Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Deep in the jungle of a small island in the Philippines, young Japanese lieutenant Hiroo Onoda and his three fellow guerrillas "set out on their way for the decades that lie ahead". The last survivor, and certain that the end of the war is nothing more than a lie from the enemy, Onoda will take almost thirty years to be convinced to finally surrender.. The Twilight of the World is a story of survival, of honor, of stoicism, and of an individual confronting, to the brink of madness, the destructive forces of civilization and indifferent nature.. A full plate, therefore, for film director Werner Herzog, who here confirms himself to be a prose writer of impressive firmness and suggestive power.. His account, based on interviews he conducted in person, embraces imaginative fluidity to try to reconstruct in detail not only the facts, but also their aesthetic and philosophical implications.. The details sometimes sound hallucinogenic: a bag of dirty clothes swells with a mold that looks like cotton candy, a piece of gum on a tree trunk becomes the unmistakable sign of an ambush. Onoda walks backwards so that his footprints point in the opposite direction and mislead the enemy.. In the sky, in print and on radio broadcasts, signs of progress may seem incomprehensible to you.: an artificial satellite traveling among the stars, a newspaper page filled with advertisements, an airplane flying without propellers. Onoda killed innocent people, became a local legend, was pardoned by the Philippine government and received a hero's welcome in Japan after turning himself in.. He lived for some time in Brazil and died at the age of 91, in Tokyo.. Herzog does not gloss over the ambiguities of this extraordinary real-life case.. On the contrary, it opens space for doubt, poetry and dreams to take us far beyond the conventional, to the realm of stories that resist being deciphered.