Fires On The Plain Chapter Summary

Ooka Shohei named the last chapter of Fires on the Plain “In Praise of Transfiguration.” Through the whole novel, readers witness the protagonist Tamura transform from an innocent soldier to a killer. Readers watch him go from condemning the practice of eating human flesh to eating human flesh for his own survival. At the end, Readers see Tamura’s redemption as he shot Nagamatsu who killed and ate his own comrade Yasuda. What was the difference between two men who both killed and ate human beings? To Tamura, the guilt of eating human flesh distinguished himself from Nagamatsu who cold-bloodily killed Yasuda. As Tamura recalled, “I do not remember whether I shot him at that moment. But I do know that I did not eat his flesh; this I should certainly have remembered.” (224) The fact of him shooting at Nagamatsu had no importance to Tamura. However, his emphasis on not eating

Nagamatsu’s body indicated that he was not the savage who would kill his own people for food. The revival guilt and shame contributed to his transfiguration. From killing the Pilipino woman to eating human flesh, then to his redemption, Tamura’s transfiguration is about reconstructing his understanding about life and death, morality and cannibalism, and human nature.
Tamura’s transfiguration did not start when he ate human flesh for survival, but at the moment he was sent to a foreign land. As he described, “I was being transported across the ocean to fight and kill, and I suddenly had realized that I had not the slightest will either to fight or kill.” (19) He didn’t want to kill, yet he later adjusted himself to kill because war turned people into enemies. His perceptions on objects also changed because of war. To Tamura, a gentle hollow became a shelter from artillery fire. The green fields became dangerous terrain. Even a dog on a foreign land became an enemy, thus Tamura was obligated to annihilate the animal. Tamura said, “I had been given (this weapon) in order to destroy my country’s enemies, should first have been used to slaughter a dog.” (101) The war had reshaped Tamura’s perception on everything, including human nature. Although he tried to grasp one last hope of humanity by making friends with a Filipino who “kindly” offered him food, all he realized at the end was the futility of seeking a Filipino’s friendship, because they were enemies. This one brief moment showing the naivety of Tamura reflected his difficulty of adapting to a cruel and chaotic war zone from a civilized society. As he continued his journey for survival, his misperception about the war led to his unique understanding about life and death.
In the early chapters, Tamura predicted his death, saying, “I knew full well that only calamity and extinction awaited me at the end of my journey.” (59) This prioritized his curiosity to explore the difference between life and death. Tamura perceived that the awareness of him being alive was the proof of his existence. When death took away his consciousness, the body he left behind was no different from the other elements on earth, like water and dirt blending into the great universe. As he put it, “My consciousness would certainly cease the moment that I die; but my flesh would blend with the river and remain part of this great universe. Such would be my survival.” (64) His afterward description of witnessing a slaughtered Pilipino village echoed his recognition of being dead and alive.
Accidently as Tamura walked into a village filled with corpses, he used the term “objects” to refer to the dead people. As he explained, “They were people, but their bodies had already become mere dehumanized objects…they had lost all the individual conformations of their past lives.” (105) His recognition of a dead body as an object mirrored his early perception of consciousness as the only validation of being alive. However, the garments worn by the corpses reminded Tamura that these “objects” were used to be humans. Despite his willingness to sympathize with the dead, “the grotesque transfigurations of putrescence” impeded him. (105) “They were barely distinguishable from the surrounding earth,” as Tamura put it. Were they not objects—those who used to be humans, but now lost consciousness and unrecognizable?
As he approached to a devastating point where he had to eat human flesh to survive, his understanding about dead bodies as objects suddenly became a delusion. The contradiction of containing both morality and eating human flesh for survival as a natural instinct bewildered him. Tamura felt revolted, initially. As he explained, “in pre-historic times people did eat each other, just as that primitive societies practice incest.” (178) Tamura thought that devouring each other were as savage and uncivilized as practicing incest. Moreover, his additional comparison of eating human flesh with fornicating with our mothers, as both unacceptable and immoral behaviors, emphasized his opposition toward such practices.
Nevertheless, his action, right after his vigorous condemnation, contradicted and broke his morality when he felt the urge to eat human beings for survival. As he justified his own action, “I was now able to overlook such inveterate prejudices must have been because I recognized in my predicament an extreme exception to the normal human condition.”(178) He chose to fulfill his belly instead of keeping his morality because of an extreme predicament, as he claimed. He was perplexed by his own decision, saying, “I cannot tell whether or not this new desire of mine was natural.”(178) Tamura thought savage human behavior had passed away along with the pre-historic times. As he reached a time when he had to eat human flesh to stay alive, he realized how fragile the idea of being moral and civil was. He was struggled with admitting such monstrous desire would reside in him. When he attempted to describe his feeling, he failed because he said such experience was like lovers who could not remember a certain moment while having intercourse. Apparently, Tamura’s absent feeling of disgust and revolt contradicted his early claim.
The experience of fulfilling his belly overshadowed the guilt of violating his morality. Even though he did not self-blame while eating human flesh, the guilt of eating a human haunted him ever since—“For invariably I felt that I was being observed by someone…Who was observing me?” (178) Was that “who” the Filipino woman he killed? Tamura rejected such an assumption. He added, “after all, I had not eaten her; I had only killed he” (178) Certainly, there was a difference between killing a human being and eating a human flesh, according to Tamura. Moreover, from his tone of speaking, eating human flesh was definitely worse than killing. As far as I interpreted, the “who” was his morality. Even he seemed to have convinced himself that a necessary violation of morality was for his survival, his morality kept judging him. The sense of guilt resulted in his consistent explanation that dead bodies without consciousness were nothing but mere objects to which human rules did not apply.
Tamura also applied the same recognition of a dead body to a dying officer. When the officer died, Tamura regarded the officer’s dead body as no different from vegetables and animals that “we normally kill and eat without the slightest compunction.” (186) He continued, “What lay before me was a mere object—an object utterly unrelated to the soul that had uttered the words: ‘You may eat this.’”(186) His continuous comparison of human beings with objects played as a placebo effect to mitigate his guilt of consuming human flesh. His comparison of a dead body with no consciousness to an object was only a delusion which didn’t ease the guilt for Tamura.
At the end scene, when Nagamatsu shot his comrade dead, Tamura realized that the evil human nature of killing each other and eating each other was not only bared in him, but in all human beings.

He vomited as Nagamatsu chopped off Yasuda’s wrists and ankles. He said “the most horrible thing of all was that I had expected these very actions!” As he predicted his own calamity in the early chapters, he foresaw the bloody conflict between Nagamatsu and Yasuda because of the long-existed deep distrust in them. But as he witnessed Nagamatsu dismembering Yasuda, he realized that human beings had no limit of becoming more vicious and cannibal. He was desperate at recognizing the reality, and he wanted to detach from the human species, as he said, “If I at this moment could vomit forth anger, then I, who was no longer human, must be an angel of God, an instrument of God’s wrath.” Tamura’s feeling of disgust at Nagamatsu’s cannibalism distinguished him from human beings who bared the ugliness of human nature. So he turned his exasperation into shooting at Nagamatsu as a punishment representing

God.
Nagamatsu would probably die in war, though Ooka did not confirm it at the end. But death no longer concerned Tamura. He was only concerned about the fact that he did not eat Nagamatsu afterwards, which separated him from human beings who felt no guilt in eating each other. At the end, the large X carved on the Imperial crest indicated his disconnection from a human society became his final step toward transfiguration. After witnessing his own cannibalism and realizing the same pernicious and savage human nature residing among other people, Tamura’s determination of isolating himself from a broken society and the human species became his ultimate transfiguration.