The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Dorrigo is writing the forward for a book of illustrations of the POW camps, done by Guy Hendricks: “Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is” (22). Although it was already clear that Japan would most likely lose the war, they believed they would win, and they had hundreds of thousands of slaves, including 22,000 Australian POWs, 9,000 of which worked on the railway: “On 25 October 1943, steam locomotive travels the length of the completed Death Railway, it will be past endless beds of human bones that will include the remains of one in three of those Australians” (23). He is unhappy with the draft of what he has written, and there is “one name he could not write” (24). The details of what he thinks of as the most important day include the story of Darky Gardiner.

Dorrigo continues to reflect on his past: “The POWs refer to the slow descent into madness that followed simply with two words: the Line” (25). In the hotel with Lynette, Dorrigo remembers looking at the railway pegs and considering them as a “journey to hell” (26). He reads a book after Lynette is asleep and thinks that the best books make him want to examine his soul: “His book that night was presented to him by a delegation of Japanese women, come to apologize for Japanese war crimes” (26). He falls asleep while he is reading. 

Earlier that day, a poem from the book has struck him. The poem is by a Japanese poet named Shisui. When requested to write a death poem on his death bed, he had simply painted a black circle on a sheet of paper. Dorrigo thinks of the circle, “a contained void, an endless mystery, lengthless breadth, eternal return” (27). 

Before arriving at the Line, Dorrigo was second-in-command of 1,000 POWs in another camp. He remembers that they spent their downtime reminiscing about women and trying to stay engaged in whatever physical activity they could invent. When they began the walk that would lead to the Line, they were soon passing bloated corpses everywhere. 

The walk to the Line takes nearly a week. Darky sings when they walk. There are bodies lining the roads and paths at every stage of the journey. When they reach their destination, they discover that the French occupy the village, which the Royal Navy is also bombarding. The French withdraw soon after their arrival, but the shelling continues. After the shelling stops, the POWs walk through the town:

Amidst the chaos and rubble, the shops were open, trade went on, people cleaned up as if after a natural catastrophe, and off-duty Australians were wandering around buying and scrounging souvenirs. They fell asleep to the sound of jackals yapping as they came in to feed on the dead (32).