humanist. James Quandt calls Ichikawa a materialist, noting that he represents abstract concepts in simple objects. In Fires on the Plain, life and death are carried by Tamura in the objects of salt and a grenade respectively. Christianity Audie Bock points out that in the novel the narrator is in Japan with a Christian view of life, while the film ends with Tamura walking, hands up into gunfire. When first shown in London, critics complained about this changed ending. By ending with the hero in a hospital meditating on the past, the novel implied a faith in man and the possibility of progress. However Ichikawa's film rejects faith. Tamura puts his faith in man by walking towards the villagers, and he is shot. The individual Tamura may be purified at the end of the film, but the world and mankind are not. Asked about the controversial change in ending, in which the narrator apparently dies rather than survive, Ichikawa replied, "I let him die... I thought he should rest peacefully in the world of death. The death was my salvation for him." Further, the main character in the film does not have the Christian outlook that narrator of the novel has. Ichikawa explained, "...it somehow didn't seem plausible to show a Japanese soldier saying 'Amen'." Degradation Some critics have seen in Fires on the Plain themes of degradation and brutality. Ichikawa has said that things the characters do, such as cannibalism, are such low acts, that if the protagonist, Tamura did them, he would've crossed such a low that he'd be unredeemable and Ichikawa commented that Fires on the Plain is his attempt to show ""the limits in which moral existence is possible." Others, such as Chuck Stephens, note that Ichikawa occasionally mixes black humour and degradation, like in a scene where soldiers exchange boots, each getting a better pair, until when Tamura looks down at the boots, they are completely soleless. Film critic Chuck Stephens, in his essay Both Ends Burning for the Criterion Collection release of Fires on the Plain, said the following about Ichikawa : "At once a consummate professional and commercially successful studio team player and an idiosyncratic artist whose bravest films-often displaying a thoroughly odd obsession (to borrow the title of one of his most brilliantly sardonic black comedies) with fusing the brightest and bleakest aspects of human nature-were passionately personal (if not political or