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Shōhei Ōoka (1909–1988)

Autor/a de Fires on the Plain

30+ obres 461 Membres 13 Ressenyes 2 preferits

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Obres de Shōhei Ōoka

Obres associades

Chika Engeki No.4 1 exemplars
(007)闇 (百年文庫) (2010) — Autor — 1 exemplars
海 1972年05月号 — Col·laborador — 1 exemplars

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Ōoka Shōhei was thirty-five-years-old in 1944 when he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, given cursory training, and sent to the front lines in the Philippines, where he served as a communications expert. By December he was suffering from starvation and severe malaria and had been left behind when his unit retreated. He was captured by the Americans and spent the next year in American POW camps. His account of his time as a POW is highly detailed and explores not only his experience, but the motivations and mindsets of those around him.

Like most Japanese soldiers, Ōoka had been instructed to never surrender and if capture was imminent, suicide was preferable. In addition, they knew how the Japanese had treated prisoners in Manchuria and the Philippines, and feared similar treatment. Many thoughts passed through Ōoka's mind in the days leading up to his capture, including a half-hearted suicide attempt, but in the end, acute illness render the issue of surrender moot. He was astonished when instead of torture or neglect and ill-treatment, he was sent to a POW hospital, treated for the malaria and given a special diet, as well as books and clothes. His dismay at being captured segued into relief at surviving.

Ōoka describes life in the POW camps in great detail, as well as his fellow prisoners and the American GIs that he met. He was highly perceptive and introspective. Prior to the war, Ōoka had studied French literature, translated [[Stendhal]], and learned English as well. He eventually becomes a translator in the camps and has access to all levels of the camp hierarchy. His insights are fascinating:

Surrender and attitude toward captors:

Surrender is a particular, individual act. On the verge of starvation in the jungles of the Pacific, a great many soldiers must have contemplated surrender, yet very few found the courage to actually turn themselves over to the enemy. At the same time, it would not have been the least bit implausible for a man who had never dreamed of surrender to suddenly find his hands in the air when confronted with the incontrovertible superiority of his foe. (p. 138)

Their confusion {as to how to behave toward their captors}, it seems to me, was quite understandable. Their military indoctrination prevented them from accepting the Americans' warm-heartedness with simple gratitude. Whereas they saw themselves as dishonorable captives, the Americans treated them as human beings, and this excessive kindness, so to speak, confounded them completely. (p. 53)


One thing that I found particularly interesting was that many Japanese gave fake names when they were captured, because they did not want their families back in Japan to know that they had suffered the ignominy of capture. They feared too that their families would be punished. This became a problem for both sides after the war. Some innocent soldiers were denied repatriation, because the name they had adopted at capture was on the list of suspected war criminals, and other guilty parties were released.

On the differences between professional soldiers and those who were drafted:

Being drafted was to him like going through some kind of natural disaster, and his only concern was to somehow weather it and make his way home alive. (p. 147)

We were an "over-the-hill" unit of mostly middle-agers, sent to the front after completing barely three months of basic training in early 1944, and we could hardly be called soldiers. When Mindoro became the Americans' next target after Leyte, we experienced great hardship and suffering, but again, not from anything that could really be called combat. Thus, we emerged from our experiences on the island with our civilian identities intact. We never became true "brothers-in-arms."

We may never have been proper soldiers, but we did become bona fide prisoners of war. (p. 149)


And in particular, he writes about the attitude of "anything goes" from the soldiers who had fought in China vs the conscripted soldiers in 1944 who were slightly horrified at their behavior. The professional soldiers and sailors (of whom there were many, whose ships had been sunk off the coast of the Philippines) maintained their military discipline and hierarchical authority much more than the civilian soldiers.

One thing that is conspicuously absent from Ōoka's account is any mention of the families the Japanese soldiers left behind, including his own. From a photograph on the back of the book, I know that he had a wife and two young children in 1944, but he never talks about them or of writing letters home, etc. I would have liked to have known how the soldiers were received when they returned to an occupied Japan. There is a lot of conjecture about this in the camps, but his account ends with the repatriation ships reaching the Japanese mainland.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in WWII and those who have read his novel, [Fires on the Plain].
… (més)
 
Marcat
labfs39 | Apr 1, 2023 |
En la isla filipina de Leyte, a punto de finalizar la segunda guerra mundial, el ejército japonés se desintegra hostigado por el avance de las tropas estadounidenses. El soldado japonés Tamura, enfermo y hambriento, se ve obligado a abandonar el hospital y a deambular por la selva, por la que también vagan otros compañeros de armas. Quebrado todo vínculo con la sociedad y convertido en un paria, Tamura se verá enfrentado a sí mismo en un lugar donde sólo cabe sobrevivir y donde el asesinato y el canibalismo simplemente suceden.… (més)
 
Marcat
Natt90 | Hi ha 10 ressenyes més | Mar 29, 2023 |
Tamura is a conscripted Japanese soldier on the island of Leyte in the Philippines late in World War II. When the novel opens, he has been discharged from the field hospital because he can no longer supply his own food, and rejected by his unit because he is too weak to forage. He wanders the forests, starving and lonely. At one point he sees the cross on the top of a Filipino church and begins reflecting on his youthful belief in God and later adult rejection of religion as childish illusions. Rather than the existence of evil, his focus is on his personal relationship with God and God's wishes for him. Eventually he meets up with other Japanese stragglers and joins them in making a push for the coast, where rumor has it they are to be evacuated. But the American army has cut off their escape route, and Tamura finds himself wandering alone again. As starvation and madness set in, he must confront both practical and philosophical questions about death, sin, and the role of chance in human destiny.

Like his protagonist, Shohei Ooka was a conscript sent to the Philippines late in the war. He was a student and translator of French literature and after the war was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale. He kept a journal during the war and began writing and publishing postwar. Several of his books won prominent awards, and in his Nobel acceptance speech, Kenzaburo Oe credits Ooka as an influence on his own writing.

I read [Fires on the Plain] in two sittings, unable to stop turning pages to see what would happen. The writing is clear and clean, with detailed descriptions of nature, but what I found most compelling was Tamura's struggles with survival, not only of his body, but of his Self. How do you remain true to yourself during the horrors of war, the degradation of the body, and the effects of starvation, loneliness, and guilt on the mind?
… (més)
5 vota
Marcat
labfs39 | Hi ha 10 ressenyes més | Nov 20, 2022 |
Des livres comme cela il y en a peu. Des livres comme un uppercut dans l’estomac du lecteur.
Les Feux est un livre de guerre, inspiré de l’expérience de l’auteur. Mais c’est un livre de guerre comme on en lit peu. D’abord parce qu’il se passe aux Philippines, théâtre d’affrontements entre l’armée japonaise et l’armée américaine, un pan de la Seconde guerre mondiale rarement évoqué chez nous. Ensuite parce que ce n’est pas un roman de guerre à proprement parler. Ce ne sont pas les combats qui sont décrits, c’est la défaite et la déroute. Un sujet rarement traîté, ou alors pour montrer la grandeur des vaincus. Ici, aucune de ces fioritures, c’est la déroute dans tout ce qu’elle a de plus brutal qui est décrite à travers l’errance du soldat Tamura.
En lisant, je ne pouvais m’empêcher de penser que ce roman était japonais jusque dans ses moindres mots. J’ai du mal à expliquer cela mais j’ai cherché à comprendre d’où venait ce sentiment, et je crois qu’il a deux origines. D’abord la capacité à faire se côtoyer le plus beau (un paysage, une lumière…) et le plus laid (un cadavre en décomposition, une blessure purulente…). Les descriptions sont faites avec une économie de mots et une factualité jamais démenties, mais surtout elles peuvent passer du beau au laid sans transition, pas même en changeant de paragraphe ou de phrase, mais parfois dans la même phrase, la même ligne. Cela crée un sentiment de malaise que je retrouve dans certaines nouvelles de [[Kawabata]]. Autre chose qui m’a paru très japonais, c’est la description sans fard de la défaite dans ce qu’elle a de plus humiliant, de plus terre à terre. Il n’y a ici aucune velléité d’enjoliver la réalité ou de cacher ses aspects les plus sombres. Tout est mis sur la table, au lecteur de se débrouiller avec cela. On est loin des héros défaits ou même des anti-héros, Tamura n’est qu’un soldat ordinaire avec, comme le suggère l’auteur, un comportement ordinaire dans ce genre de circonstances. On est loin de l’imagerie occidentale, plongés directement dans le traumatisme difficile à imaginer pour nous, de la défaite japonaise qui marque aussi l’effondrement d’une conception du monde. Pas de collectif ici, non plus, c’est chacun pour soi et la solidarité n’existe que si elle est intéressée.
Ce livre est extrêmement dérangeant, il fait voler en éclat les stéréotypes ou les visions romantisées de la guerre, il nous égare dans les méandres de la survie la plus élémentaire, là où les questions morales n’ont plus lieu d’être, il nous entraîne dans les forêts denses et les marais boueux de l’île de Leyte, dans lesquels il nous laisse englués et sans espoir de s’en remettre. Un livre dur, impressionnant, où la force du propos contraste avec la simplicité du style, où l’apparente neutralité des descriptions cache un réquisitoire féroce contre l’inhumanité de la guerre, de toutes les guerres. Un livre indispensable.
… (més)
 
Marcat
raton-liseur | Hi ha 10 ressenyes més | Dec 12, 2021 |

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Obres
30
També de
3
Membres
461
Popularitat
#53,308
Valoració
3.9
Ressenyes
13
ISBN
49
Llengües
7
Preferit
2

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