A beautifully written Japanese soldier’s memoir of the North Borneo tragedy of 1945, An End to a War tells the story of Ueno Itsuyoshi, a late draftee into the Japanese Army in World War II. Ueno and his fellow soldiers came to Borneo expecting to fight and die for the Emperor, but instead most died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. This is undoubtedly the best eye-witness description we have of the horror of the death marches that took the lives of many thousands of Japanese, Australian, British and, indirectly, local people. Few of those who were ordered to march from the east coast ever arrived at their destinations on the west coast. Ueno’s story provides a broader context to the infamous Sandakan-Ranau death marches of Allied POWs, a few of whom he met briefly on his trek.