Andrew's Reviews > Taken Captive: A Japanese POW's Story

So I guess these were, to a much less extreme degree, the experiences that informed Fires on the Plain. And it’s good a series of war stories as any, which all have that consistent trudging theme – of being tired as hell, just wanting to go home, even as they are supposed to be performing a poorly conceived of patriotic duty to the Japanese Empire, with American captors that seem just kind of ill-mannered and not terribly bright. Which is quite the antidote to the typical accounts of the honor-mad warrior ready to commit seppuku at a moment’s notice popular during the time period, from both official imperial and American pop culture accounts. Better even than Ooka’s fiction, I think.