The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Nakamura receives a letter from Aki Tomokawa, one of his old corporals. Nakamura has avoided contact with the other soldiers from the camp, but now he sees his attitude as paranoid. Tomokawa’s effort to reach out touches him. His letter tells Nakamura that the first locomotive to have traversed the railway is being restored and will be displayed at the Yasukuni Shrine. He decides to meet with Tomokawa in the town of Sapporo, at the annual snow festival. He visits Tomokawa and his wife at their apartment. He sits in an armchair in their living room and is suddenly tired: “He kept his eyes closed, conscious that all around him the world lived as he had never known it had lived, and, just, as he finally opened himself up to this joy, he also realized he was dying” (340). 

In middle age, Dorrigo is no longer afraid of enclosed spaces. He is often bored with Ella, her friends, and her parties. He also is bored by surgery and by himself. The constant string of affairs no longer entertains him. He thinks often of Sisyphus and wonders if he is living his own version of having to roll the rock up the hill forever: “Perhaps that was what hell was, Dorrigo concluded, an eternal repetition of the same failure” (342). He is often angry with Ella and yells at her: “He waited for a denouement that never arrived. And her hurt, her pain, her tears, her sadness, rather than ending his soul’s hibernation, only deepened it” (343). 

Dorrigo and Ella continue their unhappy marriage: “Ella could not fathom living without loving. Her love was simply what she was, looking for objects to pour itself out upon” (343). She repeats Dorrigo’s opinions as if they are her own, despite the public’s perception that she is independent. Her parroting of his words frustrates Dorrigo: “He’d be astonished at both the banality of the opinion and her loyalty in repeating something that he could see now was trite and stupid” (344). At night, she usually cries herself to sleep. 

Tomokawa is telling Nakamura that he used to worry that he would be picked up as a war criminal. Nakamura is beginning to hallucinate. Tomokawa appears to him as a giant monster and says, “I think those POWs had it easy, and they should be proud of what they achieved with that railway and us. But to hang us for that and not for what we did to the chink! Really, it defies reasoning” (346).

Nakamura agrees with him: “He knew he had selflessly performed his duty with devotion and honour” (346). However, he also feels shame and terror that he does not understand. His fear of death is more that he worries that he never really lived. When Ikuko touches him, it is when he most doubts that he is a good man. Tomokawa says that the time in the camp was the happiest of his life, and he does not believe the prisoners were as unhappy as they said in the courts.

The next spring, the Tomokawa’s receive a letter from Ikuko, saying that Nakamura has died. She does not mention how aggressive and angry he became towards her and their daughters. The letter includes a death poem that he had written in his final hours: “Winter ice / Melts into clean water— / Clear is my heart” (351). 

At a dinner for the College of Surgeons’ executive committee, Ella says that she thinks Dorrigo is the loneliest man in the world. Everyone laughs, but he knows that she understands how he feels—lonely no matter where he is or whom he is with: “He was a lighthouse whose light could not be relit” (351). He does not feel that his marriage to Ella has been a mistake, however. He knows that Ella will not give up on him, even though he has given up on himself. He loves their three children—Jessica, Mary, and Stewart—but he loves them most when he is away from them. His children are cold to one another that he wonders if they are modeling themselves after his example. Ella begins to smoke and sometimes she curses: “How he wished he hadn’t made her hard” (354). 

After years with Ella, Amy begins to leave his thoughts. He is bound to Ella, “and yet it all created in Dorrigo Evans the most complete and unassailable loneliness, so loud a solitude that he sought to crack its ringing silence again and again with yet another woman” (356). Each new woman amplifies his solitude. As he continues to travel and work, he finds that fewer people interest him. One evening he is called to perform a surgery on a woman named Amy Gascoigne. He recites a poem to himself that reminds him of Amy. It is the first time he has thought of her in years: “He had stolen light from the sun and fallen to earth. For a moment he had to turn away from the table and compose himself, so that the rest of the team would not see his scalpel shaking” (357). 

Dorrigo renews his relationship with his brother Tom. He is comfortable in Tom’s company. In February of 1967, he learns that Tom has had a heart attack. He is upset but going to visit Tom also gets Dorrigo out of the first two days of a family vacation to Tasmania. When he visits Tom in the hospital, he remembers Jackie Maguire’s wife, and that he had seen Tom kissing her so long ago. Tom says they weren’t kissing. He had started crying with memories of the war, and she had held him and listened. Tom reveals that she had his baby earlier, but he hadn’t known. She had gone to Launceston to have it and had then given it up for adoption. Her husband had not known either. He had been adopted by a family named Gardiner, and the boy had been named Frank. He had died in a POW camp. 

As he walks across a bridge in Sydney, he sees Amy. He had thought she had died in the hotel explosion. He follows her for a while without her knowing he is there. She changes direction and is walking towards him. He does not think anything except that he wants her. She walks by him without a word. He wonders if he is mistaken. He looks back and she is gone. He wonders if she saw him and chose not to say anything because she has moved on: “How empty the world is when you lose the one you love” (367). 

Amy had thought he was dead, but when his fame began to grow, she knew he was alive. It did not occur to her that he might have thought she died in the explosion, and that was why he never looked for her. After Keith’s death, she received a comfortable inheritance. She married another man who vanished to America. She never looked for Dorrigo because he had become famous and she did not know what he might want from her at that point, or she from him: “He had become someone, or more than someone—she could see that he was passing into something not a person” (369).

Amy is sick and her oncologist has told her that all available treatments are extreme: “In eighteen months—six more than she had been given—she would be buried in a suburban cemetery, an unremarkable lot amidst acres of similarly unremarkable graves” (369). Her only request will be that she be buried with a pearl necklace. 

Dorrigo flies to Hobart, where Ella is vacationing with the kids. She is in a village called Fern Tree, just outside of Hobart. Dorrigo attends a luncheon held in his honor at the College of Surgeons before joining her. During the luncheon they are told that a firestorm has begun and is threatening the nearby towns, including Fern Tree. He borrows a car from an old surgeon named Freddy Seymour and drives towards Fern Tree. He soon sees a police roadblock, and an officer tells him that the road to Fern Tree is a death zone. He says he can’t let him pass. Dorrigo smashes through the roadblock in his car and keeps going. Within half a mile, flames surround him. 

When the fire begins, Ella takes the children and walks towards Hobart. Embers start burning their skin within a mile, and the fire gets closer. Mary begins to cry because her feet are blistering. The fire is all around them. They began to run in the direction they had come from and reach a house with a shed. The shed is set apart from the house, and there is nothing to burn around it. They hide inside but flames still try to pour in under the door. Minutes later the fire outside is quieter, and they hear a car horn honking. It is Dorrigo. He takes a moment to hug Ella and then they get in the car: “It was more affection than his three children had seen their father show their mother in a lifetime” (378).