The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Part 4, Chapters 8-13 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4

Part 4, Chapter 8 Summary

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).

When the guards come for him in the morning, he fights them, but they overpower him. When he stands on the gallows, he still cannot think of an idea of his own. His last thoughts are of the 50 yen, and how little money that is.

Part 4, Chapter 9 Summary

Over the next few years, Nakamura is safe. He meets a woman named Ikuko Kawabata, who helps him find work in a hospital as an orderly, and then as a clerk. He worries constantly about being found out and turned over to the Americans. He becomes friends with a doctor named Kameya Sato, and plays “Go” with him often. Sato tells him that the secret of “Go” is that “there is a pattern and structure to all things. Only we can’t see it. Our job is to discover that pattern and structure and work within it, as part of it” (313).

He tells Nakamura that as an intern at a hospital, he witnessed an American soldier being operated on without anesthesia as part of a medical experiment. Nakamura had heard such stories before and thought they had all been lies. Sato says he had felt proud to be there. At the end of the surgery, Sato says the American looks like he had aged several years, and when the doctors removed his heart, it was still beating. He tells him of many other experiments he witnessed, and how many of the doctors later killed themselves in prison after their convictions. When he finishes the conversation, Nakamura concludes, “We, too, are victims of the war” (317). Sato’s story has excited him.

Part 4, Chapter 10 Summary

Over the coming months, Sato and Nakamura grow bored with each other, and then stop playing “Go.” Eventually, he believes that it is more honorable to stop living under false pretenses and returns to his real name. He marries Ikuko, and soon they have two children together. He thinks often of the deaths of the POWs but finds that “he was haunted only by the way he was haunted by so little of it” (319).

In 1959, he applies for a position at the Japan Blood Bank. He feels a hand on the back of his neck as he waits and a voice recites a haiku. He looks up and sees that it is Kota: “I had to see your neck,” say Kota. “I just had to be sure you were the man I thought you were. You see, I never forget” (320).

Part 4, Chapter 11 Summary

At John Menadue’s request, Dorrigo visits the widow of Jack Rainbow, who was supposed to receive his medals. Menadue had always seen himself as a leader until he arrived at the Line: “Then he came to see that his primary interest was not in helping others but in saving his own life” (324). He wonders why leadership ability seemed to come naturally to men like Dorrigo: “a despicable womanizer close to ugly, a loner who hid in crowds, a man oblivious to any sort of authority except that which he commanded by some insulting grace of God” (324). He gives Dorrigo the medals at a pub. When Dorrigo meets with her at her home, she sits with him in her parlor.

Part 4, Chapter 12 Summary

She tells him about their five children. She says that while Jack was gone, she would sleep in the same bed with all five of them because she could not bear to be alone. She switches subjects and asks if he believes in love: “Because I think you make it. You don’t get it given to you. You make it” (327). When he doesn’t answer, she asks again. Dorrigo remembers being back at the King of Cornwall with Amy.

Mrs. Rainbow tells him that she doesn’t believe in love. She says that it’s “too small a word” (328) for what the feeling people call love can be. She says that now Jack is gone, everything is silent.

Part 4, Chapter 13 Summary

Dorrigo and Mrs. Rainbow lay together on her bed for a couple of hours, just holding each other. Then the brewery truck that had dropped Dorrigo off returns on its way back to town and picks him up. After he leaves, she puts Jack’s medals in the range fire. She eventually marries a younger man who dies in a tractor accident. Near the end of her life, she can’t remember what Jack looked like.

On the way back to town, Dorrigo tells the driver: “[Jack Rainbow] had something. He’s dead and I am alive, but he had something I’ve never known. He was a couple” (330). The driver says that some people never know love:

Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fate, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you bugger it all, you drink it and it’s gone. You know it and then you don’t know it. Maybe we don’t control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell (331).

Dorrigo looks out the window and thinks again: “The world. It just is” (332).

Part 4, Chapters 8-13 Analysis

Chapter 8 shows the death of the Goanna, who remains a blank slate until the moment of his execution. He has enough awareness to know that he did not live for anything real, and that the Japanese government had used and then abandoned him. He contributed nothing but suffering to the world, and in turn, he experienced nothing but suffering.

Nakamura finds peace with his new wife, but it is his conversation with Sato that is the most significant part of his story. Sato tells him of horrific medical experiments that he participated in. Nakamura had heard stories of live dissections but had believed they were anti-Axis lies. Once he knows that they are true, he is not horrified. His sense that he has done the right thing in the camp, and by participating in the Empire that performs these human experiments, strengthens. He grows proud of himself for his fortitude, and that he is part of a nation with the strength to do what must be done.

Dorrigo’s visit to Mrs. Rainbow challenges his ideas of love and forces him to try and sharpen his definition of it. When she asks him if he believes in love, he isn’t sure. It is not until he is returning with the trucker that he realizes that Jack Rainbow “had something. […] He was a couple” (330). Dorrigo believes that, whatever love is, it is something that Jack experienced, whereas he did not. The driver responds with another of the novel’s declarations about the merciless nature of fate: “Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fate, our happiness and unhappiness. […] Maybe we don’t control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house” (331). For the driver, love is something that one succumbs to. Pretending otherwise is a grave mistake. The benefits of love come only from acknowledge its faults.