Book, Twilight of the World, O[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Deep in the jungle of a small island in the Philippines, young Japanese lieutenant Hiroo Onoda and his three guerrilla companions "set out on a journey through the decades ahead." Last survivor, and certain that the end of the war is nothing more than a lie from the enemy, Onoda will take almost thirty years to be convinced to finally surrender. The Twilight of the World is a story of survival, of honor, of stoicism and of an individual confronting, to the brink of madness, the destructive forces of civilization and indifferent nature. A full plate, therefore, for film director Werner Herzog, who here confirms that he is a prose writer of impressive firmness and suggestive power. His report, based on interviews he conducted personally, embraces imaginative fluidity to try to reconstruct in detail not only the facts, but also their aesthetic and philosophical implications. The details sometimes sound hallucinogenic: a bag of dirty clothes inflates with a mold that looks like cotton candy, a piece of gum on a tree trunk becomes the unmistakable sign of an ambush. Onoda walks backwards so that his footprints point in the opposite direction and lose the enemy. In the sky, in print and radio broadcasts, signs of progress may seem incomprehensible to you: an artificial satellite strolling among the stars, a newspaper page filled with advertisements, an airplane that flies without propellers. Onoda killed innocent people, became a local legend, was amnestied by the Philippine government and received as a hero in Japan after turning himself in. He lived in Brazil for some time and died at the age of 91, in Tokyo. Herzog does not eliminate the ambiguities of this extraordinary real case. On the contrary, it opens up space for doubt, poetry and dreams to lead us far beyond the conventional, into the realm of stories that resist being deciphered.