This chapter continues Kenichi Ara’s critique of Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore, exposing numerous historical inaccuracies regarding the Nanjing Incident, POW executions, Chinese irregular forces, Japan’s conscription system, and the social atmosphere of 1937–38 Japan. It also highlights factual errors concerning the Spanish Civil War and the bombing of Guernica. The chapter warns that Murakami’s distorted historical narrative contributes to the global spread of fabricated accounts, as evidenced by recent incidents in NHK broadcasts, U.S. publications, and references in the U.K. Parliament’s reports.

The Chinese Army, Completely Different from the Japanese Army
Haruki Murakami also writes the following.
He says that 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 sight not only traumatized his father but that “the brutal spectacle of a man’s head being cut off with a military sword was, needless to say, burned intensely into my young mind.”
However, the execution of prisoners was conducted for specific reasons, and unless the reasons for execution are explained, it cannot serve as a valid criticism.
Some Chinese soldiers wore civilian clothing beneath their uniforms, and when defeated, they immediately became plainclothes fighters.
There were also units that fought in civilian clothes from the outset.
This was completely different from the Japanese army.
Such fighters were not entitled to the treatment of 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 contrived 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 act is described vividly and becomes an important element of the painting “Killing Commendatore,” but it is built on entirely fabricated moral pretension.
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 investigated conscription-age men and prepared conscription registers, and based on these registers, the conscription examination was conducted.
Students who were still in school were given 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 considering this, drafting someone still in school was impossible.
When his father was first called up, he was discharged after one year, and Murakami writes, “At that time, active-duty soldiers drafted into service served for 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, and there were soldiers whose service ended in one year.
This is recorded in the regimental history and in soldiers’ diaries, and anyone writing about the Fukuchiyama Regiment would naturally know this.
Distortion also appeared in his earlier The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
He writes, “You could see the shadow of war 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 found on the menu.
What was brought to him was pumpkin potage with cheese toast on the side.
Pumpkin is called nankin, cheese is kanraku, and he thought, “Delicious. This must indeed be Nanjing falling. What a witty 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 too many young people still failed to recognize the wartime emergency six months after the outbreak of the incident—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 the number during the Nanjing campaign—and public excitement upon its fall surpassed that of Nanjing.
The years 1937 and 1938 were bright and prosperous, marked by successive victories before the conflict became stalemated.
They were also the most economically prosperous years of the prewar period, as Japan finally emerged from the Great Depression.
Murakami’s historical perspective—“Japanese people fundamentally lack the awareness that they were also perpetrators” and “Chinese and Koreans naturally grow angry”—led him to distort the years 1937 and 1938 as dark times.
Examples of ignorance continue throughout 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.”
This describes how to distinguish civilians from plainclothes fighters, but the reality was the opposite.
Japanese soldiers developed calluses on their hands from handling rifles, so those with calluses were identified as soldiers.
Murakami also writes, “What 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, the bombing of Guernica occurred in April 1937, and Picasso painted his monumental mural on the bombing later that same year.
Such examples could be continued endlessly.

The Spread of Fabricated History
In August last year, a Chinese staff member at NHK Radio International added the unscripted phrase “Do not forget the Nanjing Massacre” during a broadcast, then resigned and returned to China.
The Koua Kannon temple in Atami, built by General Iwane Matsui to memorialize soldiers of both Japan and China, was visited in January this year by a young Chinese man who urinated on the approach path, trespassed, and fled after scattering leaflets when noticed.
In April, another Chinese man, Xu Haoyu, declared that “300,000 civilians were killed (in the Nanjing Incident)” and even explored running for mayor of Atami in the election scheduled for next September.
The issue is not confined to China.
In March last year, Japan’s Holocaust by Brian Rigg was published in the United States, claiming that the Japanese army killed 300,000 people in Nanjing.
On March 18 this year, when a cross-party committee of the U.K. Parliament released its report on the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, it described the massacre by saying, “Many were killed in scenes of barbarity unseen in world history since the Nanjing Massacre of 1938.”
If Haruki Murakami were to receive the Nobel Prize, China would feel even more emboldened in asserting the Nanjing Incident, and the safety of Japanese nationals in China would remain at risk.
Around the world, the spread of fabricated history would only accelerate.