New Guinea is presented through Colonel Kota’s recollections as a place of extreme military hardship and moral collapse. His account links the campaign’s bombardments and hunger to the Japanese belief in endurance, then turns to the cannibalism committed under starvation; the memory remains with him after the war and complicates the authority of his later testimony.

Geographic and Narrative Setting

Two months before speaking with Major Nakamura, Colonel Kota had been serving in New Guinea, specifically Bougainville. He invokes the campaign to explain the conditions under which Japanese troops fought, contrasting New Guinea with the familiar saying that Java was heaven and Burma hell: in the saying, no one returned from New Guinea. Kota presents himself as proof that the saying was not invariably true, but survival has not meant escape from what happened there.

New Guinea enters the novel through retrospective speech rather than a scene of combat. Kota’s recollection interrupts a conversation about the railway and gives Major Nakamura a personal account of the conditions behind the Japanese demand for endurance. The place is thus both a distant battlefield and a memory that becomes newly intimate when Kota struggles to tell what starvation made possible.

The Campaign and the Demand for Endurance

Kota describes American air power as overwhelming. His unit was bombed and strafed day and night by Lockheeds; troops given a week’s rations were expected to fight for a month. In his account, even salt and matches in the combat area would have been enough to cope with anything. The contrast is stark: material deprivation is acknowledged, but presented as something Japanese soldiers should overcome through spirit.

Kota also speaks of a war of annihilation against Americans and Australians, insisting that Japanese military spirit would endure after the enemy’s machines and technology had failed to sustain them. Major Nakamura hears more than a report about a campaign. Kota’s manner and words embody the conviction that hardship must be endured, the railway must be built, and victory will follow from the Japanese spirit. Yet Nakamura cannot define precisely what that spirit means. It feels to him like a force more real than the bamboo, teak, rain, mud, rocks, sleepers, and rails of the railway, while remaining beyond words.

Starvation and the Memory of Cannibalism

Kota’s account shifts from military confidence to an admission he cannot complete. In the darkness of a hut, he begins to speak of men loving one another, then falters. He remembers that in New Guinea, under starvation, Japanese soldiers butchered and ate both American prisoners and their own men. He recalls corpses with skinned thigh bones exposed, and remembers the colors and the taste of the flesh.

Kota wants another person to know that the men were starving and had no choice, and to tell him that what happened was all right. The request is not simply a description of hunger: it is an appeal for recognition and absolution. Major Nakamura answers that it cannot be helped. Kota accepts the response, but the exchange leaves the horror intact; neither the appeal nor the familiar formula can undo what he remembers.

Postwar Testimony and Uneven Accountability

The novel later shows that Colonel Kota’s wartime testimony had consequences in Australian military court proceedings. His interrogation evidence was cited against Choi Sang-min and had helped convict several Korean and Formosan guards. Choi tried to argue that, as a Korean sergeant, he could not have ordered a prisoner’s death, and pointed out that the alleged order concerning Private Wat Cooney could not have been given while Cooney was no longer in the camp. Confused and incomplete camp records did not establish that point.

Choi also heard that Colonel Kota had later been released without charge. In his view, Kota and Major Nakamura were likely free and possibly working for the Americans, while lower-ranking Koreans and Formosans were left to face execution. The novel does not make New Guinea the setting of those proceedings; rather, Kota’s recollections of the campaign and the later use of his testimony place private memory alongside the public, unequal accounting of wartime responsibility. The location’s significance lies in that unresolved connection: a survivor’s traumatic recollection can bear witness to extreme conditions, yet the postwar record does not distribute blame or justice evenly.