Kawamura Haruki is already a sailor, but the wartime Imperial Japanese Navy sends him to New Georgia, part of the Solomon Islands. His brothers are in the war also, and he holds a treasured letter from one of them, folded neatly and kept hidden in his pants cuff. He’s originally from a farm outside of Hiroshima, and the fate of one his brothers seems grim. The fictional narrative, which draws from historical sources, traces his unit’s trek across the jungle in the Solomon Islands as they fight a losing battle that becomes even worse in the Philippines. On a Luzon mountain, the haggard crew faces chronic shortages of supplies and begins to face starvation. The news that Haruki receives is sparse, often in the form of rumors, and as he faces jungle rot and malaria, the prospects are slim that he and his thinning unit can survive the war without any kind of discernible leadership: “Sometimes I wonder if we lost because we didn’t disobey loud enough.” Isoyama, a pseudonymous Filipino American writer, has done an admirable job of researching contemporary texts to get inside the psyches of Japanese soldiers during the war. Haruki’s story is plausible, detailed, and suspenseful, with restrained emotions, attention to the natural world, and carefully calculated dialogue. The author has captured the sights and sounds of the jungle and the conflict, but also the multilingual nature of the Pacific theater, with Japanese, English, and Tagalog alongside some Japanese script. The book’s final third is a bit repetitive, but this work stands out as one that seeks to understand its era.