The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a haibun, or prose poem account of a journey on foot, written in 1689 by the Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō. It is also the name of a novel published in 2013 by the Australian Richard Flanagan, based on the ordeal undergone by his father and 15,000 other Australian POWs who between 1942 and 1943 were forced by the Japanese to labor on the construction of a 258-mile railway between southwest Thailand and northwest Burma.
Because the “Death Railway,” as it was called, passed through mountainous jungle terrain, its hundreds of bridges, viaducts, and embankments had to be built by hand, without machinery. The workstations strung along its length were as lacking in food, medicine, and sanitation as any Soviet or Nazi forced-labor camp. So death claimed more than a quarter of the 60,000 Australian, British, and other Allied POWs who were beaten, starved, overworked, and exposed to filth and disease in that benighted place. And of the 200,000 Malay, Thai, and Burmese men, women, and children who were likewise enslaved, death claimed more than half.
Comments