Apocalyptic Wandering in the Wilderness: Reading Hikaru Okuizumi, *A Record of Romantic Marching*

Responding to the Interpreting cartographies theme, this paper explores the “mapping” out of sacred stor(ies), especially themes around wandering in the wilderness by examining the Japanese novel, A Record of Romantic Marching (Rōmanteki na kōgun no kiroku, 2002) by Hikaru Okuizumi (1952–) [1]. Okuizumi is a Japanese novelist who tirelessly grapples with the question of violence and human responsibility, especially regarding the catastrophes caused by the Japanese empire. A Record of Romantic Marching (after here, A Record) follows the journey of Japanese soldiers who are sent to an (imagined) island in Southeast Asia that was occupied and devastated by Japan during WWII. The story tours the “hell” that wounded and sick soldiers experience: they continue an “apocalyptic march” in a fashion that mimics the Israelites wandering in the desert in the book of Exodus (98). They move endlessly around the island’s dense jungle and the deserted “valley of death” (193). In the end, the novel reveals that the soldiers are ghosts who, eternally bound by the megalomania of colonialism, are doomed to perpetually wander the wilderness and never arrive to the promised (home)land. Describing an eternal wandering without liberation, this “cartographic” novel harshly criticizes Japanese imperialism and its legacy and urges the reader to ponder how to stop this—and other—“marches” through hell.  

The novel is set against the historical background of 1944 and 1945, during the steady collapse of the twentieth-century Japanese empire. The characters of *A Record* are sent to a fictional version of one of the real Southeast Asian islands where many Japanese troops were completely destroyed by the U.S. military. Despite the catastrophic loss of life, these soldiers’ deaths were propagated as “honorable” in Japan under the imperial ideology that imprisonment during war was shameful. This time period alone produced about ninety percent of the Japanese war dead (except for civilians) and about sixty percent of them died of starvation or sickness, not in battle. In many of his novels, Okuizumi grapples with this preposterous total-war ideology as one of the gravest negative legacies of the Japanese empire, which, if allowed to flourish, would have sacrificed—wasted—the entire Japanese population, including their colonies.  

Following seemingly arbitrary orders, the protagonist’s platoon traverses the island full of harsh natural environments. As more and more soldiers are eliminated by death, the act of walking with scarce food becomes “suffering prepared by hell” (280). The novel immerses the reader in the terrifying reality of the “war” that the imperial ideology glorifies: a wet jungle that renders malarial soldiers’ bodies rotten and infested by killer ants; stray soldiers stealing resources from native villages; some soldiers descending into insanity or cannibalizing dead fellows. This depiction of a walk through hell summons traditional “cartographic” literary works on religion, such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Dante’s Inferno. However, A Record provides no salvific way out: in the end, the protagonist finds himself in a mortar-shaped cave where injured soldiers walk endlessly in a circular motion.

The novel depicts this “apocalyptic marching” by interlacing narratives of reality and hallucinations, including episodes from the book of Exodus in a convoluted manner. Wandering the jungle, the protagonist abruptly has a vision of the Israelites worshiping the statue of a golden calf: liberated from slavery, the Israelites still grow impatient with the absence of Moses, who has ascended Mt. Sinai to receive the covenant, and they ask Aaron to make a god for them to appease their anxiety (199). Later in the novel, the exodus motif appears again. Seeing handbills about the end of the war distributed from American airplanes—a possible opportunity for “liberation” from the battlefield—most of the Japanese soldiers remain indecisive, unable to believe Japan’s defeat. A captain declares they should go to Yasukuni Shrine, where the “great war dead” are enshrined. In order to join them, some of the soldiers massacre each other. A moment later, the protagonist finds himself in postwar Tokyo and witnesses that the ghosts of the war dead had already “exodused” the shrine with maggots (282): in violent death, they discover that the shrine is not the key to the promised land; moreover, their “living god,” the emperor, remains silent, like the statue of a golden calf. They are in the wilderness, suffering the consequences of worshiping a false god: imperialism. “Aren’t we the Japanese, barefoot, ragged, infested with lice and mold, and eaten by maggots as we are still alive? … We true Japanese march on the land of starvation filled with pus.” (280)

Repeatedly, the novel comes back to the same point: “sacrificial” death for the empire is utterly miserable and results in apocalyptic wandering. It should be noted that most soldiers in the novel are conscripted, so if they survive, they could eventually return to civilian life, but none is determined to do so. Walking vengefully through the “land of pus and starvation,” the ghost soldiers cling to imperial militarism. In this sense, Okuizumi intimates that that the contemporary Japanese are also “ghosts,” indifferently inheriting a colonial mindset and wittingly or unwittingly, walking over corpses. The implied hell continues and is exacerbated in the present. 

Okuizumi’s A Record offers readers a glimpse into the perpetual, limitless “hell” that accompanies the colonial mindset, touring a bleak landscape populated by the endlessly wandering ghosts: it provides a keen criticism of the “imperial religion” still operating today, however subtly. In rotten wilderness, we, infested by lice and killer ants, are cannibalizing each other in direct and structural violence—even if we do not want to admit this reality, we are still haunted by the god of prosperity, devastation, and negligence. If we do not try to seek alternatives, the apocalyptic march becomes perpetuated. By vividly mapping violence in an imagined island, Okuizumi’s novel reminds us of a fundamental point about human reality: “moving on” means we must cease to indifferently wander in a violent world so that we can pause and ponder alternatives for this ever-operating apocalypse.

[1] Hikaru Okuizumi, Ishi no raireki Rōmantekina kōgun no kiroku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2002).