streams. He is motionless. Nothing, no Filipino soldiers, no reporters, there is clearly no ambush. Suzuki comes crawling out of his tent, and starts brushing his teeth, he is almost exactly above Onoda, whom he has not seen. "Don't move," says Onoda calmly, aiming his rifle at the back of Suzuki's head.
"Onoda," says Suzuki, "Hiroo Onoda."
"You have kept your word. Turn around."
"I have come with your commanding officer from Tokyo," says Suzuki, speaking into the mouth of the rifle, "Major Taniguchi."
"And otherwise?"
"No one else. A detachment of the Philippine Army Corps is expecting you on Hill 500."
"Armed?" asks Onoda.
"Yes, but only to salute you as a guard of honor."
"Where is my commanding officer?" Onoda is cautious. "I must assume there is some trap."
"Major," calls Suzuki, "would you kindly step outside. Lieutenant Onoda is here."
But the Major doesn't emerge, he hasn't got his boots on yet. Onoda stands and waits beside the mouth of the large tent. Within, hands fiddle with the opening. Taniguchi steps out, an old man, white haired and stooped, eighty-eight years old.
"Lieutenant," he says, "I recognize you. You have become a grown man."
Onoda salutes, takes two steps back, and presents arms.
"Do you recognize me?" asks Taniguchi.
"Yes, sir," Onoda tautens.
"I have new orders for you from the Ministry of Defense." Taniguchi is not in uniform, just an army shirt and the peaked cap of the Special Forces. He holds a piece of paper in his extended hands and reads from it. "In accordance with the Emperor's instructions, the Fourteenth Army and all other Japanese units have ceased all forms of combat. Units under the command of the Special Forces are hereby to cease hostilities forthwith. They are to place themselves under the command of the Philippine forces, and follow their instructions."
Onoda is quite impassive. He salutes.
"Lieutenant, your war is over." Because Onoda has gone rigid, Taniguchi now asks him in a kindly tone of voice: "Lieutenant, are you all right?"
♥ An officer barks an order, and the unit presents arms. Onoda takes the inspection, mechanically, as though all this could only be an illusion. At the end of the line stands the General in overall command of the Philippine armed forces. Onoda steps up to him, salutes, surrenders his rifle. Then he hands over his sword as well, in both extended hands, but the general gives it back to him immediately. "The true samurai keeps his sword," he says. Onoda has long felt incapable of emotion, but later he will admit that inside everything in him was bawling.
♥ And then this: shortly after Onoda's return to Japan, Norio Suzuki undertook his expedition to the Himalayas to find the yeti, as he had intended. At the foot of Dhaulagiri, he is struck by an avalanche and killed. Hiroo Onoda straightaway flew from Japan to Nepal. Accompanied by a Sherpa, he set off on the three-week trek and climbed to a height of five thousand meters, to the majestic southern flank of the eight-thousand-meter peak. At the place where Suzuki lay buried, the Sherpas had built a cairn. Onoda's bearer set down his rucksack. "This is the grave here." Onoda had the sensation of vast fists coming down upon him form the heavens, as though the infinite nature of the snowy peaks, the glaciers, the abysms would rip him in two. Onoda stepped up to the cairn. The only trace of the life that had been was a fluttering prayer flag. As impassive as everything around him, Onoda stood to attention. The clouds parted briefly, a shy glimpse of sunlight. No earthquake, no thunderbolt. Silence.
♥ When news of the end of Lieutenant Onoda's solitary campaign reached Japan, the hearts of an entire nation stood still.
♥ Onoda married two years after his return. He had no children. He died in Tokyo at the age of ninety-one.
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♥ Onoda long refused to accept soldier's pay for his twenty-eight years. Only when pressed by his family did he finally accept the money, donating it right away to the Yasukuni Shrine. There, form the mid-nineteenth century, the names of the now 2.5 million people who had lost their lives for the fatherland were kept. (Strangely, also the names of some of their domestic animals.) The shrine is a somewhat controversial institution because it also houses the names of about a thousand convicted war criminals. ..It took two weeks of negotiations between Onoda and the head of the shrine before I was invited. I accepted the invitation, thinking who am I anyway to allow myself the luxury of such reservations, coming as I do from a country that has brought such horrors upon other countries and peoples. Onoda and I straightaway struck up a relationship.
♥ Onoda had a song translated for me that he had kept singing to himself on Lubang, to keep his spirits up:
Quiet moon, I may look like a tramp or beggar,
But you are witness to the glory of my soul.
We knelt opposite the abbot in a long ceremony.
♥ How could he have forgotten the bottle? Something real that was kept hidden somewhere apart from his memories. Often he had pondered whether the years in Lubang could have been years of sleepwalking, but if some concrete object that did not appear in his dreams suddenly materialized, then he couldn't have been in a dream after all. What marks the beginning of something palpable, and where is the memory of it? Why, he often asked himself, couldn't it be that his endless jungle march was an illusion? After all his millions of steps, he had understood that there was—there could be—no such thing as the present. Each step of the way was past, and each further step was future. The raised foot was past, the same foot placed in the mud in front of him still ahead. Where was there room for the present? Every centimeter of his foot going forward was the future, every centimeter behind was past. And so on, in smaller and smaller scale, in millimeters, in barely measurable fractions of millimeters. We think we live in the present, but there is no such thing. Am I walking, living, fighting? And then what about all those stretches when he had walked backward, to deceive the foe? Even his backward step was a step into the future.
The past could always be measured and described, but his memory had blurred events, sometimes bewilderingly mixed them up. Even a decade after Shimada's death he continued to see him in the jungle ahead. His memory had not extended its grace to the preservation pf pain. (Otherwise women would hardly agree to bear more children after the pain of childbirth.) The future was always like a distorting but impenetrable fog lying over an unfamiliar landscape, though there was some knowledge of it. The day is ending. The sun will rise in the morning. The rainy season will begin in five months. And then the unexpected, the bolt form the blue: a bullet, like a seam of tracer in the gloaming. It will hit you, if you don't manage to turn aside at the last moment. The point that it would have struck, the solar plexus, is no longer where it was. The decay of his uniform is inevitable, but instabilities can still be avoided, or at least delayed. Each patch slows the disintegration, the wear, the rot. At the end it was still a uniform.
..Was he then a sleepwalker, or was now, the present, something he had dreamed? He often racked his mind about the question of Lubang. There was no proof that when awake he was awake and no proof that when dreaming he was dreaming. The twilight of the world. Ants, when they stop, for some reason we don't understand, move their antennae. They have second sight. Crickets scream at the cosmos. Among the terrors of night was a horse with glowing eyes, smoking cigars. A saint left a deep imprint on the rock on which he slept. Elephants at night dream standing up. Fever dreams trundle the rock of night up the angry boiling mountains. The jungle bends and stretches like caterpillars walking, uphill and down. The heron when cornered will attack the eyes of its pursuers. A crocodile ate a countess. The dead, when turned away from the sun, can be buried standing up. Three men on a horse, the saddle remains empty. The net of the sleeping fisherman continues to catch fish. A man who walks backward should also talk backward. Onoda backward is Adono. The heart of hummingbird beats twenty times a second, twelve hundred times a minute; the silent Indios in the Mato Grosso do Sul believe they are alive twice. It is only among his cattle in the Mato Grosso that Onoda feels secure. His heart beats with their hearts, his breath comes and goes with theirs. When he is with them, he knows he is where he is. The night is over, and the swarms of fish know nothing.
