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In Fires on the Plain (1957), which has been made into a grim movie recently released in the U.S., Author Shohei Ooka attempted a serious study of the fanaticism of the Japanese soldier. Its hero Tamura kills senselessly in the last months of the war in the Philippines. But the more revulsion he feels, the more fanatical he becomes. "All voluntary actions were forbidden to me," he reasons. "I, who had voluntarily robbed a human life of the compulsion whereby it lives, had condemned myself to an existence based entirely on compulsion—the compulsion of moving ineluctably toward my own death." Because Tamura shows no mercy to himself, he can show none to others. But at the point of utter degradation, Tamura at last finds his will. While other surviving Japanese turn to cannibalism, Tamura balks and takes a bitter pride in refusing the flesh of another human. At long last, he is able to utter the words that come so easily to people in a free world: "No one can make me do what I do not want to do."
The Japanese are now concentrating on sex and sensibility in their novels (Junichiro Tanizaki's The Key, Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), and the emotions of a single person interest them more than the entire Pacific war. "We are grass eaters here," says one Japanese writer good-humoredly. "So meaty a subject as war guilt is physically incompatible with us."