This chapter continues Kenichi Ara’s critique of Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore. It analyzes the reality of Chinese irregular forces, the legal basis for prisoner executions, misconceptions regarding Japan’s conscription system, the bright social atmosphere of 1937–38 Japan, and numerous factual errors in Murakami’s descriptions. Ara demonstrates that Murakami’s narrative—built on ignorance, distortion, and fabricated historical assumptions—misrepresents both Japanese military conduct and the era itself.

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The Chinese Army, Completely Different from the Japanese Army
Haruki Murakami also writes the following.
He says his father rarely spoke about his wartime experiences but did tell him one thing.
In the transport unit to which he was assigned, prisoners were executed, and at that time the Chinese soldiers showed no fear, sat quietly with their eyes closed, and displayed an admirable attitude.
Murakami writes that the scene not only traumatized his father but that “the brutal sight of a man’s head being cut off with a military sword was, needless to say, seared deeply into my young mind.”
However, prisoner executions were carried out for specific reasons, and unless the cause is explained, it cannot serve as a criticism.
Some Chinese soldiers wore civilian clothes beneath their uniforms and immediately became “plainclothes fighters” when defeated.
There were also units that fought in civilian clothes from the beginning.
This was entirely different from the Japanese army.
Such fighters were not entitled to the protections guaranteed to lawful prisoners of war under international law and could be executed.
Murakami condemns the killing of unresisting prisoners as a violation of international law, but this is nothing more than deliberate hypocrisy.
In Killing Commendatore, the pianist Tsuguhiko is ordered to kill prisoners, suffers psychological trauma, and upon returning home slits his wrists and commits suicide.
The brutal killing is described in vivid detail and becomes an important element of the painting “Killing Commendatore,” but it is based on a one-sided, fabricated moral pose.
Murakami’s ignorance and distortion do not end there.
He writes that his father was drafted in August 1938 due to an administrative error while still in school, but municipal mayors prepared conscription registers by investigating eligible men, and conscription examinations were conducted based on those registers.
Students in school were granted deferment.
Since conscription officers conducted the draft, what happened to Murakami’s father could not have occurred.
Only about twenty percent of those who passed the conscription examination were actually drafted, so drafting someone still in school was impossible.
Murakami also writes, “At that time, the active-duty service period for conscripts was two years, but in my father’s case, for some reason he finished in one year. I do not know why.”
However, the 16th Division was repatriated in August 1939 and discharged, meaning there were soldiers who completed service in one year.
This is recorded in the regimental history and in soldiers’ diaries, and anyone writing about the Fukuchiyama Regiment would naturally know it.
Distortion also appeared in his earlier The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
He writes, “I could see that the shadow of war was growing darker day by day. The years 1937 and 1938 were such dark times.”
Yet when Nanjing fell in December 1937, the actor Ryokuchi Furukawa was performing on stage in Nagoya.
He entered a Western-style restaurant for lunch and ordered a “Nanjing-fall soup” he saw on the menu.
What was brought to him was pumpkin potage with cheese toast on the side.
Pumpkin is nankin in Japanese, and cheese is kanraku, so he thought, “Delicious. This must indeed be ‘Nanjing falls.’ What a clever chef.”
This shows how cheerful the era was in its reception of the fall of Nanjing.
In February 1938, two thousand students in Tokyo cafés and entertainment districts were arrested in a single sweep.
It was said that, six months after the outbreak of the incident, too many students still failed to recognize the wartime emergency—but the fact that two thousand students were out enjoying themselves shows how lively society was.
For the October attack on Hankou, as many as five hundred reporters, correspondents, broadcasters, and commentators accompanied the army—several times more than during the Nanjing campaign—and public excitement upon its fall surpassed that of Nanjing.
The years 1937 and 1938 were bright, prosperous years before the conflict became stalemated, marked by successive victories.
They were also the most economically prosperous years of the prewar period, as Japan finally emerged from the Great Depression.
Murakami’s historical view is that “Japanese people fundamentally lack the perspective that they were also perpetrators” and that “Chinese and Koreans naturally grow angry.”
To fit this historical outlook, he distorted the years 1937 and 1938 as dark times.
His ignorance is further illustrated by numerous statements in Killing Commendatore.
For example: “If the palms were rough and calloused, then he was a farmer and might be released. But if the palms were soft, he was judged to be a regular soldier who had stripped off his uniform and attempted to flee disguised as a civilian, and he would be killed without questioning.”
Murakami claims this was how soldiers distinguished civilians from plainclothes fighters, but the truth is the opposite.
Japanese soldiers developed calluses on their hands from handling rifles, so those with callused hands were identified as soldiers.
Murakami also writes, “What on earth happened in 1938? In Europe, the Spanish Civil War was intensifying. It was around that time that Germany’s Condor Legion carried out its indiscriminate bombing of Guernica.”
This too is incorrect.
The Spanish Civil War began in 1936, and the bombing of Guernica occurred in April 1937.
Picasso painted his monumental mural on the Guernica bombing within that same year.
Such examples could be continued endlessly.
(To be continued.)