Fires on the Plain, written by Shohei Ooka in 1952, awarded the Yomiuri Prize and translated into English by Ivan Morris in 1957, is generally recognized to be the most important Japanese novel to have come out of the last war.
In this novel he used an unusual rhetorical style, which is rather avoided by contemporary novelists. The most interesting device of his rhetoric is seen in the abundant use of figurative expressions, especially simile and metaphor. The former is classified into descriptive and intensifying similes, while the latter into living and dead metaphors. Intensifying simile and dead metaphor are generally used as idiomatic expressions in everyday speech without so much literary consciousness. On the other hand, descriptive similie and living metaphor are used intentionally to make the descriptions more vivid and effective. In this paper, the writer compared the original Japanese version to its English translation and investigated the linguistic and rhetorical functions of simile and metaphor.