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another hut. Oneof Aoki’s hut mates was the young marine named Hirano, who was characteristic of what could be called the “ultras,” the dogmatists or the party of certainty, the unflinching group of which the aviator Tengan was the high priest. That is, they were the ones who at the least pretended that dying at the hands of the enemy was their constant thought and their chief agenda item.
    Other men were more ambiguous and could accept that some secretly wanted to survive. But Hirano was typical of the party of certainty in that he had been much influenced by his captain’s behavior when things had become hopeless at Buna, on the north coast of New Guinea. Trapped in a small pocket near the beach and about to be driven out onto the open sand, they had heard an enemy officer call on them to surrender. He shouted that he would count to ten to allow the captain time. The captain stepped out of the palms and into the waist-high grass, carrying a small flag above his heart and clamped on top of his unit patch and held it there as a target while the officer counted. When the officer was close to ten the captain cried out, “Here!” and drew a pistol. So they shot him through the heart, and the other men rushed to his flanks, without rifles since they were without ammunition, and exposed their own chests. But that day, since they were victorious now, it was the way of the enemy to take prisoners, out of a sort of contempt for how withered and segmented their opponent’s front was. Hirano, kneeling beside his captain’s body, from whose back wound a fistful of flesh and bone and membrane had been ripped by the bullet’s exit, became a prisoner.
    Hirano was excited now by a further intake of prisoners into Gawell Camp. A serious mass of men was being assembled in Compound C, he earnestly told Aoki one day in the mess. As if the new inmates were in fact reinforcements. Compound C was a force now, said Hirano, a full-strength regiment. At a suitable moment, he said, the regiment might be unleashed.
    Aoki had heard similar, overly simplified sentiments from others and he became fed up with their stridency, even if he had reconciledhimself to the idea that he must not survive to take home to his wife and family his crimes and his shame.
    â€œLook,” he told Hirano, “we’re prisoners, but that doesn’t mean we’re nothing when it comes to simple enjoyments. Even a nothing must live till the end—as well as can be managed. Trying to be warm in winter, cool in summer, even feeling joy in a show of color in the sky. We know they’ll probably shoot us when it suits them. So wait for that.”
    It was a common and comforting belief in Compound C. The garrison would shoot them all when Japanese forces landed on the coast. As a corollary to that doctrine, the inhabitants of Compound C would not go quietly but resist with staves and baseball bats and knives. The only blot on the dogma was Aoki’s own experience—the youth who’d shot him in the leg . In the end, could the garrison also take such halfhearted options?
    â€œPlay a bit of baseball and badminton,” he advised Hirano, “and relish what’s left. No one says you can’t have a bit of fun. That’s my advice. There are enough misery faces around the compound.”
    Hirano said, again too fervently, “If they won’t end things for me on the day we win the war, I’ll hang myself. I’ll join the shadows where all the other victors wait, because there aren’t any misery faces there.”
    Aoki got unreasonably annoyed by the raw child-infantrymen like Hirano who hadn’t been in China. To him, China was the test, and the islands of the South Pacific an arena for latecomers and amateurs and the partially informed.
    â€œUntil that time,” said Aoki, “there are all your living comrades wandering around in the dust here who aren’t shades. Do you ever