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.
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