Over the Brink

FIRES ON THE PLAIN (246 pp.)--Shohei Ooka--Knopf ($3.50).

Running from the sound of the exploding grenade, Private Tamura felt a fragment rip his shoulder and saw the gouged chunk of his own flesh lying on the ground. He picked it up, wiped it clean and popped it into his mouth. He was that hungry and, besides, "There could certainly be nothing wrong in eating my own flesh."

For those who can take that grisly moment in stride, Fires on the Plain will not seem unbearable; it is a painful book to read, but rewardingly so. Unlike most of the Japanese novels that have reached the U.S. during the past few years, this one has neither the perfumed style nor the Oriental passivity and obliqueness that have made the others too exotic for Western tastes. Its hero is an infantry soldier at the end of whatever rope the author may choose to pull. He is the universal G.I. in whatever uniform comes to hand. But since he is Japanese, the U.S. reader will see war from an angle of vision that is as fresh as it is harrowing.

Final Duty. The Japanese army on Leyte has been smashed, and now the survivors are starving and trying to reach the last escape port in small groups. Private Tamura is more expendable than most. He has tuberculosis. His squad leader tells him to go back to the hospital--which has kicked him out after three days--and if he is not readmitted he is to use his last grenade to commit suicide and carry out "your final duty to your country." Taking his final ration of six raw potatoes, Tamura sets off. Aware that the hospital will not take him in, he lies on the ground with others who have been turned away; later he strikes off on his own, and almost at once he begins to starve. He sees coconut trees laden with fruit, but he is too weak to climb the trees. Because he is a poor shot, he misses the chickens that might save him. The cross on a Philippine church draws him into a deserted village, and he senselessly shoots a returning woman who shrieks when she sees him. With other drifting troops, his effort to slip through the American lines fails, and the weakened Tamura senses the first intimations of madness. He also becomes increasingly aware of the temptation to eat the flesh of the occasional Japanese corpses he finds everywhere, some of them already stripped by others. When finally he attempts to hack off some flesh with a bayonet, his left hand compulsively grips his right and saves him from cannibalism.

God Has Spoken. Close to madness, Tamura begins to think about God and to feel that he is now beyond the human pale. And when he meets up with a former buddy who feeds him with dried human flesh, he has committed another act that revolts him and leads directly to madness. By this time he is sure that God has spoken to him, but he has long since lacked the strength of mind to solve either the spiritual or moral problems that assail his failing brain.

Captured and sent home at war's end, Tamura is a madman and knows it. Six years later Tamura writes a book. Having committed himself to a madhouse, he asks his wife to divorce him, and she does. There Novelist Ooka leaves him, trying to figure out who or what he is. It seems unlikely that he will, though there are times when he thinks he might be an angel. "But if I am an angel of God, why am I so grieved? Why is this heart of mine, which should now be free of all earthly attachments, so full of uneasiness and fear? I must make no mistake . . ."

In Fires on the Plain, Japanese Author Shohei Ooka has written what critics in his native land think is their first well-written book about the war. The novel has sold 100,000 copies, and it is not hard to see why. In translation it has moments of obscurity, but it still conveys powerfully the gradual crackup of a war-shattered man who, in his last extremity, can relate himself neither to humanity nor God.

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