The Graves of ‘Three Thousand Soldiers’: A Study and Translation of Oda Makoto’s ‘Sanzen gunpei’ no haka Roman Rosenbaum The University of Sydney Oda Makoto 小田実 (1932–2007) was one of contemporary Japan’s most unswerving social critics and novelists. He was born in Osaka and witnessed the fire-bombings at the end of the Pacific War. It was this unique experience of belonging to the cohort of people who came of age during the era of scorched earth (yakeato jidai) that would compel him to become one of Japan’s most eloquent postwar iconoclasts. He began his literary career at an unusually early stage of his life. At seventeen and still in second grade at high school, he composed the long novel Memorandum of the Day After Tomorrow (Asatte no shuki), which was praised by his acquaintance the novelist Nakamura Shinichirō and was published in 1951 by the enigmatic editor of Kawade shobō, Sakamoto Kazuki. This very early success triggered Oda’s literary career, which started in earnest after he returned to Japan from the United States where he had studied at Harvard University as a Fulbright scholar in 1959. Following his studies he travelled widely throughout Asia on his way back to Japan and wrote I Will Look at Anything, which became an instant bestseller after its publication in 1961. Oda’s writings were fuelled by constant overseas travel and the short story translated here is a result of his stay in West Berlin as a Cultural Exchange scholar from 1985 to 1987. It confronts many of the myths surrounding the wartime atrocities committed by Germany and Japan. One of the finest examples of cross-cultural novelistic discourse, it offers a unique insight into German–Japanese discourse formation. Oda’s unique sense of estrangement at the same time disturbs and liberates readers through