Fires on the Plain (野火, Nobi) is a 1959 Japanese war film directed by Kon Ichikawa, starring Eiji Funakoshi.

The screenplay, written by Natto Wada, is based on the novel Nobi (Tokyo 1951) by Shōhei Ōoka, translated as Fires on the Plain.

[4] Fires on the Plain follows a tubercular Japanese private and his attempt to stay alive during the latter part of World War II.

[5] In February 1945, the demoralized Imperial Japanese Army on Leyte is in desperate straits, cut off from support and supplies by the Allies, who are in the process of liberating the Philippine island.

As he searches for food, a young Filipino couple arrive by canoe and run to a hut to retrieve a cache of precious salt hidden under a floorboard.

Tamura leaves to find Nagamatsu and witnesses him attempting to shoot another man, realizing with a shock what the "monkey meat" really is.

Kon Ichikawa stated in a Criterion Collection interview that he had witnessed the destruction of the atom bomb first hand, and had felt since then that he had to speak out against the horrors of war, despite the many comedies that made up most of his early career.

The actors were fed little and were not allowed to brush their teeth or cut their nails to make it look more realistic, but doctors were on set constantly.

[6] Mickey Curtis said, also in a Criterion Collection interview, that he did not think he was a good actor, but Ichikawa said he just needed to act naturally.

Also included is a video introduction with Japanese film scholar Donald Richie and a booklet with an essay on Fires on the Plain by Chuck Stephens.

[14] In its early release in the United States, many American critics dismissed Fires on the Plain as a gratuitously bleak anti-war film.

He notes however, "this is a tribute to its maker, for it is perfectly obvious to me that Kon Ichikawa, the director, intended it to be a brutally realistic contemplation of one aspect of war."

He points out, "...with all the horror in it, there are snatches of poetry, too..." He ends the review commenting that the only audience who would enjoy the film were those with bitter memories towards the Japanese held over from World War II.

Variety's review is more positive than the New York Times, calling it, "one of the most searing pacifistic comments on war yet made... it is a bone hard, forthright film.

"[16] Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader said: "No other film on the horrors of war has gone anywhere near as far as Kon Ichikawa's 1959 Japanese feature.

Rather than build his story around big explosions and the thrill of battle, Ichikawa instead brings the human drama front and center, directing his spotlight on a soldier who is left to his own devices when the guns stop blazing.

[23] Alexander Jacoby has written: "The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain differ in approach – the one sentimental, the other visceral, rather in the manner of the American Vietnam movie of later years.

The comparison is telling: just as Hollywood has largely failed to deal with the politics of US involvement in Vietnam, preferring to focus on the individual sufferings on American soldiers, so Ichikawa's war films make only a token acknowledgement of wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, and largely buy into assumptions of Japanese victimhood in World War II – assumptions which to this day remain too widespread in the country."

[24] Max Tessier has called Ichikawa a cinematic entomologist because he "studies, dissects and manipulates" his human characters.

Tessier calls Fires on the Plain the summit of this tendency in Ichikawa's work, and "one of the blackest films ever made."

[25] James Quandt calls Ichikawa a materialist, noting that he represents abstract concepts in simple objects.

[26] Audie Bock points out that in the novel the narrator is in Japan with a Christian view of life, while the film ends with Tamura walking, hands up into gunfire.

[32] Film critic Chuck Stephens, in his essay Both Ends Burning for the Criterion Collection release of Fires on the Plain, said the following about Ichikawa : "At once a consummate professional and commercially successful studio team player and an idiosyncratic artist whose bravest films-often displaying a thoroughly odd obsession (to borrow the title of one of his most brilliantly sardonic black comedies) with fusing the brightest and bleakest aspects of human nature-were passionately personal (if not political or polemical) prefigurations of the Japanese new wave, has always had a gift for crystallizing contradiction.

He does not put on the pained facial expression and the strained walk typical of the genre, but instead staggers confused through the film more like a drunk man.

Sato says that this gives the film its black-comic style which results from watching a man trying to maintain his human dignity in a situation which makes this impossible.

[35] Quandt notes that Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, wrote the script to the film and contributed this sardonic wit.