When Ōoka Shōhei published his novel of the same name about the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces in the Philippines in 1951, “certain incidents” were not discussed in public. No mention was made of how the fighting troops, demoralized and starved, fell apart physically and mentally in the final months of the war. Too many soldiers lost all sense of wrongdoing, culminating in isolated cases of cannibalism - with locals being eaten just as much as comrades. Ōoka knew what he was talking about: he was drafted in 1944 and stationed in the Philippines. What he deals with in Fires on the Plane (Nobi) (2014), he knew either from his own experience or from the masses of stories told by fellow internees.
Trash-punk underground icon Shinya Tsukamoto, world-famous for his garish, garish, garish cinematic nightmares of martyred machine men and other possessed people, interprets Ōoka's sarcastically gruesome tale as a Buddhist trip to hell in which the boundaries between feverish delusion and reality become increasingly blurred. You can no longer rely on anything here - and what was a friend yesterday may be torn apart tomorrow.
