The religious theme gives ironic depth to the narrative. Attracted by the sight of a cross on a church steeple, 'Tamura, clutching his rifle, descends to the village to "resolve the religious doubt" that has visited him at the "end of his life" (p. 86). He has previously dreamed about the church, and witnessed his own funeral with a "coffin draped in black" where one of his selves lies, while another "I" observes the proceedings. When he reaches the village, images of death greet him. A "black swarm of carrion crows" perches on the church roof and arms of the cross; the church doors are black. At the foot of the church steps lie rotting corpses, "grotesque transfigurations of putrescence." Surprised by a young couple who have returned to the deserted town for a hidden cache of salt, Tamura murders the woman in the presbytery of the church, and adds one more "self" to his already confused identity. "I had to acknowledge that I was now no more than a brutish soldier who, far from being able to communicate with God, could not even mix with his fellow creatures" (p. 115-16). Private Tamura ends his curious confrontation with the Western passion symbol feeling that he no longer belongs to humankind.
Near the climax of the novel, Tamura encounters a dying officer crazed from suffering. The helpless man is covered with flies and leeches. As a symbol, the officer is an ironic composite, half Christ-figure, half Beelzebub.9 Appropriately, when he offers his flesh to Tamura shortly before dying, the offer is a mixture of blessing and temptation. The analogy with Christ and the Mass is made explicit after the officer's death. "I remembered Jesus' arms, strained from hanging, which I had seen in the seaside village," Tamura says. But the demonic possibility too is suggested. "I was obsessed by the words that he had murmured before his death. For some reason these words, intended as an invitation, acted instead as a ban" (p. 184). Tamura's divided mind finds physical expression. His left hand seizes his right, and prevents it from using his bayonet on the dead man. After this experience Tamura has a strange religious vision (or hallucination) of an "unknown tropical flower" which says, "You may eat me if you like!" He then imagines great masses of flowers falling from the sky and hears what he takes to be the voice of God saying, "Consider the lilies of the field" (pp. 190-91). Much of the time he feels, as he has felt so often during his wilderness trek, that he is being watched. This feeling (do the "eyes" represent a projection of his guilt? a paranoid fear? a feeling of God's presence?) keeps the reader aware that the point of view here is that of a deranged mind.
The eyes finally assume human form in the person of Nagamatsu, who rescues Tamura, revives him with water and what turns out to be human flesh (an ironic communion?), and keeps him alive until the climax when Nagamatsu kills Yasuda and is in turn killed by Tamura. The meaning of the religious motif is difficult to determine; the point of view (a sick mind) keeps one from being dogmatic. But part of the significance, at least, emerges from the ironic juxtaposition of redemption and destruction, feeding and killing, living and dying. Can these seeming opposites be reconciled? Can twentieth-century man, postwar man, with new and ever more sophisticated means of serving either end-eating or killing-find his role in his world? Can he count on divine aid? Tamura's religious yearnings are roused only when he faces death; when he confronts the crucified Christ (the crucifix in the church), he becomes a murderer. The profound import of the Communion gift of body and blood is only apparent (and then only to a distorted mind) when he sees that men must literally eat one another to stay alive. Perhaps the book's ironic possibilities are best summed up in the ubiquitous and symbolic fires on the plain. They suggest that man's response to his world may be natural or unnatural; they may be "genuine bonfires" for burning waste husks, or guerrilla signals to mark human targets. They may also be God's purifying fire of judgment. If so, then Tamura's last remarks are more than mere hallucinatory ramblings. Perhaps he speaks as an inspired shaman-sage, mad with the truth.10 If man's insanity is somehow compatible with divine purpose, then indeed "glory be to God."
Like No Requiem and Fires on the Plain, Takeda's Luminous Moss centers around an incident which takes place during the last year of the war in the Pacific. In an introductory narrative-essay, the author tells of his trip to Rausu in Hokkaido. Amid signs of postwar prosperity, he is guided to Makkaushi Cave, where he sees the famous "luminous moss." He also learns of a wartime incident of cannibalism which occurred in the vicinity. At the "apex of the War" a small ship had been wrecked in a storm; the captain and a crew member had straggled ashore on a "storm-driven, snow-laden beach." Two months later, the captain had appeared, sole survivor of the tragedy. But after fishermen had discovered evidences of cannibalism and the captain had confessed to having eaten his dead comrade, the "beautiful wartime drama" had become in the eyes of the people a tale of terror, the "courageous captain" a beast-like criminal. Author Takeda follows his essay with an imaginative recreation of the "incident" and the captain's trial in the form of a closet drama.
As in the other works, men, dying of starvation, resort to eating human flesh to stay alive. Like Ooka, Takeda has a symbol of the human heart, though more obvious, in the Makkaushi Cave. Both Takeda and Ooka get considerable ironic mileage from the identity motif and religious symbolism. But differences are again considerable. Whereas in No Requiem Moriya oversimplifies the problem of cannibalism (the Japanese military is blamed), and Ooka gives it a personal, mystical slant in Fires on the Plain, Takeda endeavors in a number of ways to universalize his message. He invites the reader to see himself, like the protagonitst, as Everyman, not only capable of, but deeply involved in, the act. Thus, Takeda explains that he chose the closet drama form of the play in order to "best allow the reader's everyday feelings to enter into and merge with the situation." In fact, the reader is invited to imagine himself as "producer" of the drama. Obviously, the significance is that one contributes not only in a literary but in a moral way. Lest the reader miss the point of his involvement, Takeda states the reader-producer analogy three times.
In other ways too Takeda stresses the involvement of all men. The introductory narrative has a peacetime setting with civilian characters, including the junior high school principal (his "educative" function becomes apparent when he is identified with the captain in act 2). Even the notorious "incident" involves not just military men, but "military civilians," and while the incident occurs at the apex of the war, the shipwreck results from a natural disaster, a snowstorm typical of the area, which could have occurred at any time. Allusions to Buddha, Christ, Bosch, Breughel, medieval Japanese scrolls, the Ainu, and contemporary Soviet-Japanese relations further stress the idea of universality. But most obvious of the universalizing devices are the symbolic luminous moss and the figure of the captain. In the "play," when Hachizo first sees the "ring of light, like the halo of the figure of Buddha" behind Nishikawa, he says, "They say—an'