Hailar is both a practical military hub and a threshold into the novel’s histories of border conflict, captivity, and state violence. Its railway connection, army outpost, hospital, and intelligence operations link the remote Khalkha River frontier to the larger machinery of war; in Lieutenant Mamiya’s account, it is also the place where his ordeal returns, briefly, to institutional care.

Borderland and Military Setting

Hailar lies within a frontier whose geography resisted precise military definition. In the late 1930s, the Kwantung Army’s maps of the Hulunbuir Steppe near the Outer Mongolian border were crude, while the immense, sparsely marked terrain made it difficult to locate oneself by landmarks. Political caution further delayed official boundary surveys: both the Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia were sensitive to border violations, and Japan had little capacity for a larger conflict while fighting in China. Yet the possibility of war made detailed combat maps essential, including information about routes, campsites, water, artillery positions, marching times, and supplies for horses. The work of mapping therefore overlapped with intelligence gathering, including activity connected to Hailar.

Route to the Khalkha River

In 1938, a small Japanese detachment travelled from Hsin-ching by train to Hailar, then continued by truck through the area of the Khandur-byo Lamaist temple to a Manchukuo Army border observation post near the Khalkha River. The journey covered roughly two hundred miles across empty wilderness. The narrator’s assignment combined command of the escort with collecting topographical information, while the party accompanied the civilian Yamamoto on a mission whose real purpose was not apparent to him. Hailar thus serves as the staging point between the capital and a border region where the limits of maps, military knowledge, and political control become concrete.

Mamiya’s Rescue and Return

After Yamamoto’s mission ended in catastrophe, Corporal Honda searched for Lieutenant Mamiya, who had been taken away and left in a well. Honda eventually found him, made a rope from strips of his clothing, and pulled him out while he was nearly unconscious. He then found a horse and carried Mamiya across the dunes and river to the Manchukuo Army outpost. There, Mamiya’s wounds were treated before headquarters sent a truck to take him to the hospital in Hailar. The route back to Hailar marks the difference between rescue and recovery: Honda brings Mamiya out of immediate danger, while the hospital offers a temporary return to organized care.

Intelligence, Occupation, and Aftermath

Hailar also belongs to a broader system of military secrecy and coercion. Mamiya later recalls working in intelligence and describes Chinese laborers being killed to conceal the construction plans of a secret base there. That account prevents the town’s logistical and administrative functions from appearing politically neutral: the same infrastructure that supports maps, missions, and military communication is implicated in the violence used to secure secrecy.

The wider Manchukuo story places Hailar within a collapsing imperial order. As the Soviet advance approached Hsin-ching in 1945, the Kwantung Army’s depleted forces abandoned border garrisons and Japanese civilian settlers, while Manchukuo Army soldiers deserted or rebelled. Later, Mamiya was sent to a Siberian coal mine, where prisoners died from harsh conditions, dangerous work, and mistreatment. Hailar is not the site of every episode in that history, but it forms one of its key connections: a military town and hospital on the route from the frontier into captivity, memory, and the unresolved consequences of occupation.