The Phantom Speaks：The Invisibility of War Responsibility in Hino Ashihei’s Words from the Phantom

This paper examines Hino Ashihei’s Words from the Phantom (1949), a postwar detective story that addresses war crimes committed in the Philippines by a Japanese soldier. The narrative begins with the mysterious suicide of Sako Yūtarō, a repatriated soldier haunted by the “phantom” of Ricardo Manalo, a Filipino that he had killed during the war. Told from the perspective of a first-person narrator, the story recounts how Sako was driven to exhaustion and eventual suicide by Manalo’s repeated resurrections and vengeful attacks. Prior research has critically noted that the detective-style narrative downplays Sako’s responsibility for his war crimes. This paper takes this critique further by exploring in detail how the narrator -the “I”- and the narrative structure obscure Sako’s wartime culpability. Simultaneously, the text incorporates elements that are beyond the narrator’s control, such as Sako’s suicide note and a Tagalog letter from Manalo. These elements diverge from the narrator’s framing and introduce contradictions. By analyzing these contradictions, this paper demonstrates how the text creates dissonances that challenge the narrator’s authority and illuminate the multifaceted nature of criminal responsibility. Ultimately, the study highlights the novel’s means of representing such responsibility by juxtaposing the narrator’s controlling perspective with textual elements that resist such control.