Werner Herzog’s Wondrous Novel of Nothingness in the Jungle

The Japanese lieutenant Hiroo Onoda emerged from hiding, in 1974, after fighting the Second World War for twenty-nine years. He’d been deployed to the Philippine island of Lubang in 1944, when he was twenty-two, and had received secret orders to hold his position even as the Imperial Army withdrew from its airfield there. His commander promised that someone would come back for him eventually.

Fortunately, Werner Herzog, an accomplished student of sublime futility, has made Onoda the subject of his wondrous first novel, “.” The story in his telling seems not so much fictionalized as lightly mythologized. Herzog’s films, now numbering six dozen, are peopled by the deluded, the obsessed, and the disconcertingly tenacious. His archetypal character might be someone undaunted by nature’s cruelty, who follows his dreams so doggedly that he ends up living a nightmare.

“The Twilight World” has the unenviable task of dramatizing nearly three decades of acute emptiness. Onoda and his companions lived like a millenarian cult, anticipating a salvation that never came—the action was all in the future, and all in their minds. Herzog has written a clipped, economical account that sometimes explodes into lyricism, turning their waiting into a thing of numb, antic beauty.

Under these circumstances, the discovery of a piece of used chewing gum on a bamboo pole counts as a major plot development. Onoda believes that American G.I.s may have placed it there to taunt him. He considers chewing it himself, to gain insight into the enemy psyche. Later, when he encounters it again, he’s certain that someone has moved it “by a hand’s breadth.” Herzog has always been attuned to the ways in which survivalism functions as a form of existentialism.

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