This novel uses the repeated motif and imagery of eyes throughout, particularly of the narrator, Mitsu, as he lost an eye as a child. He remarks early in the novel that his injured eye “was a lone sentry that I’d hired to keep watch on the forest of the night within me, and in doing so I’d forced myself to practice observing my own interior.” Throughout the novel, Mitsu learns more about himself through his responses to the events in the valley, and about his heritage and personal history as he uncovers the truth about the uprising of 1860. Mitsu assigning his lost eye the task of introspection also shows his character as a more academic, intellectual character, in opposition to Taka’s emotional volatility.

The imagery of eyes comes up again when Mitsu reflects on his wife’s drinking. He observes that “when she drank, her eyes became unusually bloodshot; the fact worried her” and, when she vows to stop drinking, that her eyes are instead “bloodshot with sleep.” This imagery of Natsumi’s red eyes becomes more sinister when she tells Mitsu, “In Korean folk tales they say that a woman whose eyes are red like plums has eaten human flesh.” The imagery of the red eyes is brought up again when Mitsu dismembers the pheasants; in this instance, though, the pheasants’ eyes are red because they have died, and Mitsu has slit the membrane with his fingernail.

That the folk tale about the red eyes is Korean is not a coincidence. This novel comments heavily on the tense relationships between the Korean and Japanese members of the village. The historical context for this is that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Korean people were brought to many areas of Japan as forced labor for industries like forestry and agriculture. The situation in the village in this novel is that, while the Koreans have assimilated to Japanese society somewhat, there is still unease. This has continued in Japan until the current day, and the descendants of these Koreans, known as zainichi, suffer from both institutional and social discrimination.

This novel is narrated in the first person by a character, Mitsu, who discovers that what he thought he knew about his family history is unreliable. As Mitsu makes each new discovery about his great-grandfather’s brother, and the events following the 1860 uprising, the reader takes what he learns at face value. Mitsu is a reliable narrator, but he is moving through uncertainty. In this way, the author has created intrigue by showing two levels of suspense: both what is happening to the narrator in the “present” time of the story, and his repeated revelations and relearning of what happened in the “past” time of the story. In addition to this, what Mitsu relays to the reader is accurate and reliable, but his personal assessments and predictions are faulty.