Wakao also thinks herself responsible for the deaths of the three men, as well as a nurse who she broght with her to the field hospital. Masumura's films, based on the few I've been able to see, have been about the irrationality of love. Death is likewise presented as having no logic with soldiers dying from disease if not bullets. One of the officers describes soldiers as not humans but weapons. Masumura shows war as reducing everything and everyone to commodities. Soldiers are reduced to missing body parts, at the end of a major battle Wakao discovers the dead stripped of all clothing and weapons. Wakao is valued, or perhaps more correctly, devalued, as an object for sexual release. There are no conventional scenes of sex which is in keeping with the exploration of lesbianism in Manji, or the focusing on women as a collection of parts in Blind Beast.

The film's anti-war stance is clear when the armless soldiers discusses how another double amputee was institutionalized to avoid letting the Japanese citizens know how terrible war is. Masumura's critical eye extends to the blind patriotism is his characters, with the nurses taking up arms in a hopeless battle. For Masumura, war is hell, but being a survivor is of no comfort.