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

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