'Was he sleepwalking then or was it that today, now, was something he had dreamed? Many times on Lubang the soldier had tried to puzzle it out. There was no certain proof that he was awake when he was awake, or when he was dreaming that he was dreaming.'
In his first book in decades, pioneering filmmaker and writer Werner Herzog turns his attention to the story of a Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda, who continued to defend a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of the Second World War.
Like a phantom or a ghost, Onoda moves through the jungle he has hidden in for decades believing that the war with America is still going on, unaware of the atom bomb, the moon landing or the real world beyond. At first with other soldiers and then all alone, he fights the harshness of nature and his own demons. By interpreting flashing satellites in the sky or fragments of speech from a looted radio, Onoda's idea of the 20th century is pieced together from fragments of evidence. Until he meets the man who will free him from the illusion of never-ending war: Suzuki Norio.
In The Twilight World, Werner Herzog's moving portrait of Onoda's seemingly senseless struggle offers a profound meditation on the human condition. Was it all a dream? Why do we live at all? What is time and what are we put here to do?
