Victimhood and self-exoneration

Victimhood and self-exoneration name a central tension in the novel’s treatment of war: people and nations can suffer genuine injury while also using that suffering to avoid confronting the harm they inflicted. The distinction is clearest in Tenji Nakamura, whose conviction that he is an honourable victim survives evidence of atrocity, and in the postwar record, where selective punishment and public forgetting leave both perpetrators and victims unevenly visible.

A story that protects the self

Tenji Nakamura’s conversation with Sato exposes how thoroughly a story of duty and victimhood has shaped his moral understanding. As Sato recounts the vivisection of American airmen by Fukujori Ishiyama and other operations performed without anaesthetic, Nakamura recognizes that the Americans’ accusations are true. Yet the acts still seem to him explicable within the familiar logic of war. The account does not immediately break his defenses: its sequence of justified decisions feels so recognizable that the suffering it describes cannot move him to a new judgment.

Sato’s story extends beyond Ishiyama’s operating room. He describes the later fate of the men involved: Ishiyama hanged himself in prison, while others sentenced to death had their sentences commuted and were eventually freed. Sato says the Americans want the past forgotten, and the Japanese do too. He then points to Ryoichi Naito, whose respectable public standing as founder of the Japan Blood Bank contrasts with his alleged leadership in wartime experiments, including biological weapons testing on prisoners in Manchukuo. Sato presents the postwar accommodation as a political choice: American interest in Japanese biological-warfare knowledge and the prospect of new business help explain why the past is not pursued.

Nakamura answers by including himself and his country among the war’s victims. His claim is not simply a denial that Japanese people suffered. He feels that he, Ikuko, his executed comrades, and Japan itself have been falsely accused, and this belief gives coherence and even grandeur to a life marked by secrecy and evasion. The novel makes the contradiction explicit: victimhood can describe real exposure to war while also serving as a shelter from responsibility for actions committed under its cover.

Selective justice and unequal remembrance

The postwar trial of Choi Sang-min gives this tension a legal and institutional form. At his two-day Australian military trial, much of the English-language proceedings was unintelligible to him. The court dismissed the charge that he had participated in the murder of Frank “Darky” Gardiner because the written testimony was contradictory, but upheld the charge that he had ordered the murder of Wat Cooney, as well as lesser charges concerning mistreatment and the withholding of food and medical supplies. He was convicted as a Class B war criminal and sentenced to hanging.

Choi disputed the accusation concerning Cooney: he said Cooney was no longer in the camp when the alleged order was given. But confused, incomplete camp records could not establish that point. The case therefore presents both the necessity of judging wartime conduct and the limits of the evidence available to a court. Choi also understood his sentence through a broader pattern of unequal accountability. He had heard that Colonel Kota’s testimony helped convict Korean and Formosan guards, while Kota himself was released without charge; he suspected that officers with links to the Japanese nobility escaped punishment while men of lower rank became scapegoats. His perception does not settle the truth of every charge against him, but it shows how selective justice can intensify a condemned person’s sense of having been used and abandoned.

The difference between accountability and self-exculpation remains essential. A flawed or unequal process can be criticized without erasing evidence of a defendant’s own actions. Choi was acquitted of one charge, convicted of others, and sentenced to death; his account of unfairness coexists with the court’s findings concerning mistreatment and deprivation. The novel keeps those claims in tension rather than treating victimhood as either wholly false or sufficient to absolve.

National memory and the missing dead

The novel enlarges the problem from individual testimony to public commemoration. At Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, steam locomotive C 5631 is displayed alongside the Book of Souls, which lists more than two million people who died in service to the Emperor of Japan between 1867 and 1951. Enshrinement carries an idea of absolution, and the names include 1,068 men convicted of war crimes after the Second World War and executed, among them men found guilty of mistreating prisoners on the Death Railway.

Yet the plaque before C 5631 does not mention the railway’s construction or its dead. The locomotive’s commemoration frames imperial service as worthy of honor while leaving the violence of the project outside the frame. The figures themselves resist a definitive accounting: about 60,000 Allied prisoners worked on the railway alongside a quarter of a million or more Asian laborers, while estimates of deaths among those laborers range from 50,000 to 200,000. No agreed total exists. Their names have already been forgotten, and there is no corresponding book to record their lost lives.

This contrast makes remembrance part of the moral argument. The memorial does not merely preserve some names; its ceremonies and silences help shape which deaths receive recognition and which are left without a public record. A national claim to victimhood or honorable sacrifice becomes self-exonerating when it honors its own dead while excluding the people who suffered and died under its power.

The cost of becoming a good man

After his distance from Sato grows, Nakamura draws closer to other people and becomes more truthful. When the remaining imprisoned war criminals are released, he abandons his false identity, returns to his real name, and marries Ikuko the following year. Their two daughters love their gentle father; when the younger, Fuyuko, is nearly killed by a school bus, he stays beside her day and night. His later tenderness is real, but it does not settle the question of what kind of transformation it represents.

Nakamura alone senses the strangeness at the heart of his new identity as a good man. He has overseen many deaths and may have been directly involved in some, yet he feels no responsibility. Time erodes his memory of his crimes and allows stories of goodness and extenuating circumstances to take their place. What haunts him is not the crimes themselves so much as how little he is haunted by them. The novel therefore refuses an easy equation between later kindness and moral repair: changed conduct matters, but it does not by itself restore what has been forgotten or establish that accountability has occurred.

Victimhood and self-exoneration are joined not because suffering is unreal, but because the reality of suffering can be made to answer a different question from the one responsibility demands. The novel traces that displacement through Nakamura’s inward convictions, Choi’s unequal trial, and the memorial landscape around C 5631. Against these protected stories, it sets the people whose names and deaths did not enter the official book.