Japanese · 1909–1988
Ōoka studied French literature at Kyoto, translated Stendhal, and worked for a film company until he was drafted in 1944 at thirty-five and sent to Mindoro in the Philippines with almost no training. His unit was destroyed. He spent weeks alone in the jungle, was captured by the Americans in January 1945 while unconscious with malaria, and came home from a prison camp on Leyte to write about it. Taken Captive, his first book, examines why he did not shoot an American soldier he had in his sights. Fires on the Plain, three years later, invented a soldier who does worse things than he did. He also wrote a vast documentary history of the Leyte campaign and a novel about a love affair on the Musashino plain, but the war books are why he matters: he is the writer who refused to let Japan describe its defeat as a tragedy that happened to it.