Tigers

The Tigers are the zoo animals killed by Japanese soldiers in Hsin-ching in August 1945, shortly before Soviet forces reached the city. Their deaths occur amid the collapse of Manchukuo and the Kwantung Army’s retreat, but the episode does not reduce them to wartime background: the animals’ fate is decided by military orders, constrained by the soldiers’ weapons, and later recalled by the veterinarian as a loss that alters the emptied zoo. The contrast between the Tigers’ killing and the elephants’ survival gives the episode its ethical and narrative force.

Setting and Circumstances

The killings take place during the final days of Japanese rule in Manchukuo. The Kwantung Army has been depleted by the war in China, and Soviet forces are advancing toward Hsin-ching. The city’s political order is breaking down: Japanese authorities prepare to withdraw, the Manchukuo Army’s Chinese soldiers desert or rebel, and Japanese civilians near the border face abandonment. Within this wider collapse, soldiers receive the task of killing zoo animals that could pose a danger to people if the front reached the city.

The crisis is also a consequence of military weakness. The Kwantung Army lacks the equipment and ammunition to resist the Soviet advance effectively; the narrative describes it as reduced to a paper tiger. The soldiers sent to the zoo expect soon to fight and die, and the order to kill the animals is one action in a sequence of commands issued while the army’s defeat appears unavoidable. The Tigers’ fate is therefore determined not by an immediate threat from them, but by a military institution trying to manage risk in a city about to be overrun.

The Killing and the Elephants’ Survival

In Nutmeg’s vision, Japanese soldiers move through the zoo and shoot the animals that might attack human beings. The episode places the killing beneath a summer sky and sets it against the soldiers’ silence, emphasizing the dissonance between the ordinary setting of the zoo and the military procedure imposed upon it. The veterinarian later remembers that the Tigers, along with the leopards, wolves, and bears, had been eliminated the previous afternoon.

The soldiers do not kill the elephants. When they confront them, the animals’ size makes the soldiers’ rifles seem inadequate, and the lieutenant decides to leave them alone. The men are relieved. Their response makes the decision more than a calculation about weapons: the veterinarian understands it as evidence that the lieutenant retains a degree of ordinary human sensitivity. The spared elephants become the surviving presence against which the absence of the Tigers is felt the next morning.

The difference between the two outcomes also reveals the unevenness of human power over animals. The Tigers are killed because the order and the soldiers’ capacity to carry it out converge; the elephants survive when the lieutenant chooses not to proceed. The account does not suggest that the animals’ lives are protected by a consistent principle. Their prospects depend on decisions made by people within a military system, and on the practical limits of that system.

The Zoo Afterward

The next morning, the veterinarian wakes to a zoo from which the voices and smells of the killed animals have disappeared. The rifle noise still troubles his hearing, making the previous day difficult to dismiss as a dream. The elephants’ trumpeting brings relief, but it also makes the empty cages a visible record of what has been lost. The veterinarian’s daily work continues: he feeds the animals that remain, assisted by two Chinese boys sent by former workers who have stopped coming themselves.

The absence of the large carnivores makes the work easier and less dangerous, a fact the veterinarian acknowledges even as he feels their loss. That tension prevents the episode from resolving into simple mourning. The animals had been living beings and occupants of the zoo, but they had also required labor and presented danger; their disappearance changes both the emotional landscape and the practical conditions of the veterinarian’s work. The zoo’s remaining animals, and especially the surviving elephants, continue to demand care in a city where political and social arrangements are coming apart.

The Chinese workers later take responsibility for removing the animal corpses. They offer to haul them out of the city in exchange for the hides and meat, which they can use or sell. The veterinarian accepts because he has little practical alternative. Their bargain places the Tigers’ remains within another economy of survival: what the military has killed becomes food, material, and medicine for people living through the collapse of the city. The workers’ criticism that the soldiers have made a clumsy job of killing the animals further emphasizes that the Tigers’ deaths are not an abstract symbol but a material event with consequences for the people who must deal with the bodies.

Narrative and Ethical Significance

The Tigers belong to a sequence in which human institutions determine animal life according to changing claims of danger, utility, and necessity. At the zoo, they are treated as potential threats and killed under military orders. Afterward, the veterinarian’s memory of their lost presence sits beside his relief that caring for the remaining animals is easier. The passage holds these responses together rather than allowing one to cancel the other: practical relief coexists with awareness of an irreversible loss.

Their deaths also sharpen the novel’s account of the war’s collapse. The soldiers are preparing for an advance they cannot stop, and the animals are killed as if the army can still impose order on the space it is about to lose. Yet the decision to spare the elephants shows that orders do not wholly erase individual judgment. In this contrast, the Tigers’ fate marks both the reach and the limits of military power: the army can destroy lives within the zoo, but it cannot restore the political world that is disintegrating around it.