jarring, however, is that modern man has provided the matrix, war, which generates the act. Wars and rumors of wars, from the "war to end all wars" to the current conflicts, give ample scope for commentary, and the frequency of the motif in 'twentieth-century literature is hardly accidental. For the Japanese who experienced the Pacific war, cannibalism has a special immediacy. Japanese troops trapped in the Philippines near the end of the conflict fled to the mountains and for agonizing months struggled desperately to survive. Some few, perhaps crazed by hunger, malnutrition, and disease, ate and, in their desperation, even hunted for human flesh.4 Three postwar Japanese literary works confront the reality and record the shock. Tadashi Moriya's No Requiem, Shohei Ooka's Fires on the Plain, and Taijun Takeda's Luminous Moss comment on man's confrontation with his man-eating self.5 The result is intriguing and ironic. The emphases differ, but one message comes through clearly: man's unnatural—or all too natural—penchant for violence has fostered the conditions which foster the act. Indeed, in view of man's predatory instincts, eating is but the logical next step after killing; there may be little or no moral distinction between the two deeds. Hypocritically, however, men condemn the one and condone the other. The authors dramatize the inconsistency.
They are not the first moderns, or Asians, to protest. In 1918, when the last mustard gas was dissipating over the fields of Europe, Lu Shun produced his condemnation of traditional Chinese society, indicting through his shaman-like mad sage a culture whose history was "a record of man-eating," and where "everyone wants to eat others but is afraid of being eaten himself." The leader of the man-eaters around him, he finds, is his older brother. A still deeper awareness comes when he suspects to his horror that he too may have eaten flesh, that of his younger sister.6 In similar fashion, Japan's entry into the modern, postwar literary era reveals a poignant soul-searching into the nature of man and society.
Mildest of the three books is Moriya's No Requiem. A more or less factual account, the story records author Moriya's life as an army doctor in the Philippines during the closing year of the war in the Pacific. According to the translator's preface, details of cannibalism were omitted in the Japanese original, but included in the revised English edition. The facts by themselves would be grim enough, with or without cannibalism, were it not for Moriya's genial tone and matter-of-fact acceptance of the events. A battalion of one thousand men is gradually reduced to fifty, mainly by disease and starvation; swollen and disfigured corpses are a common sight. Only a relatively dispassionate and low-keyed presentation could make "light literature," as the translator calls it, of such a subject. But the terror is played down, and the result is a very readable, though not emotionally demanding, account. It ends happily with the narrator safe in Japan, joyfully united with his family.
Moriya mentions several instances of soldiers eating human flesh. The first is "a weird story" brought back by some men who go to bury a comrade. When they remove the cloth which is covering the corpse, they are horrified. "He couldn't believe his eyes, Maeda said. The dead body of Kawaguchi had turned to a sheer skeleton in one night, the flesh cut off clean. At once he suspected the 'Japan guerrilas' of such infamous act" (p. 288).7 These guerrillas, the author explains, were starving soldiers "hard put to it" to stay alive. "Extreme hunger had turned some of them to the living demons. They were driven to attack a solitary soldier and find the source of supplies of animal matter in the Hominidae. Homo homini lupers!" (p. 289). Though the reader may find this hard to believe, Moriya says, it is an undeniable fact of which he is ashamed. "I had to admit it when a Sergeant of the First Company was attacked by one of them and wounded on the thigh" (p. 289).
A soldier named Takahara reports the next instance. When he approaches a group of men cooking a meal, they try to hide the contents of the mess-tin. Takahara gets a look anyway. "A good deal of fat swam on the surface of stew they were cooking, and he saw at once it couldn't be the karabaw meat." Moriya follows this with two more examples. "Then I had the news that an officer of another unit was eaten up by his orderly as soon as he breathed his last. I believe the officer was so attached to his orderly that he bequeathed his body to his servant, and the devoted orderly faithfully executed the last will and testament of his lord and master, and buried him in his belly instead of the earth" (p. 290). The last evidence is the disappearance of a sailor who was returning to his hut ahead of his companions, carrying some of the carabao meat they had secured on a successful hunting foray. His disappearance is attributed to the Japanese guerrillas.
But though he cites the evidence, Moriya mitigates it in a number of ways. The "Japan guerrilas," for example, are "hard put" to exist, they are turned to demons by extreme hunger, they are driven to attack others by necessity. As the language suggests, the guerrillas too are victims, passive instruments of the wartime fate which controls them. Again, in the story of the officer and the orderly, the facts are softened by the author's attempt, though strained, at humor. Finally, Moriya finds a scapegoat in the military. Since the Japanese army in the Philippines had lost control over the troops, he says, "no surprise at all, if some of them had turned to the cannibals driven by a wolf in the stomach when they themselves were wolves by nature." The ultimate responsibility thus rests with the warlords. "For all these infamous brutalities the Japanese Army in the Philippines was absolutely responsible. Had they grasped the war situation accurately and taken proper measures to cope with it, casualties on the Philippine Front would have been far less. Nor would such a glaring stain of cannibalism have been imprinted on the history of Japan" (p. 291). One might well ask what sort of "grasp of the war situation" Moriya has in mind, but his attempt to fix the blame may be genuine, if unconvincing. He has, at least, tried to prepare the reader for this point of view by a number of moralizing asides blaming the Japanese military for the disasters he experiences. Thus ameliorated, cannibalism is portrayed as a mildly climactic event which is merely the inevitable worst of a series of desperate acts by desperate men. The reaction of "frozen horror" at the first encounter becomes, within two pages, "no surprise at all." If the reader has any second thoughts, he is left to indulge them on his own.
Fires on the Plain is a different matter. Like No Requiem, Ooka's narrative takes place in the Philippines during the close of the Pacific war; the protagonist tries desperately to keep from starving or being killed by the enemy Americans, hostile natives, and his own countrymen. Surrounded by the dead and dying, he spends much of his time searching for food. He eventually confronts the truth that men are eating human flesh. But the similarities, striking as they are, are less important than the differences.8 Fires on the Plain is a metaphysical quest, and Private Tamura makes the dark journey, familiar to literary tradition, into his own heart of darkness. There is little doubt that spiritual as well as material food is at issue. Along the way he confronts death continually, agonizes over his identity, and probes the implications of a flesh and blood communion. The heart of hearts, in this instance, is a clearing in an otherwise dense forest where an unlikely trinity of three fugitives, Yasuda (Nagamatsu calls him "Dad"), Nagamatsu ("adopted" by Yasuda), and the troubled Tamura, live in mortal fear of one another. After killing Nagamatsu, who has killed Yasuda, Tamura loses his memory and wanders off. He is wounded, captured, and returned to Japan, where he endures a schizophrenic existence in a Tokyo mental hospital.
Moriya, the narrator of No Requiem, is never without companions who appreciate him. As a medical man he is respected and needed. Most of the time his talents win him favored treatment. In contrast, Private Tamura of Fires on the Plain is an unwanted outcast; his diseased and hungry body only repel people. From the opening lines he bears the curse of the condemned man. "My squad leader slapped me in the face. 'You damned fool!' he said. 'D'you mean to say you let them send you back here? If you'd told them at the hospital you had nowhere to go, they'd have had to take care of you. You know perfectly well there's no room in this company for consumptives like you!" (p. 3). Thus cursed from the community—such as it is—Tamura begins the lonely search for his salvation. His only "friendship"—the tenuous link with Nagamatsu and Yasuda—ends in violent death and psychosis. Moriya reaches home and the arms of his loved ones; Tamura a sanitarium, his wife in the arms of another man. Unlike Moriya's expression of joy, Tamura's is a pathetic claim to immunity from hurt. With Swiftian fervor he asserts, "I don't care. Just as all men are cannibals, all women are whores" (p. 236).
Private
