tiger

The tiger in the novel is not merely a symbol of danger: it is a captive animal whose fate is decided by wartime scarcity and military orders. During the impending collapse of Manchukuo, Japanese soldiers kill two tigers at the zoo in Hsin-ching as part of an effort to prevent dangerous animals from escaping into a city facing possible fighting. The episode makes the animals’ lives a consequence of the military’s failing capacity to protect either the city or its inhabitants.

The decision to kill the zoo animals

The zoo director gives a lieutenant a list of animals designated for “emergency liquidation,” along with a map of the grounds. A veterinarian and two Chinese workers are assigned to accompany the firing squad. The order arises from a shortage of food for the animals and the prospect that starving, dangerous creatures might escape during fighting or air strikes. The lieutenant would prefer not to kill them, but considers a swift death potentially preferable to prolonged starvation and regards an escape into the city as a serious risk.

The list includes two Indian elephants as well as the tigers. The lieutenant leaves the elephants until last, while the tigers become the squad’s first targets. A plaque identifies the pair as having been captured in the Greater Khingan Mountains of Manchuria. Their earlier capture and confinement stand in sharp contrast to the immediate decision over whether they will live: the animals are treated as entries on a list, while the soldiers must face the reality of killing them.

The shooting of the tigers

The lieutenant assigns four soldiers to each tiger and tells them to aim for the heart, although he is uncertain where it is. As the men load their Model 38 rifles, the tigers rise at the sound and roar from behind the bars. The lieutenant draws his pistol as an added precaution, and the squad fires together at his command. The volley fails to kill the animals, so the soldiers reload and shoot again.

Afterward, the lieutenant sends a young soldier into the cage to check that both tigers are dead. The veterinarian unlocks it, and the soldier approaches with his bayonet held out before him. He tests one tiger by kicking its hindquarters, then repeats the gesture before accepting that it is dead; the female lies equally still. The soldier has never seen a real tiger before, and the encounter leaves him feeling that he has been made to perform an act detached from his own life. The dead animals seem larger to him than they did alive, an impression that marks the distance between the abstract order and the animal bodies the soldiers have just killed.

The wider cull and its limits

The killing extended beyond the tigers: the soldiers also shot the leopards and wolves, then spent the most time confronting two bears. The bears continued resisting the gunfire, and the men grew exhausted before they could kill them. Once the shooting stopped, some soldiers spat on the ground, while the young soldier who had entered the tiger cage struggled to contain his nausea. The sequence shows the cull as a sustained military operation, but also as an ordeal that the men could not make emotionally or physically routine.

The elephants were spared. When the soldiers stood before them, their rifles seemed inadequate against the animals’ size, and the lieutenant decided to leave them alive. The men responded with relief. Their shared thought was that killing people on a battlefield could feel easier than killing animals confined in cages, even when human combatants faced the possibility of being killed themselves. This contrast unsettles the military distinction between a necessary order and a manageable act: the elephants’ survival follows not from a change in the emergency, but from the squad’s recognition of its limits.

The novel’s account makes the tiger’s captivity part of the event’s moral and historical weight. The pair had been taken from the Greater Khingan Mountains and kept behind the bars of a zoo; now, under wartime emergency, their lives were again determined by human institutions, first through capture and confinement, then through an order to kill. The lieutenant’s uncertainty about where to aim, and the young soldier’s disbelief that a real tiger had been killed, expose the distance between a military list and the particular animals it reduces to entries. Their deaths are not presented as an abstract symbol of danger: they are the consequence of a collapsing state’s inability to feed or safely contain the creatures in its care.

Narrative significance

The tiger’s fate is also part of a wider history in which institutions decide which lives can be protected and which are treated as expendable. The zoo cull takes place as the Kwantung Army loses equipment and supplies and the collapse of Manchukuo becomes imminent. The tigers are therefore neither detached emblems nor incidental scenery: their captivity and deaths expose the consequences of military failure for animals held under human control. The episode’s attention to the soldiers’ hesitation and the elephants’ reprieve complicates any simple claim that necessity makes killing routine. It leaves the tiger’s death grounded in the particular circumstances of wartime scarcity, while showing how a command turns living creatures into items on an emergency list.