The Battle of Nomonhan appears in the novel both as a military disaster and as a story that returns through the memories of its survivors. Mr. Honda, a former soldier who lost his hearing in the fighting, recounts a battle shaped by isolation, inadequate supplies, and overwhelming Soviet mechanized power. His account turns a neglected historical defeat into a lasting lesson about waiting, water, and the human cost of decisions made far from the front.

The Battle in Mr. Honda’s Recollections

For roughly a year after their marriage, Toru Okada and Kumiko Okada visited Mr. Honda monthly. Their visits were arranged by the Wataya family, but neither spouse went because of a strong belief in his spiritual powers. Mr. Honda was hard of hearing even with a hearing aid, and his war-damaged hearing became part of the strange arrangement through which he spoke as a practitioner of divination. Rather than offer frequent predictions, he repeatedly returned to Nomonhan, telling his visitors about the battle and his wartime experiences.

Mr. Honda described being with Japan’s Manchurian garrison, the Kwantung Army, when an explosion in the fighting damaged his eardrums. The novel connects this injury to the battle’s physical and historical aftermath: after he lost his hearing, he was sent home with an honorable discharge and became a diviner. He later regarded his impairment as having possibly spared him from being sent to the South Pacific, where many Nomonhan survivors were dispatched and killed.

The battle also enters the story through Lieutenant Mamiya’s account of the 1938 border mission involving Yamamoto. Mamiya was assigned to command a small escort and conduct topographical work near the Khalkha River, where the army’s maps were incomplete. The border had been kept deliberately vague because the Kwantung Army wanted to avoid provoking the Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia while Japan was committed to its war in China. Yet the same uncertainty made accurate military maps essential if a conflict began. Mamiya’s recollection identifies Nomonhan as the following year’s realization of that danger: a border left obscure for political convenience became a setting where combat maps and logistical knowledge mattered.

Water, Firepower, and Defeat

In Mr. Honda’s telling, the immediate ordeal was a scarcity of basic supplies. He recalled that the front had become disorganized and supply lines were cut: his men lacked water, rations, bandages, and bullets. For three days he had almost nothing to drink. Dew collected on a washing cloth offered only a few drops, while a large river flowed within sight of the Japanese position but remained inaccessible.

The river was blocked by Soviet defenses: tanks equipped with flamethrowers, machine-gun positions, and sharpshooters on high ground. At night, flares exposed movement. The Japanese soldiers had Model 38 infantry rifles and twenty-five bullets each, a stark contrast with the force confronting them. Desperate for water, many of Mr. Honda’s companions tried to reach the river; none returned. In his account, the visible abundance of water intensifies the deprivation: survival depends not on whether a resource exists, but on whether people can reach it through the military conditions surrounding them.

Mr. Honda reduced that experience to a lesson in restraint. When circumstances required a person to remain still, he said, the person should stay still; when the flow had not begun, waiting could be unavoidable. He linked the advice to Nomonhan and to the idea of being, for the time being, as if dead. The lesson is not a denial of the battle’s suffering but a rule formed from the consequences of action under conditions where movement could be fatal.

A Defeat Remembered and Repeated

Mr. Honda’s stories included the death of a lieutenant beside him, his own attack on a Soviet tank with a Molotov cocktail, and the shooting of a downed Soviet pilot. Because he repeated these accounts, Toru and Kumiko sometimes heard them seven or eight times. He did not recount them quietly: his damaged hearing made him shout, and the couple could hear little for a while after leaving his home. The repetition gives the battle a double place in the novel—as a historical event and as a survivor’s testimony that returns, loses some of its novelty, but remains difficult to forget.

Toru reflects that he had known little about Nomonhan before hearing Mr. Honda’s account. The Japanese forces had fought Soviet mechanized troops on the Manchurian-Mongolian border and were crushed. Units were destroyed one after another. Some officers attempted to retreat to prevent further losses, but their superiors ordered them to commit suicide. Many captured Japanese soldiers refused to join the postwar prisoner exchange because they feared prosecution for desertion; they remained in Mongolia and died there. The defeat’s consequences therefore extended beyond the battlefield, into the treatment of survivors and the fates of those who could not safely return.

Mr. Honda’s interpretation places the defeat within a wider institutional injustice. Nomonhan embarrassed the Imperial Japanese Army, he says, yet the officers responsible for the failure later advanced in central command, and some entered politics after the war. The soldiers who had fought for them were, in contrast, mostly killed or sent into further danger. Mr. Honda’s account makes the contrast between bravery and institutional reward central: courage among the troops did not prevent defeat, and sacrifice did not ensure that those who ordered or endured it would be treated equally.

Logistics and the Larger War

Lieutenant Mamiya’s recollections widen the context beyond the battle itself. The Kwantung Army’s border surveys were constrained by an immense, sparsely marked region, the absence of clear political boundaries, and the risk of an international incident. Yet a modern army required maps that could guide camps, artillery, marches, water supplies, and provisions for horses. The mission’s topographical work was therefore not merely administrative: it addressed practical needs that would become urgent if the border dispute turned into war.

The novel also sets Nomonhan against the deceptive calm of Hsin-ching in the late 1930s. Japan’s war in China was expanding, casualties were rising, and relations with the United States were worsening, while officers in the capital could still live as though peace continued. The contrast helps explain why the battle’s logistical failures matter: the apparent distance between comfortable routines and the frontier concealed an increasingly unstable military situation.

A later account of Japanese planning reinforces the point. As early as 1920, the Imperial Army studied the possibility of war with the Soviet Union and recognized that its equipment was inadequate for a Siberian winter. Tests of clothing on Sakhalin suggested that frostbite could incapacitate a large proportion of frontline infantry, and planners calculated the resources needed to equip ten divisions. This preparation concerned a possible winter campaign rather than the specific shortages Mr. Honda describes at Nomonhan, but together the episodes depict a military organization aware of severe logistical vulnerabilities without being able to overcome them.

The same concern with material supply recurs in the later story of the Siberian coal mine where Lieutenant Mamiya is held as a prisoner of war. The mine’s leadership treats laborers as replaceable inputs, diverting food, clothing, and medicine while pursuing production figures. Boris’s business operation includes appropriating a substantial share of supplies sent to the camp and selling them for profit; the resulting shortages fall on powerless prisoners. These episodes are not part of the battle, but they echo its governing disparity between resources, command, and the people exposed to danger. Nomonhan’s lesson about water and waiting thus sits within a wider narrative in which logistics are never neutral: decisions about supply determine who can endure and who is abandoned.

Narrative Significance

The battle is not presented as a single continuous battlefield scene. Its meaning accumulates through distinct acts of recollection: Mr. Honda’s repeated stories to Toru and Kumiko, Lieutenant Mamiya’s account of border mapping, and later reflections on military planning and wartime institutions. This structure makes the event’s consequences more prominent than a simple chronology. The reader encounters Nomonhan as an episode that continues to shape how survivors understand waiting, risk, and the fate of those sent into impossible conditions.

Water is the most concentrated link between the historical memory and the novel’s wider language of warning. Mr. Honda’s men can see a river but cannot reach it; his conclusion is a caution about acting before circumstances permit movement. His separate warning to Toru about water gives that wartime lesson an unsettling resonance in the novel’s present, without reducing the battle to a supernatural prediction. The river remains at once a concrete military obstacle and the source of a rule learned through loss.

The account also resists a triumphal version of military history. Mr. Honda remembers the soldiers’ resistance, but does not let courage erase their defeat or the unequal aftermath. Mamiya’s memories add the administrative pressures and uncertain borders that surrounded the conflict, while the later episodes of abandonment and exploitation show the persistence of systems that place ordinary people at risk. Nomonhan therefore functions as remembered history, a caution about action and supply, and an early instance of the novel’s scrutiny of how institutions distribute danger and responsibility.