Exploring fanaticism and folly

The Twilight World

Werner Herzog

Penguin Press

Werner Herzog has portrayed the excesses of human drama as the director, producer and screenwriter of more than 60 feature and documentary films, the author of more than 12 books and the director of more than a dozen operas.

His debut novel, The Twilight World, is a tale about Hiroo Onoda, a real Japanese lieutenant who terrorized the Philippine villagers of Lubang Island with guerrilla tactics for 29 years after the conclusion of the Second World War.

The book begins with the writer himself. In Tokyo in 1997 to direct the feudal opera Chushingura, Herzog insults his hosts by declining an invitation from Japan's emperor. Shocked, someone asks Herzog whom he'd rather meet.

“Onoda,” he replies. “And a week later, I met him.”

Did Onoda long for his family, or sex, or safety as he navigated the jungle, changing camps nightly, sometimes walking backward to evade trackers? The Twilight World largely eschews psychology and self-reflection to chronicle how Onoda and fellow soldiers Shimada and Kozuka cached ammunition in homemade palm oil and misread the planes flying toward subsequent American wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Declining to pass explicit judgment on his subject's devastating refusal to accept that the Second World War was over, Herzog nonetheless tightens the lens on who he thinks is important: Onoda.

Onoda died in 2014 at the age of 91. Public fascination with his story hearkens to a corrupted nostalgia for codes of conduct that demand loyalty to chain of command, no matter what. But where is the honour in ambushing farmers who, recovering from an imposed war, harvest rice?

Left with orders to destroy Lubang Island's transportation infrastructure but never to surrender or kill himself, Onoda is reported to have killed up to 30 residents, wounding many more, for which he was later pardoned. Readers of The Twilight World would not learn the human cost of Onoda's steadfast ignorance because the narrative adheres to his ingenious survival.

Beautifully translated from German into English by Michael Hofmann, The Twilight World shows Onoda as not an ahistorical lunatic, but rather a man with admirable focus who clings to life and refuses to cede a fight.

In his feverish search for ecstatic truths, Herzog has given readers a portal into human folly, self-discipline and domination — surely his life's work.