Werner Herzog is the bard of the man against. In films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the renowned German director has chronicled the stories of men driven by some inner compulsion or obsession to confront forces within their reach but beyond their control. Man against man, man against nature, man against society, man against the world, even — in My Best Fiend, his documentary about his tempestuous relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski — man against Werner Herzog.
Therefore, it is only fitting that for his first novel, The Twilight World, Herzog has chosen to fictionalize the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who spent 30 years hiding on the Philippine island of Lubang and was largely responsible for creating the legend of the Zanryu nipponhei, the holdout World War II Japanese soldiers. Onoda was a real-life Herzogian protagonist, almost the prototype, as he united in himself the various types: man against man, man against the elements, man against time, man against war, and, above all, man against himself.
Herzog begins his narrative in 1974, at the end of Onoda’s one-man campaign to keep the Second World War going. That year, he met Norio Suzuki, a Japanese student who’d traveled to Lubang as the first stop on a journey to find Onoda, a yeti, and a wild panda, in that order. Onoda is bewildered by this emissary from another world and his bizarre tales (atomic bombs? men on the Moon?) but eventually accedes to the young man’s entreaties and promises to lay down his arms if Suzuki returns with one of Onoda’s superior officers.
From there, Herzog jumps back to late 1944, when the Japanese are preparing to evacuate, and the same major who in three decades will order Onoda’s surrender commands him “to hold the island until the Imperial Army’s return.” When Onoda’s attempts to sabotage the airfield and pier fail, he retreats into the interior while the remaining forces depart. From there, he carries out his mandate to “defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs.” Onoda doesn’t have to carry out his mission single-handedly; he soon gains three comrades who have also been left behind.
Though they occasionally terrorize the local population, for the most part, Onoda and his men (one will surrender in 1950, the other two will be killed in later years) spend most of their time scouting the island, pilfering provisions and supplies, waiting for the Japanese to return, and, more than anything else, staying out of sight as much as possible. Hide and endure — the rain, the jungle, the insects, their doubts, the rot and rust, each other. That is what they do. They must learn to survive, to become one with the trees and mud. Herzog briefly but ably conveys the various skills they had to master to stay alive, not least of which was learning to make palm oil to keep their weapons and ammunition in fighting condition.
Herzog wisely doesn’t try to provide a minute-by-minute or day-by-day account of their ghost war. That would’ve been monotonous. It also would’ve gotten in the way of how he wants to tell Onoda’s story, which is to portray it as something out of a dream. One which, like all dreams, is not bound by the logic of time.
In Herzog’s retelling, Onoda’s sojourn on Lubang exists in a perpetual twilight between dream and reality, past and future, life and death. There is no time because it is a dream; the absence of time means it can only be a dream. “The dream has its own time frame,” the narrator observes at one point. So, too, does the jungle, where the passage of time is marked by sunset, if it is marked at all. For the most part, however, “the jungle does not recognize time.” It is “forbidden,” and all within its domain “are outside history.” The present itself is impossible, a nullity. To be conceivable at all, therefore, Onoda’s war must be “an event extorted from eternity.”
Yet time must reach even into that atemporal vastness. Herzog uses an amusing device to show its passage, having Onoda and his cohorts periodically encounter new technology such as jet engines, transistor radios, and satellites. They know these strange objects are new and different, but having imprisoned themselves in 1945, how new and different they simply lack the ability to comprehend.
Herzog’s gift for imagery translates well to the page. His prose is spare and evocative. The screech of birds and insects in the jungle he compares to the brakes of “a great locomotive” being applied for hours on end without respite. An idea too dangerous to consider is like “a piece of metal brought to white heat in the fire.” Where he really excels — as well the maker of Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo might — is in capturing the feel of the jungle: its unending foliage, its heat and damp, the cacophony of animals, the relentless downpours, the sheer oppressiveness of it all. It may be easy to hide in the jungle, but only because it is so easy to lose oneself to it.
Hiroo Onoda lost himself in that jungle nothingness for three decades. Multiple efforts were made to get him and his men to surrender, as well as to capture them. (By the end, Onoda had survived over a hundred ambushes. He also killed several islanders.) Yet it took a chance meeting with someone half his age 30 years after he absconded into Lubang’s interior to persuade him to step out of that jungle and back into history. Why?
Herzog suggests that it was partly because, from Onoda’s perspective, the war never ended. The fighters, bombers, and ships that would fly over or steam past Lubang never stopped, they just got bigger and faster and more numerous. Surely they wouldn’t be doing so if the war had ended. How was he to know they were for entirely new and different wars?
There is also a simpler explanation for why Onoda held out for as long as he did: duty. Onoda was ordered to stay on Lubang and defend it until the Japanese returned, so he did. No more, no less. Herzog, who asked to meet Onoda when he was directing an opera in Tokyo in 1997 and clearly admires him a great deal, never says this in so many words, or even offers it as a formal explanation for Onoda’s actions, but it is the answer he obviously prefers.
Onoda insisted that his men keep their gear as close to fighting trim as possible. Given the decay unavoidable in a jungle, this wasn’t always easy. Undeterred, they performed this task sedulously anyway. Onoda was especially concerned that they maintain their uniforms. This proved even harder. Yet they nevertheless repaired and patched them as best they could — even until patches and repairs were all they were. No matter how tattered and torn, as long as they still had uniforms, they were still soldiers.
One day, Onoda (who died in 2014) invited Herzog to the shrine where his uniform was stored. As he took it in his hands, Herzog realized that it was the testament not only to Onoda’s ordeal but to how he was able to endure it. “The decay of his uniform is inevitable, but inevitabilities 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.”
Hiroo Onoda had preserved the integrity of his uniform and thereby his own integrity. Against the depredations of nature and war, against the jungle and the world, against all the things that would have wanted him to give it up, even time and common sense. Such a triumph any Werner Herzog hero would be proud to call his own.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta.
