German filmmaker Werner Herzog debuts this month his first novel, a surreal story set in the Philippines with his unlikely protagonist a Japanese soldier who fought a war for 30 years, unaware that it was long over.
Known to cinephiles as the auteur behind the films Aguirre, Nosferatu, and My Best Friend, to name some of the more than 60 feature films and documentaries that he has produced, written, and directed since 1961, Herzog has also published over a dozen books of prose over the decades.
In The Twilight World, Herzog, who is nearly 80, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda. In 1944, toward the end of World War II, Onoda was ordered by his superior officer to continue holding Lubang Island “until the Imperial Army’s return” and “defend its territory by guerilla tactics, at all costs…”
The novelette is an imagining of Onoda’s 28 years of futile and useless struggle in the jungle, fighting a war that was long over. Herzog’s work, writes San Francisco Chronicle’s Zach Ruskin, involves “poetic, sweeping passages in which Herzog rides his protagonist’s ever-spinning mind to muse on grand concepts like loyalty, time, and self” to deliver “a superb yet painful parable on the fleeting nature of purpose.”
Blending memoir and history with poetry and fiction, Herzog explores the parameters of Onoda’s fortitude in the face of uncertainty and other themes including patriotism, grief, and honor.
The book’s chapters travel back and forth in time to chronicle Onoda’s movements through the decades – as a man in his 20s receiving orders from his superior officer to stay on the island as a guerilla fighter; then, accompanied by several fellow soldiers, struggling to survive; later, alone, a middle-aged man, finally stepping down from his post to return home.
Herzog writes of the blurring of time and space with the same intense lyricism that marks his films: “Time, time and the jungle. The jungle does not recognize time. They are like two alienated siblings who will have nothing to do with each other, who communicate, if at all, only in the form of content.”
“Days follow nights” without seasons in an unending blur of rain and “slightly less rain” with the dim, twilight surroundings being “one unvarying constant: everything in the jungle is at pains to strangle everything else in the battle for sunlight.”
Apart from being a story of a place and its challenges, it is a story of time and how it erodes and erases itself as the years pass, time eating itself like the Ouroborous worm. “After all his millions of steps, he had understood that there was—there could be—no such thing as the present. Each step of the way was past, and each further step was future.”
It is also a story of blurred vision and even more hazy reality, a story of memory and its nature under extreme circumstances. How has Onoda hung on to his sanity amid years of solitude and the stress of fulfilling impossible tasks in an improbable world?
Herzog imagines Onoda’s state of mind – was he sleepwalking, dreaming, was it all an illusion? Yet, “Among the terrors of the night was a horse with glowing eyes, smoking cigars.” And thus, perhaps unknowingly on the author’s part, enters the most Filipino of references in the entire story.
Otherwise, aside from the location, there is nothing Filipino here. There is only the privation and trauma of Onoda’s internal, and mental landscape as he traverses the perpetually damp and lush external environment toward an imagined future of rescue, vindication, and triumph.
How factual is the narrative of The Twilight World, considering that it is based on a true story and many hours of interviews? Herzog writes: “Most details are factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.”
Onoda eventually emerged from the jungle in 1974, only after one of his commanding officers, who by then was in his 80s, traveled to Lubang to convince him to stand down. Onoda died in 2014 at the age of 91. His story, recalled by a few till now, will be revived and transmitted to a wider audience through Herzog’s effort to explore the nature of loyalty and duty amid the most adverse of circumstances.
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog
2022 / 132 pages, pb / Penguin Press
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