Shohei Ooka (1909 - 1988) is an outstanding Japanese writer, winner of the Yomiuri Prize (1952) and Noma Prize (1974). In his novel “Fires on the Plain,” he is one of the first, with amazing detail and courage, to approach that boundary of human existence, beyond which lies the desert of rejection and loneliness. Private Tamura is sick, his army is defeated, there is no place for him either in the platoon or in the hospital . Now everything that surrounds him can bring death with it: the unimaginably beautiful nature of the island of Leyte, American bombers, Filipino avengers, savage cannibal comrades. But it turns out that looking into the eyes of death is not so scary - it is much more dangerous to look into the abyss of your own soul... In 1944, S. Ooka himself visited the Philippines - he served in the Japanese army as a cryptographer, and was captured by the Americans. He knows for certain what war is, how defenseless and lonely a person is when he does not belong to himself, what monstrous force drives him into meaningless battles, how terrible and cruel he can be, rejected by people and God. In the existential drama unfolding in the Philippines at the end The Second World War, a classic of Japanese literature of the 20th century, Shohei Ooka (1909 - 1988), with amazing honesty and courage, approaches that boundary of human existence, beyond which lies the desert of rejection and loneliness. The novel “Lights on the Plain,” awarded the Yomiuri Prize, is being published for the first time in Russia.