Book of Souls

The Book of Souls is a memorial register at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the act of enshrinement carries a promise of absolution. In the novel, its authority to name the dead is set against the namelessness of the hundreds of thousands who died building the Death Railway. The contrast makes the book more than a record of loss: it exposes how public remembrance can preserve some lives while leaving others without even an agreed count.

Memorial and register

The Book of Souls lists more than two million people who died in service to the Emperor of Japan in wars between 1867 and 1951. It stands within Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, described as Japan’s unofficial national war memorial. Among its names are 1,068 men convicted of war crimes after the Second World War and executed; some had worked on the Death Railway and were found guilty of mistreating POWs. Enshrinement at the shrine is presented as bringing absolution from evil, placing the memorial’s spiritual authority beside the record of crimes committed in service to the state.

The shrine’s museum also displays locomotive C 5631, the first train to travel the full length of the completed Death Railway. On 25 October 1943, it carried Japanese and Thai dignitaries past beds of human bones, including the remains of one in three of the Australian POWs sent to work on the railway. The locomotive and the Book of Souls thus occupy the same memorial landscape, but the plaque before the engine says nothing of the railway’s horror or the dead who built it.

The names the railway has no record of

The absence is not simply a matter of an incomplete plaque. The Allied POWs were only about 60,000 of the people enslaved on the project. Beside them laboured a quarter of a million Tamils, Chinese, Javanese, Malayans, Thais and Burmese, or more. Estimates of deaths among these forced labourers range from 50,000 to 200,000; no agreed total exists. Unlike those commemorated in the Book of Souls, the workers who died building the railway have no shared register of names. The narrative insists that their names are already forgotten and that no book has been made for their lost souls.

That imbalance gives the Book of Souls a double significance. It preserves a vast list, but its memorial order does not encompass every death produced by imperial violence. The railway’s dead remain outside the record, while the locomotive that passed their remains is displayed as an object of national pride. The juxtaposition makes commemoration itself a question of selection: which dead become legible, and whose suffering is left without a public name?

Memory, omission, and the fragment

The book’s presence sharpens the difficulty of Dorrigo Evans’s own attempt to write about the POW camps. He had set aside three uninterrupted hours to finish a long-overdue foreword to a book of Guy Hendricks’s camp illustrations, but the completed introduction felt to him both too obvious and too personal. He had sketched an account of Guy’s death, including the story of Darky Gardiner, yet could not write one name. His failure to make a complete explanation of the railway echoes the larger absence surrounding its dead: a record can be attempted, but it cannot make the forgotten fully recoverable.

The novel places such difficulty beside opposing impulses to remember and to survive. After Rabbit Hendricks dies of cholera, Dorrigo Evans waves away Rabbit’s sketchbook when it is brought to him for preservation or destruction. He tells Bonox Baker, “Everything’s forgotten in the end, Bonox. Better we live now.” Bonox answers with the memorial phrase “Lest we forget.” Against the Book of Souls’ monumental register, these brief exchanges suggest that memory is also carried uncertainly—in objects, fragments, and the words survivors repeat. The narrative’s offering for those without a register is not a claim to restore every name, but a fragment that refuses to let their absence pass entirely unmarked.