Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo

Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo is both a place of commemoration and a focal point for the novel’s critique of what public memory preserves. Its museum displays the locomotive that completed the Death Railway, while the shrine’s Book of Souls enshrines Japan’s war dead. Set against the railway’s suffering and the absence of its victims’ names, these memorial objects expose a profound imbalance between honoring imperial service and remembering those who died under forced labor.

Memorial site and railway display

The shrine is described as the museum site of Japan’s unofficial national war memorial. There, steam locomotive C 5631 is proudly displayed. On 25 October 1943, the locomotive had travelled the full length of the completed Death Railway, towing three carriages carrying Japanese and Thai dignitaries. Its passage came after the railway’s construction had consumed immense numbers of lives: the narrative places the remains of one in three of the Australian prisoners sent to work on the line among the human bones the train passed.

The railway began as a military response to Japan’s strained wartime position. The Japanese High Command wanted a land route to supply its forces in Burma, but Japan lacked the money, machinery, and time to build one by ordinary means. The project instead relied on coerced labor. At the site where the line was planned, Imperial Japanese Army engineers marked its route with surveyors’ pegs; the projected railway ran 415 kilometres from north of Bangkok through to Burma. Those technical plans became a system of forced work whose human consequences are absent from the display plaque at the shrine.

The Book of Souls and the meaning of enshrinement

The shrine also contains the Book of Souls, which lists more than two million people who died in service to the Emperor of Japan in wars between 1867 and 1951. The novel describes enshrinement there as carrying absolution for acts of evil. Among the listed dead are 1,068 men convicted of war crimes after the war and executed; some had worked on the Death Railway and were found guilty of mistreating prisoners of war.

That juxtaposition makes the shrine more than a repository of names. The locomotive and the Book of Souls place the railway within a commemorative account centered on service to the Emperor, even as the project’s victims and the crimes committed against them remain largely outside that account. The memorial’s sacred authority sits uneasily beside the evidence of suffering and the unequal outcomes of postwar accountability.

What the memorial leaves out

The plaque in front of C 5631 does not mention the horror of building the Death Railway. Nor does it name the hundreds of thousands who died in its construction. Even the total is unresolved: Allied prisoners of war were only a fraction of the workforce, alongside a quarter of a million or more Tamil, Chinese, Javanese, Malayan, Thai, and Burmese laborers. Estimates of deaths among these forced laborers range from 50,000 to 200,000, and the narrative stresses that no one knows the true number.

The absence is not merely a gap in a plaque. The novel presents the laborers’ names as already forgotten and notes that no book exists for their lost souls. Against the more than two million names preserved at the shrine, this missing record gives the railway’s commemoration its central moral tension: the imperial dead are gathered into a sacred roll, while those whose bodies made the railway possible remain uncounted and unnamed. The shrine thus stands as a powerful image of memory organized by allegiance, and of historical loss that no monument can fully repair.