The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Goanna is transferred to a hall where all the condemned men live together. On the day he learns that his execution will occur the following morning, he is relieved. When he receives his last meal, he finds that he is unable to eat it: “If he did not eat his last meal, he could not die until he had” (306). He no longer wants to die. The other men tell him how the gallows work. He thinks of the calm many of the POWs had shown in the face of death, and he wishes he felt the same. As a Korean, he also feels that he is missing the resolve shown by the Japanese, as “[h]e had no particular beliefs” (307). He had joined the war effort solely to make 50 yen per month. He realizes that he desperately wants to have an idea of his own, one that is free from slogans and propaganda.

He remembers working for a Japanese family as a child and walking their dog. After stubbing his toe on a brick, he had picked it up and killed the dog with it. Then he sold the dog to a butcher for 10 yen. He had felt free afterwards, and now, “how he longed for that freedom again, to again know that exhilarating moment of strange power and freedom that had come with the killing of another living thing” (310).