Laurence Van Der Post著 「The seed and the sower」Vintage classics刊 p．17より抜粋

For this was the hour at which the Japanese usually came for him; this was the time of night when they usually did their torturing.

Yes, the details of it were not importnat, he said, but for weeks they had been torturing him, and the interesting thing was they did it always at night.

I might smile and think him fanciful as I did about his belief that Hara was an embodiment of a myth more than a conscious individual being, even through I had seen for myself how moon-swung Hara and his countrymen were.

But that was by no means all there was to it. That was only the elementary beginning of it all. The more complete truth was: they were all still deeply submerged like animals, insects and plants in the succession of the hours, the movement of day into night and of the days into their lunar months and the months into their seasons.

They were subject to cosmic rhythm and movement and ruled by cosmic forces beyond their control to an extent undreamt of in the European mind and philosophy.

He would have more to say of that presently, but all he had to stress at the moment was this: it was only at night that people so submerged in the raw elements of nature could discover sufficiently the night within themselves－could go down far enough with sun and sunlight into that bottom of their own unlit natures, where torture was not only natural but inevitable, like the tides of the sea.

Laurence Van Der Post著 「The seed and the sower」Vintage classics刊 pp.15-16より抜粋

引用部最後の朱字部分は我々日本人のかなり痛いところを突かれている様な気がします・・。
また「飢えたコウモリの様な彼等(日本人)種族の神々」とは、前掲「魔の系譜」(pp．160-161)引用部と何らかの関連性があるのではないかと考えさせられます。
とはいえ、一方において私は日本の神々に親しみを感じておりますので、無理解な批判は大変不愉快に思います。しかし同時に引用部の様な経験をされた方が真摯、率直に述べる内容にも何らかの正当性、妥当性があるとも考えます。

He can’t help himself, John Lawrence had said. It is not he but an act of Japanese gods in him, don’t you see?
You remember what the moon does to him!
And indeed I remembered.
The attraction, both the keen conscious and the deep, submerged attraction, that all the Japanese feel for the moon seemed to come to a point in Hara.
If ever there was a moon-swung, moon-haunted, moon-drawn soul it was he.
As the moon waxed-and how it waxed in the soft, velvet sky of Insulinda, how it grew and seemed to swell to double its normal gold and mystically burning proportions in that soft, elastic air; how it swung calmly over the great volcanic valleys like a sacred lamp, while the ground mist, mingling with the smell of cloves, cinnamon and all the fragrant spices of Insulinda drifted among the soaring tree trunks like incense round the lacquered columns of a sequined temple-Yes! As this unbelievable moon expanded and spread its gold among the blackness of our jungle night, we saw it draw a far tide of mythological frenzy to the full in Hara’s blood.
Seven days, three days before and three days after and on the day of full moon itself, were always our days of greatest danger with Hara.
Most of his worst beatings and all his killings took place then.
But once the beating was over and moon waning, he would be, for him, extra-ordinarily generous to us.
It was as if the beating and killing had purged him of impurities of spirit, of madness and evil in some strange after he had cut off the head of one of us, I remembered seeing him talking to Lawrence and being struck by the fact that he had an expression of purified, of youthful and almost springlike innocence on his face, as if the sacrifice of the life of an innocent British aircraftman the night before, had redeemed him from all original as well as private and personal sin, and appeased for the time the hungry bat-like gods of his race.