Mr. Gray still remembers the documentary “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007), filmed by Werner Herzog in Antarctica. It was not just a documentary, but a contemplative-poetic look at the landscape (and the sea), where everything seems alien and at the same time drawn from the deep past of the Earth.

The Duke proves in everything he does that he is much more than a director, screenwriter, photographer or writer. That’s why he was delighted to see that this incredible German (how interesting it would be if this guy tried to transfer the book of his countryman Sembald to the cinema) published his first novel a few months ago (it had not yet been released in Greek). Title: The Twilight World, published by The Bodley Head, London, trans. Michael Hoffman, p. 134.

The story is true, but it has all the creative exaggerations that suit the writer’s mind: deep in the jungles of a Philippine island in 1944, Japanese lieutenant Hiro Onoda receives an order from his commander: “Hold the island until the Imperial Army returns.” Everyone retreats. Onoda sits motionless in his seat. Initially, he will have two other companions left behind. Onoda lets them know that the war is not over yet.

“Silent moon, I may look like a vagabond or a beggar / But you see the glory of my soul.”

March 1974: Onoda is still in hiding, waiting for a major counterattack from the Imperial Army. Instead, his old commander in civilian clothes will appear. He urges him over the speakerphone to surrender. He has done his duty as a soldier and what’s more, now he can sleep peacefully. Onoda complies.

The story seems unrealistic, but it is completely true and the Duke undertakes to “fill” this thirty-year gap, which seems to be a parallel universe in which the war did not end in 1945.

Immersed in memories of the war, but mainly of his pre-war family life, immersed in a world of dreams and nightmares, Onoda seems sublime in an archetypal ducal natural environment: an extension of the hero’s soul, this nest. and the grave at the same time, reality and fantasy, damnation and redemption.

Herzog will overtake Onoda in life (he died in 2014 at the age of 91). He read him a song he sang to himself in the jungle: “Silent moon, I may look like a vagabond or a beggar / But you see the glory of my soul.”