What choices can an ordinary individual make amidst the massive vortex of war?
Here is a young man who tried to ruin his physical examination by drinking an entire bottle of soy sauce to avoid military service.
However, as if by a twist of fate, he was dragged to the battlefield, where he captured the 'real war' he witnessed there in comics and writings.
Through Kunio Saito's memoir,
The author, Kunio Saito, was originally a low-level employee at a film production company.
To him, who loved a peaceful daily life, the conscription notice was like a death sentence.
He even resorted to the extreme measure of 'drinking soy sauce,' which was detrimental to his health, to avoid conscription, but the Japanese military, facing a shortage of troops, did not let him go.
Eventually thrown into the heart of the war of aggression against China, he served as a soldier, coachman, and propagandist, witnessing the reality within the Japanese military.
The Japanese military he documented was not an 'invincible' army.
It was an irrational organization where ignorance, oppression, and internal cruelty swirled.
At the time, rumors circulated within the Japanese military that "the Eighth Route Army (anti-Japanese forces) do not fight directly but only run away."
However, the truth Saito witnessed was different.
A surprise attack on the edge of a cliff: A Japanese squad that had climbed up a rugged cliff and let their guard down, thinking, "Surely they wouldn't come this far?" Just as they were about to eat their packed lunches, the Eighth Route Army appeared silently and annihilated them.
Military police storming the mahjong table: Men in Japanese military police uniforms appeared before the Japanese soldiers who had been enjoying mahjong all night in the trenches.
The Japanese soldiers trembled in fear, thinking it was a surprise search. However, they were disguised members of the Eighth Route Army, and they collapsed without firing a single proper shot.
The records of those who risked their lives fighting despite inferior weaponry feel all the more objective and weighty because they were written from a Japanese perspective.
The book calmly describes the miserable daily life of Japanese soldiers raiding civilian villages to plunder pigs and grain.
The author survived 'luckily' despite narrowly escaping death multiple times and sustaining injuries,
but what awaited him after the war was a Soviet Siberian labor camp.
There was only one reason why he picked up his pen after returning home from such severe hardships. It was to expose the ugly and ridiculous true face hidden behind the flowery rhetoric of war.
