The Twilight World

April 25, 2022
Filmmaker Herzog (the diary Of Walking in Ice) draws on the true story of a Japanese officer who patrolled the Filipino jungle for nearly three decades after WWII, unaware the war had ended, in his fascinating debut novel. As the Imperial Army prepares to withdraw from Lubang Island in December 1944, Lt. Hiroo Onoda is ordered to remain behind and defend the territory by guerilla tactics. But after fellow officers refuse to assist him in dynamiting a port, Allied forces capture the island and decimate the remaining troops. Onoda perseveres in his mission, retreating to the mountains in the company of a young corporal. Night after night they remain on the move, preserving their bullets with coconut oil and battling deprivation by killing the odd buffalo or raiding small villages. Later, Onoda mistakes American planes en route to Korea, and later Vietnam, as proof that his war rages on. In spare prose, Herzog conveys Onoda’s strange relationship to the passage of time: “After all his millions of steps,” the lieutenant “understood that there was—there could be—no such thing as the present.” Onoda’s reemergence into a changed world in 1975 adds a captivating layer, though it’s all too brief and lightly sketched. Still, Onoda shares with the director’s filmic protagonists a fierce will and singular perspective. This will whet the reader’s appetite for a film version.