Fires on the Plain by Shōhei Ōoka
Published 1951 · 55,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · War Fiction, Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction
How hard is Fires on the Plain to read?
Fires on the Plain scores 73 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 54 out of 100
- Morris's translation carries military vocabulary, tropical botany, and a layer of Christian and philosophical terminology as Tamura's reading takes over his thinking.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Clear first-person prose that becomes more fragmented as the narrator deteriorates, with the late chapters breaking into short disconnected statements.
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- A survival narrative that is also a sustained argument about God, will and the limits of the human, conducted by a starving man quoting scripture at himself.
- Information density: 56 out of 100
- The Leyte campaign, the collapse of Japanese supply in the Philippines and the mechanics of army medical triage are given briefly and assumed thereafter.
- Narrative indirection: 86 out of 100
- The narrator is writing from a mental hospital, tells the reader he has lost stretches of memory, and offers two incompatible accounts of the novel's central act. The truth of the most important events is deliberately unrecoverable.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- The fires on the plain, the salt on the church floor, the cross on the hill, and the recurring question of whether an angel eats are worked continuously as the novel's religious apparatus.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- A soldier is expelled from the army for being too ill to be useful and told to kill himself as a favour, then spends the book discovering what he will do to stay alive. The Christian framework Tamura reaches for keeps failing him at the exact moment he needs it.
- Resolution withholding: 88 out of 100
- Whether Tamura ate human flesh is never established, his account contradicts itself, and the final chapter finds him institutionalised, writing, and unable to say what happened.
- Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
- A retrospective first-person narrative written from an asylum, with the frame revealed late, and a chronology broken by amnesia and by chapters the narrator admits he may have invented.
How Fires on the Plain is regarded
Fires on the Plain holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.