Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Soldiers Alive reflects the thoughts, conversations, and activities that center around a platoon of the Takashima Division of the Japanese army. Set in December 1937 to January 1938 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the story focalizes around the soldiers of Kurata Platoon, tells in detail their war crimes, and delves deep into their psychology before and after conducting merciless killings. Strict adherence to objectivity along with laser-sharp observation, Ishikawa Tatsuzō presents to the world an invaluable piece of war literature that fills the blanks of historiography. 

In any warfare, those who are the closest to the battlefield are always the soldiers. Protagonists in Soldiers Alive——Kurata, Kasahara, Hirao, Kondō——are all ordinary soldiers of the Takashima Division. As a writer who would like to inform the Japanese civilians about the truth of the war, Ishikawa reproduces a series of close-to-real war scenes through his naturalist description of these soldiers: Just because he “suspects” that a young Chinese woman is a spy, Kondō strips off her clothes in public and stabbed at her breasts with a dagger; Just because a 17-year-old Chinese girl’s loud crying (due to other soldiers’ murder of her mother) disturbs his sleeping, Hirao along with other soldiers stabs the girl to death; Army priest Katayama Genchō kills Chinese soldiers with a spade in one hand while holding a rosary in the other; After occupying Shanghai, these soldiers force Chinese women to serve as “comfort woman”  at their disposal; and they all feel elated because “this continent teemed with boundless riches; one merely had to take them…” (Ishikawa, 80).

Soldiers Alive not only revealed these soldiers’ brutal slaughtering of innocent civilians and prisoners of war but also demonstrated their psychological metamorphosis. Ishikawa deliberately slows the narrative pace and concentrates on how these soldiers gradually lost their humanity and sense of morality as the war progresses. Except for Corporate Kasahara, who was born as a farmer’s son, all other main characters in the novel are more or less educated: Before being dispatched to China, First Class Private Kondō was a university graduate and a medical doctor; Second Lieutenant Kurata, a respected elementary school teacher; First Class Private Hirao, “a romantic young man who had worked as a proofreader for a city newspaper” and whose “highly receptive, delicate nerves…could not but helplessly shatter in the harsh world of the battlefield” (Ishikawa, 74); Katayama Genchō, a well-educated monk. However, it is these very individuals who later transform into killing machines. After countless killings of Chinese soldiers and civilians, they eventually manage to get rid of the last remaining trace of morality. Kurata realized that killing must be cold-hearted, so he began to harden his heart to prepare for the daily massacre of civilians; Kondō became increasingly numb to crime and learned to boast about his “achievements”: to “get” a girl, to step on the body of a dead Chinese soldier, or to set a house on fire...; Army priest Katayama Genchō, when killing Chinese captives, did not experience the slightest pain in his conscience, but instead felt extremely happy…Ishikawa goes deep into the psyche of these soldiers, especially those with some educational background. He objectively and truthfully described the process of their losing the sense of conscience. In this unjust war of invasion, although these soldiers are “alive”, they have experienced a psychological metamorphosis by completely abandoning human feelings and a basic sense of conscience. Ultimately, they are transformed into “qualified soldiers” needed by the Japanese militarist authorities and suitable for the war of invasion. It is these haunting descriptions that make Soldiers Alive more credible due to its exposure to the war's alienating effects on humans than some historical materials that selectively record “historical facts.”

The many merits of the novel come with only one limitation. Ishikawa’s writing draws on the naturalist tradition and presupposes an environmental deterministic view on human nature. The novel regards the war environment as the only decisive factor that influences the soldiers and does not consider other factors——“The battlefield appeared to possess an astonishing power to transform all combatants into men of identical characters, identical thoughts, and identical needs” (Ishikawa, 100-101). According to Ishikawa, none of Hirao, Kondō, and Genchō are inherently evil. All of them are ordinary, law-abiding citizens before going to the battlefield. Only due to the peculiarly inhumane environment of war, they eventually lose their rationality and become ruthless killing machines. However, one crucial factor that is missing is the influence of fascist education and propaganda on these soldiers. Even though any war will bring about psychological impacts on soldiers, the war itself cannot provide a reasonable explanation for the massacre of civilians by these soldiers. The theory of Japanese ethnic superiority and chauvinism hyped up by Japanese militarists can nonetheless provide some clues for 21st-century readers----an inextricable connection exists between the domestic militarist education in Japan and the massacre of innocent civilians by the Japanese army in China.

That being said, under the harsh political milieu at the time, by not catering to militarist propaganda and setting aside the writing commandments imposed by the military on writers, Ishikawa's pursuit of truth and objectivity still deserves our respect. Despite the lack of explicit criticism of the Japanese invasion, the novel objectively presents an infernal image of the sufferings of civilians as a result of the barbarism of the protagonists.

Rating: 4.8/5

Although Soldiers Alive is a piece of fiction, readers interested in this period of history can discover a certain “historical truth” in it. Ishikawa’s outlining of the soldiers’ psychological metamorphosis is something that we can never find in works of historiography. Through this painfully objective literature and the vividly portrayed literary figures within, we are thereby granted access to the “real” psyches of the soldiers who participated in the Second Sino-Japanese War.