We don't expect a happy ending in Beasts Head for Home

The 3rd section of Kobo Abe's Beasts Head for Home (1957) brings the two travelers - the young and naive Kyuzo headed for his homeland, Japan, and the older man who's taken the lead on this entire trek, Ko - at last to a small town that seems to be a Chinese military encampment. After several weeks of enduring hardships that nearly killed both men, they now get reasonably good housing provided by a Chinese "general" (it's hinted that rank means little in this army, as there are more officers than rank-and-file enlisted men), along w/ a promise of conveyance to truck or van to the coastal town of their destination. Seems good, but we can also see that Ko is in the process of setting Kyuzo up for a fall; Ko admits to Kyuzo that's he's smuggling raw heroin and that he's a "wanted man" (Kyuzo has already figured out some of this); he gets Kyuzo to wear the heavy jacket he's toted through the entire trek - weighted with packets of the drug - and he uses Kyuzo's hoarded money to pay for their passage - promising Kyuzo that he'll get a large cut of the profits from the smuggling. All very doubtful - he's letting Kyuzo carry all the risk and he'll no doubt cut him loose when and if he unloads the heroin. Though some of the details are still foggy to me even 3/4 of the way through the novel, it's a pretty good adventure story with some really powerful scenes along the way: the encampment in a ruined brick kiln at which Kyuzo stumbles on the mummified remains of a family, the desperate attempts to keep warm by igniting clumps of grass. What about the title, though? There's a reference in part 3 to human beings as not much different from wild beasts - but it still seems a strange title, as this is by no means a conventional odyssey or a "homeward bound"journey; in fact, Kyuzo doesn't really have a home - he's escaping from his home town, which is under Soviet rule, and heading toward a country he's never seen (at least I think that's so - details are scarce). Strange title to be sure.