Bears

The bears are the zoo animals killed by Japanese soldiers in Hsin-ching in August 1945, during the final crisis of Manchukuo. Their protracted deaths make the zoo’s execution order more than a logistical act: the scene shows human institutions deciding which animals may live, while the soldiers’ response reveals their discomfort with violence carried out against caged creatures.

Identity and Circumstances

The bears belong to a group of dangerous zoo animals that the soldiers are ordered to kill as Soviet forces approach Hsin-ching. The operation also targets tigers, leopards, and wolves. The veterinarian later recalls the bears among the animals “liquidated” the previous afternoon, and their absence changes the work of caring for the remaining zoo population. The elephants, by contrast, survive because the lieutenant in charge decides not to include them in the order.

This is a wartime decision made under conditions of impending defeat. The Kwantung Army has been depleted by the war in China, and the Soviet advance is described as impossible to stop. The zoo animals are treated as possible threats in a city preparing for battle, though their confinement makes the encounter sharply unlike a battlefield. Their fate is determined not by any action of their own but by military judgment and the availability of weapons.

The Execution

The soldiers shoot the animals inside the zoo. The bears are particularly difficult to kill: even after taking many rifle rounds, the two enormous animals continue crashing against the bars and roaring. The soldiers have to keep firing until they finally extinguish signs of life. The lieutenant resets his pistol’s safety catch and wipes away sweat; the men are so tired that they are nearly ready to collapse.

The scene distinguishes the bears’ response from that of the cats, who seem more willing to accept their fate, though the narration leaves open whether this apparent acceptance is real. The bears’ continued resistance makes the violence last longer and gives the soldiers no easy sense of command over the encounter. Their bodies and behavior remain consequential in the scene: the animals resist, while the people with weapons control the conditions in which that resistance ends.

Aftermath and the Elephants

In the silence after the shooting, several soldiers spit loudly, apparently trying to disguise their shame. Spent shells lie around them, and the soldiers’ ears still ring from their rifles. One young soldier turns his gaze from the bears’ bodies and struggles with nausea. The outcome is not presented as a clean or triumphant military task; the men have carried out orders, but the act has left visible signs of distress.

The soldiers do not kill the elephants. Once they face the animals, the lieutenant judges them too large for the rifles to be effective and leaves them alone. The men are relieved. The narrator draws a pointed contrast between the execution and battlefield killing: the soldiers think it is easier to kill humans in battle, despite the risk of being killed themselves, than to kill animals in cages. The elephants’ survival is therefore both a practical exception and a measure of the unease surrounding the larger slaughter.

After the operation, Chinese workers drag the dead animals from their cages, load them onto carts, and take them to an empty warehouse. The lieutenant has the zoo director sign the necessary documents before the soldiers leave in formation. Workers wash blood from the cage floors and scrub away pieces of animal flesh. With summer at its height, the bodies will decompose quickly, but the veterinarian has no practical means to bury so many large animals: heavy equipment and sufficient labor are unavailable as the city braces for battle.

Recurrence and Significance

The veterinarian encounters the loss again the next morning. The tigers, leopards, wolves, and bears are gone, and the memory seems at first like a nightmare, but the ache in his ears confirms the reality of the previous day. Hearing the elephants trumpet brings relief because they have survived. For the veterinarian, their continued presence is a small, concrete remainder of ordinary care amid the disintegration of the city.

The bears’ deaths also recur as part of the novel’s larger account of fate and human powerlessness. The veterinarian reflects that fate, rather than any army or political force, seems to rule Hsin-ching in August 1945: it has spared the elephants and buried the other animals, while leaving the future uncertain. The contrast does not make the bears’ deaths inevitable in any simple sense—their execution is carried out by soldiers under orders—but it places a specific act of human violence within a city whose military and political order is collapsing.

The empty cages have a further practical consequence. Without bears and other large carnivores to care for, the veterinarian’s work becomes easier and less dangerous, even as passing their vacant enclosures pains him. The animals are thus neither only symbols nor merely scenery: their removal alters the surviving animals’ care, the veterinarian’s daily labor, and the moral atmosphere of the zoo. The scene’s force lies in holding those consequences together—the institutional power to kill, the animals’ resistance, and the soldiers’ recognition that a caged animal’s death is not emotionally equivalent to a battlefield casualty.