The Narrow Road to the Deep North (38 page)

It was evident to Sato that his answer didn’t make much sense to the old soldier. And so, pushing two fingers gently into one side of Nakamura’s belly, he continued.

If I am to remove an appendix, I will proceed in here, separate the muscles according to the pattern and structure that I was taught at Kyushu, and there be able to remove the inflamed appendix with the least danger and stress for the patient.

This led them to talking about Kyushu, one of Japan’s great universities for training doctors. Nakamura remembered reading a story in a newspaper about some doctors who were tried and jailed for what the Americans claimed was the vivisection of live American airmen, without the use of anaesthetics. The reports and convictions had angered Nakamura at the time, and he now brought the subject up with some fury, concluding vehemently—

American lies!

Sato looked up from the
go
table, then back, placing a black stone down.

I was there, Mr Kimura, said Sato.

Nakamura stared at Sato, till the humble surgeon raised his eyes and stared back with strange intensity.

I was an intern there near the war’s end, under Professor Fukujori Ishiyama. One day I was asked to fetch a US airman from a ward where he was under guard. He was so tall, with a very narrow nose and red curly hair. He had a wound from where he had been shot by a soldier who had helped capture him, but he trusted me. I showed him the gurney and he got himself on it. I had been told to take him not to the operating theatre but to a dissection room in the anatomy department.

Nakamura was intrigued.

And there?

And there he trusted me again. I pointed to the dissection table. The room was crowded with several doctors, nurses and other interns, as well as some army officers. Professor Ishiyama hadn’t yet arrived. The American actually stood up and then laid himself down on the dissection table. And winked at me. You know how the Americans wink. Winked and smiled. As if I was in on a joke with him.

And then, said Nakamura, he was anaesthetised, and Professor Ishiyama operated on his wound.

Sato held another
go
stone in the palm of his hand, rubbing his thumb back and forth over its polished, lens-shaped sphere, as if massaging a blind black eye.

No, said Sato. Two orderlies bound his limbs, torso and head to the table with leather belts. Professor Ishiyama arrived while this was going on and began addressing the others. He spoke of how the dissection of subjects before death helped obtain important scientific data that would help our soldiers in the great battles to come. Such work was not easy, but all great scientific achievement required sacrifice and commitment. In this way, as doctors and scientists, they were able to prove themselves worthy servants of the Emperor.

Nakamura looked at the
go
board but his thoughts were no longer with the game.

I remember feeling proud to be there, said Sato.

All that Sato was saying made perfect sense to Nakamura—after all, the same argument, formulated differently for different circumstances, had determined his entire adult life, and though he did not think this, the familiar patterns and rhythms of Sato’s story reassured Nakamura that Professor Ishiyama, even if he didn’t use anaesthetic, was acting correctly and ethically.

And still the American didn’t struggle, continued Sato. He couldn’t dream of what was about to happen to him. Before Professor Ishiyama began we all bowed towards the patient, as though it were a copyright operation. Maybe that reassured him. Professor Ishiyama first cut into his abdomen and cut away part of his liver, then sewed the wound up. Next he removed the gall bladder and a section of his stomach. The American, who looked an intelligent and vital young man at the beginning, now looked old and weak. His mouth was gagged but he was quickly beyond any screaming. Finally, Professor Ishiyama removed his heart. It was still beating. When he put it on the scales the weights trembled.

Sato’s story ran over Nakamura like a rising river over a boulder outcrop. It trickled around him, then it flushed over him, and finally it covered him. But nothing in him moved. And while it meant that all that the Americans said was true, and that he, Nakamura, had been wrong, the reasons for which it had been done made such complete sense to Nakamura that he felt there was nothing remarkable about this story of a man being cut up while alive and fully conscious.

It felt strange, but at first I didn’t think so much about it, continued Sato. It was war, after all. And then over the next few days there were other operations on other airmen—opening up the mediastinum of one, severing the facial nerve roots on another. At the last I attended they made four holes in the serviceman’s skull, then inserted a knife into the brain to see what would happen.

They were playing
go
in a small garden that had been made for the staff. It was spring, and when Sato halted, Nakamura could hear early evening birdsong. There was a maple tree that turned the last long rays of sunlight into shimmering threads of dark and light.

After the war Professor Ishiyama hanged himself in prison, Sato said. They got some others, sentenced them to death, then commuted their sentences and finally let them all go free. I thought for a time I might be tried too, but now that time is long past. The Americans want it forgotten, and so do we.

Sato pushed the paper he had been reading across to Nakamura.

Look at this, he said.

He pointed to a small article accompanying a photo. It was about the charitable work of Mr Ryoichi Naito, the founder of the Japan Blood Bank, a successful company that bought and sold blood.

I have colleagues who worked with Mr Naito in Manchukuo. Mr Naito was one of the leaders of our very best scientists in similar work there. Vivisection. And many other things. Testing biological weapons on prisoners. Anthrax. Bubonic plague, too, I am told. Testing flamethrowers and grenades on prisoners. It was a large operation with support at the highest levels. Today Mr Naito is a well-respected figure. And why? Because neither our government nor the Americans want to dig up the past. The Americans are interested in our biological warfare work; it helps them prepare for war against the Soviets. We tested these weapons on the Chinese; they want to use them on the Koreans. I mean, you got hanged if you were unlucky or unimportant. Or Korean. But the Americans want to do business now.

We, too, are victims of the war, said Nakamura.

Sato said nothing. Nakamura felt in the deepest part of his being that he, like the Japanese people, was an honourable, good man falsely accused. A victim, yes—him, Ikuko, his executed comrades, Japan itself. This sentiment explained to him all that had befallen him, even lent a certain grandeur to his miserable life of secrets and evasions, of false identities and growing distance from other people. But he felt excited by Sato’s story. A distant prospect of some divine liberation seemed to exist within it.

You know that strange sound near an earthquake’s end? Sato asked. In the dying light his weary face was growing dim. After the shaking and wild swaying is done, Sato went on, and all things—hung paintings, mirrors, windows in their frames, keys on hooks—all things shudder and make this strange sound? And outside, everything you know may have vanished forever?

Of course, Nakamura said.

As if the world is making this shimmering sound?

Yes, Nakamura said.

When the stainless-steel pan of the dissection room scales was being rattled by the American’s heart, that’s what it was like. As if the world was trembling.

Sato pulled his face into a strange smile.

You know why he trusted me?

Professor Ishiyama?

No, the American airman.

No.

Because he thought my white coat meant I would help him.

NAKAMURA AND SATO
never spoke of Sato’s past again. But something in his story began to trouble Nakamura. Over the following months their games of
go
grew less frequent. Nakamura now found the surgeon—who had formerly seemed to him such an interesting and genial companion—somehow dull and tedious, and the games became a burden to be endured rather than a pleasure to be enjoyed. And he sensed the feeling was, in some strange, inexplicable way, becoming mutual. Sato stopped turning up in the storeroom office to have a smoke with Nakamura, and Nakamura found himself avoiding those parts of the hospital where Sato might be found. Finally, they stopped playing
go
altogether.

As he grew distant with Sato, Nakamura drew closer to other people, found the strength within himself to somehow be more truthful as a human being. He came to understand that there were many men like him—proud, good men who had done their duty and were determined not to be ashamed—who also saw themselves as victims of the war. And he realised that the period of no one being who they said they were and no one being what they seemed and everyone remembering only the things that could be spoken about had now ended. As the last of the remaining imprisoned war criminals were released, Nakamura gave up any pretence of subterfuge, and, resolving that it was best to live a life of honour by acknowledging the truth, he reverted to his real name. The following year he married Ikuko.

They had two daughters, healthy children who, as they grew up, came to deeply love their gentle father. At the age of six, their younger daughter, Fuyuko, nearly died after being hit by a school bus. Fuyuko’s overriding memory of that time was of her father by her bedside day and night, head bowed. He almost seemed to his daughters to be of another world, misbuttoning shirts, forgetting to wear a belt, and concerned not to hurt spiders, which he would catch and take outside, or mosquitoes, which he would refuse to swat.

He alone sensed the strangeness at the heart of his transformation into his idea of a good man. Was it hypocrisy? Was it atonement? Guilt? Shame? Was it deliberate or unconscious? Was it a lie or was it the truth? He had, after all, overseen many deaths—perhaps, he sometimes felt, with an almost savage pride that he found undeniable and not in the least contradictory, he had even been party to some deaths. But he felt no responsibility, and time eroded his memory of his crimes and allowed his memory instead to nurture stories of goodness and extenuating circumstance. As the years passed, he found he was haunted only by the way he was haunted by so little of it.

More out of curiosity than optimism, Nakamura applied for a position with the Japan Blood Bank in the spring of 1959. To his surprise, he got an interview. He took the train to Osaka early on a winter morning. At the Japan Blood Bank’s headquarters he was made to wait till almost lunchtime, when he was finally ushered not into a meeting room as he had expected, but a large executive’s office. He was seated and again told to wait. There was no one there. After a quarter of an hour, the door behind him opened and a voice told him not to turn around and look but to stay seated. He felt fingers trace a crescent across the back of his neck. And then, behind him, a man’s voice began reciting:

Of course, Nakamura knew
Umi Yukaba
, the ancient poem that had become so popular during the war that every radio announcement of a battle—in which it was invariably announced that Japanese soldiers had met with honourable deaths rather than the dishonour of surrender—began with it. Nakamura recited the last two lines as if they were a password:

He felt the hand on his neck once more.

Such a good neck, a great neck, said the man behind him.

Nakamura turned and looked up. The hair had grown white and spiky, the body burlier, but the face, albeit sagging a little more and now smiling, remained a shark fin.

I had to see your neck. I just had to be sure you were the man I thought you were. You see, I never forget.

When he caught Nakamura’s querying look, Kota explained.

Some old Manchukuo comrades felt I might do some good work here.

The rest of Nakamura’s interview was perfunctory, as though everything was long ago settled. As he went to leave, Kota congratulated him on his new position. On returning home that evening, Nakamura almost sobbed when he told Ikuko what had happened.

What, he asked Ikuko, can prepare you for such kindness?

Many decades later, a young Japanese nationalist journalist, Taro Ootomo, who wished to rectify the many misunderstandings that had grown about Japan’s role in the Greater East Asia War, went to interview the distinguished soldier, Shiro Kota, who was now one hundred and five. He had read some articles Kota had published in some Zen magazines in the late 1950s that spoke of the deep spiritual basis of Japanese
bushido
. Kota had argued that it was the way the Japanese—inspired by Zen—had been able to recognise that there was ultimately no distinction between life and death that had rendered them such a formidable military power, in spite of their material shortcomings. But when Taro Ootomo went with ward officials and a local TV crew to congratulate Kota on his one hundred and fifth birthday, there was no one home.

Taro Ootomo was young and keen, and he persisted, going to the length of visiting Kota’s elderly daughter, Ryoko, to reassure her of his good intentions, hoping through her some entree to the old veteran. But Ryoko discouraged Taro Ootomo, saying her father was not up to talking to strangers, particularly about the war and his service, which was so easily misrepresented. He was attempting in his great old age to become a living Buddha, she told Taro Ootomo.

It was clear to Ootomo that Ryoko had little interest in her father. Deciding it was best to ignore her, he began to organise a celebration of Kota’s one hundred and fifth birthday with some nationalist friends. It would be respectful and dignified, and would seek to honour war veterans as well as to publicise the misunderstood spiritual basis of Japan’s twentieth-century wars. But each time Ootomo went to visit Kota, no one seemed to be at home.