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Private Tamura, sick with tuberculosis on Leyte, is sent away by his squad leader to a field hospital with a few sweet potatoes. The hospital refuses to admit a patient who brings no food, and his unit refuses to take him back; he is told to use his hand grenade on himself if he is turned away. The army is starving, so a sick man becomes a burden that neither institution will carry, and he is left to wander the island alone.
Starving and near collapse, Tamura rejoins two soldiers, Nagamatsu and Yasuda. They feed him dried 'monkey' meat, and he later realizes it is the flesh of other Japanese stragglers whom Nagamatsu shoots. The partnership breaks down when Nagamatsu kills Yasuda for food, and Tamura shoots Nagamatsu. This shows cannibalism arriving by increments: from eating the dead, to eating without asking what the meat is, to hunting the living.
Tamura's refusal to eat human flesh does not come from reasoning. The novel suggests that under extreme privation, moral limits may survive as bodily reflexes rather than principles. As a result, the survivor cannot fully claim credit for his own restraint.
The whole account is written after the war by a man confined in a psychiatric hospital. He has lost his memory of the period after he shot Nagamatsu, and he admits he may be misremembering or reshaping events, including whether he truly never ate. Reading war testimony this way means treating the survivor's narrative as a reconstruction shaped by guilt. The gaps and self-justifications are evidence in themselves, not flaws in the record.