Obedient to the End: Werner Herzog’s ‘The Twilight World’

A Japanese soldier emerges from the Philippine jungle after years of solitary fighting, in "The Twilight World."

In 1997, German author and filmmaker Werner Herzog was in Japan to direct composer Shigeaki Saegusa’s opera “Chushingura.” One evening, while Herzog was having supper with collaborators on this project, Saegusa broke the exciting news that the emperor had offered Herzog a private audience. “My goodness,” Herzog replied without regard to consequences, “I have no idea what I would talk about with the Emperor; it would be nothing but banalities.”

“It was a major faux pas,” Herzog later wrote in his novel “The Twilight World,” “so awful, so catastrophic that I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up. Around the table everyone present froze. No one breathed. All eyes were fixed on their plates, no one looked at me, a protracted silence made the room shudder. It felt to me as though the whole of Japan had stopped breathing. Just then, into the silence, a voice inquired, ‘Well, if not the Emperor, whom would you like to meet?’ I instantly replied: ‘Onoda.’

“‘Onoda? Onoda?’

“‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Hiroo Onoda.’ And a week later, I met him.”

Never Say Die

Over 20 years earlier, Hiroo Onoda had made headlines around the world.

In 1974, Lt. Onoda stepped out of the Philippine jungles, met with his former commanding officer, and became the next to last World War II Japanese soldier to surrender. Instructed in 1944 to wage guerilla warfare on Lubang Island until relieved, and forbidden to end his own life, for almost 30 years the lieutenant had remained obedient to his orders. Even with his few comrades all dead, he had carried on, believing that victorious Japanese forces would one day return in triumph to Lubang.

A young Japanese adventurer, Norio Suzuki, had made a tripartite vow to track down the elusive Onoda, to find a panda in the wild, and to provide proof for the existence of the Himalayan yeti. Suzuki fulfilled the first of these ambitions when he traveled to the Philippines and, after a short hunt, encountered Onoda. Finally convinced that the war was truly over, the nearly 52-year-old soldier stepped from the jungle, met with his former commanding officer, gave up his rifle, and sheathed his sword.

Norio Suzuki (L) with Hiroo Onoda. Public Domain

Onoda received a hero’s welcome in Japan. Reaction from the rest of the world ranged from admiration for his sense of duty and his loyalty to his country to incredulity to mockery. With the help of a ghostwriter, Onoda put the story of his soldiering days into print. “No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War” was  a bestseller in Japan, yet severely criticized by Filipinos for its failure to say more about what they regarded as the murders he’d committed there in his long, solitary war.

Soon after his return to his homeland, and disillusioned by what he saw as a Japanese abandonment of traditional values, Onoda relocated to Brazil. There, he operated a cattle ranch and became a leader in the Japanese community. He married, eventually attempted to make amends to the Lubang islanders, and was the subject of an Arthur Harari film, “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle.” He died in Tokyo in 2014.

This was the man Werner Herzog wished to meet.

On the Run

From their friendship and his ongoing fascination with Onoda came Herzog’s 2022 work of biographical fiction “The Twilight World.” It was the 79-year-old writer’s first novel.

“The Twilight World” yields little new hard information about Onoda. His autobiography and the numerous media articles about him had already given the public many of the details of his time on Lubang and afterward. What Herzog does offer in his novel, however, is a dramatic take on the ordeal of Onoda and his companions, and an imaginative look inside the mind of a man cut off for so long from the reality of the broader world.

The novel begins when Suzuki first encounters Onoda, who has his loaded rifle pointed straight at Suzuki’s chest. Suzuki saves his own life by first identifying himself as Japanese and then saying Onoda’s name. Herzog then shows us how through questions and conversation Suzuki, whom Onoda later described as “this hippie boy Suzuki,” breaks down Onoda’s resistance and almost convinces him that the war is over.

Even then, however, Onoda refuses to walk out of the jungle with Suzuki and surrender unless and until his old commander relieves him of his post. The two men arrange to meet, and Suzuki departs for Japan, where the government helps him locate the elderly Yoshimi Taniguchi, who became a bookseller after the war. Taniguchi returns to Lubang with Suzuki, and the man who had so long ago ordered Onoda to fight behind enemy lines now gives him his final order to stand down.

Japanese straggler Hiroo Onoda (R) surrenders his samurai sword to Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos (L), at the presidential palace in Manila, March 11, 1974. Public Domain

Readers of “The Twilight World” spend most of their time following Onoda and his dwindling band as they remain on the move in the jungle. In one telling scene, we see how relations changed between Onoda and the three men originally under his command. It’s December 1945, more than a year since the men were left on their own, and Onoda is showing the men how to break camp while leaving no trace of their presence. When he finishes, he pauses, then adds an explanation of how he sees their roles in the future. “I am not your commander,” he says. “You have not been allocated to me by High Command. I am your leader.”

His words reveal a subtle shift in power and perception among the men. Their survival no longer depends on a military chain of command, but on teamwork and camaraderie.

Fever Dreams

In his descriptions of the jungle, the weather, and the men themselves, Herzog writes in an impressionistic style, attempting to re-create the dreamlike passage of days, months, and years as experienced by Onoda and his men. Here is one example of such a word-painting:

“Time, time and the jungle. The jungle does not recognize time. They are like two alienated siblings who have nothing to do with each other, who communicate, if at all, only in the form of contempt. Days follow nights, but there are no seasons as such, at the most, months with vast amounts of rain and months with slightly less rain. There is one unvarying constant: everything in the jungle is at pains to strangle everything else in the battle for sunlight.”

Despite all their hardships, the men manage to keep up appearances. “Every year, Onoda produces his family sword from its hiding place and carefully cleans and oils it. Even if he was living in fever dreams, the sword remains his most palpable reference point for something that cannot be invented; an anchor dropped in a distant reality.”

Fact and Fiction

At the beginning of “The Twilight World,” Herzog advises readers that “most details are factually correct; some are not.” Consequently, readers may experience occasional difficulty separating the real from the unreal.

The best example of Herzog’s novelistic inventions has to do with Suzuki’s death. Once Suzuki has hunted down Onoda, he sets out on his second quest and does indeed discover a panda in the wild, a difficult feat given that creature’s shy ways. Suzuki then travels to the Himalayas to look for his yeti, only to die in an avalanche. All these events actually happened.

In “The Twilight World,” Herzog briefly relates this string of events, and then has Onoda immediately fly from Japan to Nepal on learning of Suzuki’s death. With the help of a Sherpa guide, he finds Suzuki’s burial cairn, pays him homage, and departs.

Herzog’s version makes for a romantic story, and certainly Onoda grieved the young man, but all contemporary accounts report that Suzuki’s body wasn’t found for a year and that his remains were then returned to Japan.

Faithful to the End

Keeping in mind, therefore, that “The Twilight World” is a fictional biography, Onoda’s long war nevertheless staggers our sensibilities. His sense of loyalty and duty rivals that of Homer’s long-suffering Penelope, who for two decades awaited the return of her husband, Ulysses. Whatever judgment we may pass on some of Onoda’s actions, his steadfast fealty to his orders and his emperor cannot be questioned.

Using techniques that have marked his films and documentaries, Herzog’s fine novel blends harsh reality with hallucination and dream and brings alive the cost of fidelity: what it meant for these men to survive in a jungle where every day brought privation and the demand for constant vigilance.

In the final pages of “The Twilight World,” after his meeting with Maj. Taniguchi and on their way back to the outside world, Onoda stops to retrieve his sword, which he has stowed away in a tree hollow. “The sun gleams on the sheath,” writes Herzog. “Until the very last moment, Onoda is later to confide, he has hoped that the Major will turn to him and tell him that this has all been a bit of theater; they had merely wanted to test his dependability.”

Onoda need not have worried. He had passed that test long ago.

‘The Twilight World’ By Werner Herzog Penguin Press, June 14, 2022 Hardcover: 144 pages

What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]