When an author is deciding what to write and what they want to convey, they sometimes choose a genre completely at odds with their theme. Like using a murder mystery to depict human affection, for example, or when authors address modern social issues through the lens of historical fiction. These approaches are not particularly rare.
For this reason, Sayuri Ueda chose to merge these two seemingly incompatible ideas—fantasy and extremely realistic descriptions of war. Naturally, she chose fantasy for a reason.
But what were her reasons? That’s what I’d like to unravel by following the story.
The setting is Europe in the midst of World War I. During that long period of seemingly endless fighting, an explosion erupts near a young German soldier named Jörg in Champagne on the Western Front. He thinks he’s about to die when a mysterious man saves him.
Wearing a stylish cape that is wholly out of place in a war zone, this refined gentleman is well-dressed, calm, and dignified. The next time Jörg opens his eyes, he finds himself in a clean, comfortable inn, where the man—Count George Silvestri—tells him a shocking story.
Jörg learns that the Count is a monster that has been alive for four hundred sixty years and that he has brought only half of Jörg’s soul to this inn. The Jörg there now is in a simulacrum the Count created, while his corpus and the other half of his soul are still in the trenches of Champagne. The two bodies share memories through their dreams. And now that Jörg is in a simulacrum, he can leap into the bodies of other people and travel anywhere in the world via a door with a pattern on it. The Count assigns Jörg in his simulacrum to protect a young girl named Lila.
Being thrust suddenly from realistic depictions of a battlefield to a fantasy world might confuse some readers, but this is where the first reason the author chose fantasy becomes apparent.
Why give Jörg half a soul? Jörg, who has grown sick of war, asks the Count to bring his corpus to the inn. But the Count refuses, saying, “Your corpus in Champagne worries more about what’s going to happen to his fellow soldiers than his own safety, and he would never desert them.”
Jörg’s corpus has rid himself of the half of him that detests war and faces the fighting with new enthusiasm. He views the fight for his homeland in a fresh light. Fantasy enables the reader to briefly confront the complexities of the human mind.
The book depicts several aspects of humanity’s multifaceted nature. Strength and weakness, truth and lies, compassion and selfishness. These forces intermingle to create human beings, and we learn how environments and experiences can easily alter that balance. The way the book depicts the differences between times of war and peace is particularly striking.
Just as there are many human emotions, there is more than one way to see the world. For example, Lila, the girl whom Jörg is tasked with protecting, treats him with a cold indifference due to her homeland of Poland having been invaded and destroyed by the Germans. Lila is referring to the Third Partition of Poland from over one hundred years earlier, and she doesn’t care in the least that Jörg was in no way involved in the event. Had they met as simply two people, they might have been friends, but she holds the unreasonable belief that their histories and nationalities make them enemies.
War is a cruel, absurd environment that distorts reason and morals. People are robbed of their most basic human rights, their pride as human beings, and their perspectives of right and wrong. Those ideas aren’t thrust upon people authoritatively by governments, but imprint themselves naturally among the citizens who don’t doubt their truth. War turns people into monsters. Crossing borders in his simulacrum and observing Europe under the war, Jörg learns the truth of that—for both enemy and ally.
Here, we encounter the second reason for making this a work of fantasy. The reader witnesses various people with Jörg as he travels around Europe in his simulacrum: people starving on the home front; generals who see soldiers as nothing but disposable commodities; women crossing dangerous bridges to get food. He meets people in the socialist movement who seek revolution and an end to the war, as well as people who have found a purpose in life through the war. And among all these people, he discovers the earnestness of these souls hoping to find a shred of human decency.
Jörg thinks of any way that he can break through this mess and bring an end to the war—even if doing so requires that he abandon his life as a human and become a real monster.
Now we come to the third reason: why monsters exist in the novel. The Count, who has lived for over four hundred years, and all the immortal monsters that appear in the book, have all experienced war in the past. In fact, it may be more accurate to say that the experience of war is what made them monsters. Their motives differ, but otherwise they’re the same as Jörg. That is to say, they serve as proof that humans have been waging an endless cycle of war for hundreds of years.
Readers know the harsh truth that World War I wasn’t the first war, nor the last. As the reader comes to see the people’s elation at the end of the war in 1918, they naturally feel pained, knowing that these same characters will get swept up in the next world war only twenty years later.
Why do humans keep fighting wars? Is there no way to stop it?
This is the final—and most important—point of the book as a work of fantasy.
There might not be any way to rid Earth of war. But within that reality, it might be possible for humans to retain their humanity. So long as we remember to act as humans, we can rise again after we’re hurt. So then what is it that makes us hold on to our humanity?
This plea is hidden in the author’s skillful depiction of monsters. When I reached the end of the book, I was shaking. The monsters in the book are a metaphor—although for what, it’s not my place to say here. It’s something that should be experienced while reading the book. Once you understand what those immortal monsters represent, Jörg running the length of Europe to save people and his actions imbuing Lila and a vast many others with hope will take on a new meaning. That’s when you’ll realize there’s a monster beside you, too. Then you’ll agree wholeheartedly with the reason this story used fantasy and what Sayuri Ueda wants to say.
This is a story of will.
A work that conveys why Sayuri Ueda chooses to write fiction.
This book serves as a strong testament to the idea that war is more cruelly real than any novel and conveys that reality precisely because it is a work of fiction. Certain truths can be told only through fiction. That is the power of story.