Fires on the Plain

is a 2014 Japanese war film written, produced, directed, and starring Shinya Tsukamoto. The film is based on the 1951 anti-war novel Fires on the Plain, which was a semi-autobiographical work loosely based on author Shōhei Ōoka's experience in World War II. The novel was previously adapted in the 1959 film Fires on the Plain by Kon Ichikawa. The film premiered at the 71st Venice International Film Festival in 2014, and was released to the wider Japanese box office on 25 July 2015. Fires on the Plain takes place during the final days of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines on the island of Leyte, after the American army had returned. The Japanese army remnants have taken to the jungle after being driven out of the main cities. The Filipinos, after suffering a brutal Japanese occupation, are in little mood to show mercy on their former tormentors, and light the titular bonfires for communication. Japanese soldiers are reduced to little more than bandits and murderers as their supplies dry up and they are encircled by the American-Filipino forces. A delirious and sick Private Tamura attempts to survive an aimless journey through the jungle as starvation drives the surviving soldiers to theft, madness, murder, suicide, and cannibalism. Plot Private Tamura, a writer, is ridden with tuberculosis (TB) and is sent away from his company to the military hospital; the makeshift hospital refuses to accept him, as they are already full. Tamura is discharged back and forth until essentially ordered not to return and continue consuming supplies - he is ordered to commit suicide instead rather than return yet again. On his own, Tamura finds that military discipline has faltered as the Japanese army disintegrates into the jungle and subsists largely on yams. Tamura steals food from some local Filipinos while encountering disturbing evidence of the Japanese army's collapse. A despondent soldier blows himself up with a grenade, while others lie dying from malnutrition or injuries on the path. Tamura encounters two soldiers, Yasuda and Nagamatsu, who attempt to trade cigarettes for yams to soldiers who pass by; he declines the cigarette but gives Nagamatsu a yam regardless out of pity. Tamura desperately forages whatever food he can, while American aircraft occasionally strafe the Japanese army remnants with bullets. At a seemingly abandoned church, Tamura stabs a dog.