We’ve all heard about the Japanese soldier who, after the second world war ended, stayed on the Philippine jungle island where he was stationed, armed and lethal, dismissing all signs that Japan had been defeated as enemy propaganda. His name was Hiroo Onoda; he finally stood down in 1974 after almost 30 years of delusional guerrilla warfare and died in 2014. Werner Herzog, the prolific German film-maker who narrates his documentaries in a Wagnerian register (wonderfully parodied in the YouTube video Werner Herzog Reads Where’s Waldo?), contrived to meet Onoda in 1997 and has now written a very short, only partially satisfying book about him. The Twilight World is best described as a nonfiction account of Onoda’s long, pointless mission that phases in and out of fiction – or vice versa.
So why didn’t Herzog do the obvious thing and make a film about Onoda instead? Perhaps because another film-maker got there first: Arthur Harari, whose impressive feature Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle has recently been released. Stretches of The Twilight World read like a screenplay or documentary outline that’s been injected with prose fiction growth hormones. In the expository and digressive passages, it’s impossible not to hear Herzog’s famous voice ringing charismatically in the inner ear (just as that of Quentin Tarantino resounded unmistakably in his recent novelisation Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). If a less celebrated figure than Herzog presented their editor with a book this slight, they’d probably be sent back to their desk to imagine their way deeper into the psychic jungle, fleshing it out with a few more chapters. Which is to say: we’re here for the writer as much as for the story.
