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A review by thisotherbookaccount
Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka
3.0
Madness is madness for a reason — it is very hard to put it into words. Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka is essentially the story of a Japanese soldier's slow descend into madness as he tries to survive on an island after his battalion is destroyed by the Americans in WWII.
The tricky bit about writing a character like that is you know he will eventually go to a place that readers cannot follow. It's the same with books about drug abuse, when the author goes to great lengths (sometimes based on experience) to describe what it is like, in real life, to go on a 'trip'. If you hadn't taken drugs before, you'd likely be completely lost — but there's a small niche of readers who'd immediately click in with whatever's happening on the page.
The same thing is happening here with our protagonist. You see his humanity and sanity get stripped away page by page, and by the end he is blabbering about spirituality and Christianity and, well, let's just say, it's a lot. I think the book lost me a bit in the last 20% or so, simply because it took a dive into the deep end. That is not a knock on Ooka's writing, though, because I think the writing — and the translation — serves the story quite well. I like how the story is written by a former Japanese soldier just seven years after Japan's surrender. It strips away the romance to reveal the realities of warfare — soldiers wandering through the forests in tattered clothes, shitting their pants and starving to death. It is a brave work for a time when Japan, in defeat, must have been looking for a way to justify their losses; to believe that it wasn't all for nothing. What Ooka has accomplished is to dish out the hard truth: yes, it was for nothing, and the soldiers paid the gravest price.
With that said, the madness did get a bit much, but at least this is a short book and doesn't last very long on the page. If you want a harrowing story about the mental effects of war, told from the losing side no less, this is a good place to start.
The tricky bit about writing a character like that is you know he will eventually go to a place that readers cannot follow. It's the same with books about drug abuse, when the author goes to great lengths (sometimes based on experience) to describe what it is like, in real life, to go on a 'trip'. If you hadn't taken drugs before, you'd likely be completely lost — but there's a small niche of readers who'd immediately click in with whatever's happening on the page.
The same thing is happening here with our protagonist. You see his humanity and sanity get stripped away page by page, and by the end he is blabbering about spirituality and Christianity and, well, let's just say, it's a lot. I think the book lost me a bit in the last 20% or so, simply because it took a dive into the deep end. That is not a knock on Ooka's writing, though, because I think the writing — and the translation — serves the story quite well. I like how the story is written by a former Japanese soldier just seven years after Japan's surrender. It strips away the romance to reveal the realities of warfare — soldiers wandering through the forests in tattered clothes, shitting their pants and starving to death. It is a brave work for a time when Japan, in defeat, must have been looking for a way to justify their losses; to believe that it wasn't all for nothing. What Ooka has accomplished is to dish out the hard truth: yes, it was for nothing, and the soldiers paid the gravest price.
With that said, the madness did get a bit much, but at least this is a short book and doesn't last very long on the page. If you want a harrowing story about the mental effects of war, told from the losing side no less, this is a good place to start.