Home > Author > Shōhei Ōoka
1 " ...in the distance across the dark fields I saw a flame. With the rainy season, the fireflies had long since disappeared. What then could this be? The flame flickered, now brightly, no dimly, and sometimes it glowed like a halo, as if it had sunk deep into water.I was frightened by this flame. For in my heart I, too, carried a flame. "
― Shōhei Ōoka , Fires on the Plain
2 " Why was I not overcome with nausea? At the time I had no such reaction. Perhaps nausea is simply an unconscious device of the egoist, who, when he hears of horrors outside the course of his present serene existence, allows only his stomach to respond "
3 " When I felt ill and was on the way to becoming a burden to the other men, I noticed a growing chill in their attitude toward me. For people like us, living day and night on the brink of danger, the normal instinct of survival seems to strike inward, like a disease, distorting the personality and removing all motives other than those of sheer self-interest. That is why this afternoon I did not wait to go and tell my former comrades-in-arms what had happened to me. For one thing, they probably already knew; besides, it seemed unfair to risk awakening their dormant sense of humanity. "
4 " The familiar shape of the cross still gleamed above the distant forest, but now that I had found companions it no longer made any impression on me. "
5 " Walking along, I occasionally had to stop by the side of the road to spit out the mucus that kept rising in my throat. It rather pleased me to think of the malignant tubercle bacilli that I had brought from Japan being scorched to death under the tropical sun. "
6 " People seem unable to admit this principle of chance. Our spirits are not strong enough to stand the idea of life being a mere succession of chances—the idea, that is, of infinity. Each of us in his individual existence, which is contained between the chance of his birth and the chance of his death, identifies those few incidents that have arisen through what he styles his “will”; and the thing that emerges consistently from this he calls his “character” or again his “life.” Thus we contrive to comfort ourselves; there is, in fact, no other way for us to think. "
7 " Again, was it not this same presentiment of death that made it seem so strange to me now that I should never again walk along this path in the Philippine forest? In our own country, even in the most distant or inaccessible part, this feeling of strangeness never comes to us, because subconsciously we know that there is always a possibility of our returning there in the future. Does not our entire life-feeling depend upon this inherent assumption that we can repeat indefinitely what we are doing at the moment? "
8 " The yearning in which the moonlit sky had engulfed me was like the craving I had felt for some woman whose body and spirit were unattainable. And now I perceived that it was just because the sky was likewise unattainable that I so yearned for it... "
9 " Allá iban, con mis escupitajos, los bacilos de la tuberculosis que había contraído en Japón y me alegraba imaginar esos bacilos agonizando abrazados bajo el sol tropical. "
― Shōhei Ōoka
10 " To be sure, my freedom lay simply in the fact that no one cared any longer where I went or what I did. "
