One day at the end of the afternoon, when she was returning home, Vera saw Tamio. He was bundled in a thick black coat that Vera recognised as belonging to the old uncle. His trousers were short and his ankles were bare. He was walking slowly and staring as if he might not see her, or if he did see her, as if he were angry. She stopped and held out her hand. When you are cold in the street sometimes you don’t see anyone.
‘Tamio,’ she said.
He stopped obediently as if she had summoned him.
‘Where have you been?’
He gestured up the hill. ‘We are all there,’ he said. ‘All day long.’
‘Where?’ Vera knew the others in the town didn’t trust her, by the way they kept information from her.
‘In the mountains, in the trees. We go to the kilns,’ he said. He relented.
‘Are you still burning wood to make charcoal?’
It was green wood now, he explained. They were running out of wood that had been cut in years before.
‘It must be warm by the fire,’ said Vera.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but not for the feet.’
He came into Keiko’s house for tea. And she saw that he walked like an old man, because his feet were frozen and blistered.
‘Still, all the news from China is good,’ he said. ‘Soon the war will be won.’
‘Which war?’ asked Vera, because now Ikkanshi had told her, there was fighting in Russia too.
‘The grand “Holy War in Asia” to get rid of the white colonists, and to enshrine Japan at its head. We should be proud that we can give up certain things.’
Vera asked, ‘What can we give? We have so little already. There is not enough wood to burn. The roads are full of holes so that the bicycles fall in. The schoolhouse is shabby and there were no notebooks to write in last year; now what will the students do?’
The other two looked at her silently.
She dared say it but they could not.
Every morning Keiko and Vera had their coffee. It was a habit they both had from James. They loved to make and to drink it. Keiko boiled the water in the kettle on the
irori,
and Vera ground the beans. They sat together, solemnly, and drank the hot, thick black liquid. It made them believe that there was still a world where there was no war, and that sometime that world would return.
‘Vera,’ whispered Keiko one morning after she had put her cup down, and was about to step out of the door to go to work, ‘when did it happen that the street corner had four observers on it, one for each direction? Look –’
Vera came to the door and looked. They stood shivering in the damp. They knew these observers. They were friends and neighbours. And Vera remembered the words Ikkanshi-san had told her never to repeat:
kuro taniwa.
In the darkest and coldest days of January, families were asked to set aside one day a month on which they would not eat. But even that was not as bad as the day that Keiko came home from her day on the rafts without her coffee. ‘Coffee is no longer allowed,’ she said,
It was the first, and only time Vera saw her cry.
* * *
One day Vera saw Bamboo-san, the basket maker, as he limped down the street, bent under his backpack of tools, which was dusted all over with powdery snow.
‘What do you know about my grandfather?’ she asked. ‘Or my father?’
‘I know nothing special,’ he said. ‘Only what people know.’
‘What do people know then?’
‘What do you want to know about what people know?’ he asked. His old teeth poked out from under his drawn-back lip. His skin was brown, like a beetle’s hard back.
‘There are stories,’ he said. ‘Stories that are told and told. They belong to the people who tell them, not the people who are in them. The one who is the storyteller is the one who collects. Maybe he is lame. Maybe he lives alone and has no one to talk to. Then he will remember them, go over them in his mind, so the stories are not lost. This is an old tradition. Now not so many will follow. When the storyteller is ready, he will tell the story. You may be in the story. It is not finished. You may be part of the story of James Lowinger the Englishman who came here.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Vera said.
She walked away.
The ferry depended on the weather. In snow or storms it did not appear. Sometimes for weeks at a time Ikkanshi did not see it. He ate the fish he caught, and the potatoes the old women gardeners had discarded as being too small. He worked on his carpentry, noting how much of his new room had been completed since his last supply of materials – the boards which he had collected a little at a time, the nails
which he had fashioned out of bits of iron. This summer one man had replaced a wall in his hut and Ikkanshi took its refuse. It pleased him to do that. And so he became a carpenter and it was pleasurable to cut the boards to exact length, and fit them together. He planed and sanded each piece to look like the others. To choose a board for its merits and place it where its strengths would be maximised, its weakness minimised.
As he worked he reminded himself why he wanted a bigger house. It would only take more charcoal to heat it. It had to be to show that he was not afraid. That he was not in shame and that he was not hiding. Sometimes, now, he had a feeling of immense change. He might even call it hope. Perhaps the new room would be home to it.
In the evenings he listened to his radio. He longed to know, and he could get no truthful news from the government stations. However, his shortwave in which he had a little skill was of more use. On the twenty-fifth of November he made contact with an operator in Britain. He was able to convince him of his sympathies because of his good English. From him he heard that the civilians were being evacuated from Nanking, that Chiang Kai Shek had gone up the Yangtze to safety. And he was fearful of what might happen. But he had never in his worst dreams imagined how bad it was to be.
He spent the days from the tenth of December talking on the radio and alternately working on the
meito
he had put aside in the days of the early autumn.
When he heard that the inhabitants of Nanking could not escape across the Yangtze, that they were caught in a pack at the gates in the north wall, and then that the Japanese were shelling them, he was seized with fear. He had to disguise his emotions when he spoke to the radio operator in Surrey.
The man in Surrey told him that the men of Nanking were roped together in groups of hundreds and then, with
petrol thrown over them, they were burned alive. Women were raped and raped again and after the rapes, taken away by the soldiers to be raped at leisure wherever they found themselves domiciled.
How was it his fellow officers in training allowed the rape and murder of civilians? Had they nothing but bayonets for brains? ‘That is very terrible,’ Ikkanshi said to the radio operator. ‘These are things we do not know in Japan. Even the others, on the mainland, who listen to the news and talk at the newsstands, they do not know. I am sure of it.’
But he could tell the British man did not really believe him. Ikkanshi had become overnight a member of a monster race and that meant he was a monster too.
One incident he heard was that a Japanese soldier approached three old women sitting on a bench, asked for younger women, and when no younger women were produced, he shot all three dead. The officers could not or did not stop the soldiers from killing whoever guarded a gate or sat on a bench they might like to sit on. They had not a shred of authority to defend an order not to kill, not to steal, not to rape.
And the British were there to see. The Red Cross was there to see. The churches were there to see. They called the Japanese barbarians and they were not wrong. The firing squad, the eyes gouged out, the men doused in petrol and burned alive. Even the Germans appealed to Hitler to stop the Japanese in their killing.
Ikkanshi prayed, although he did not know to whom. Hope drained away. He was seized by the most terrible anger, his intestines coiling and knotting like a poisonous snake. He sat opposite his radio with its persistent static, its excited voices filling his head with images of brutality that he had, somehow, to acknowledge as part of what he loved. The Japanese Imperial Army was feasting on the bodies of the conquered. And all the world was watching.
Those days went on for ever, it seemed to him: he would sleep, and wake in the morning, and turn on the transmitter like a wretched addict seeking more of the drug that would destroy him. German, British, American voices expressed outrage at the Japanese barbarians who burned up the streets of the towns, and stabbed the children to stop their cries while they raped their mothers. Up and up went the estimates of civilian deaths. Thousands, tens of thousands. He too began to feel that the Japanese were a race not quite human. Who were these soldiers and what empire did they seek to establish? Not that of Ikkanshi.
On one of the last days of autumn there was a milky blue sky and sun, and the morning’s snow turned to dark stains on the stones. On that day the ferry appeared. The basket maker was on it. He could have come for no other reason than to see the sword polisher, for he was the only one there.
Bamboo – that was the name Ikkanshi borrowed from Vera for him – had his backpack. He sat down in the sun in a protected place, and worked with his bamboo and his hands on some creation. The sword polisher bowed to the man as he went by this way and that way later in the day, but neither of them broke the silence. When it was dark, Ikkanshi went inside. He did not wish to invite him to stay.
The basket maker must have slept in the temple, because the sword polisher saw a fire up there. He wondered if Bamboo had been sent to watch him.
In the morning Ikkanshi looked out and saw the ferry approach: the basket maker must have arranged for it to take him back. Bent over with his backpack, Bamboo limped to the dock. At that moment Ikkanshi envied him his freedom, the freedom to go back to the people.
Suddenly, he found himself running to catch up with him.
‘I can’t imagine you would find many baskets to mend,’ he said.
The basket maker showed his unattractive teeth. ‘I had another task.’
Ikkanshi did not ask him what it was. Instead he said, ‘On the island news passes you by, Ikkanshi-san. Or does it?’
He knew about the shortwave too, then.
‘I have the desire to know,’ Ikkanshi replied. ‘We must understand where we are being led.’
‘Down a fearsome path,’ the basket maker said, ‘a fearsome one. But it is not for the little man to disagree, not in his words. Of course, in your heart you can believe anything.’ He gave a toothless, unpleasant smile.
And therefore Ikkanshi knew he was not a bad man, but perhaps misled. He wanted to ask him who had sent him, but he was not certain he’d answer.
‘I must go to Toba for provisions,’ he said. ‘What better time than now?’
On the ferry they talked in a small way of village people and affairs. They discussed the girl Vera and what she would do for the winter, her safety. The basket maker said he would watch for her. Ikkanshi wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad. When he got to Toba, he waited for the basket maker to disappear up one of the winding streets, and then he went straight to find Keiko.
He came to her dark door when the fires were being lit for dinner. All up and down the streets the pathetic thin smoke columns rose. And the town was quiet, subdued. As if people knew: but surely they did not. The papers had said only they celebrated a great victory at Nanking. The children had been given a day off, and had made a parade.
Keiko received Ikkanshi only with a look and a bow; behind them was a long summer when she had avoided him. But between them the feelings had grown stronger.
Vera’s hair was like smoke too, in the dimness of the little house. It was cold there, colder than at his place.
Ikkanshi took Keiko’s hands and rubbed them between his own. Then he took Vera’s and rubbed them too.
‘We must talk,’ he said to the girl. ‘It is not for your ears.’
And she understood and because there was only the one room, she had either to go to bed, or go out. She took her towel and went: he presumed to the bath.
And he sat and poured his story out for Keiko.
‘Where were the officers, my old classmates?’ he said. ‘Had the soldiers, perhaps, killed their superior officers?’
She had no answers, but her attention was comforting. He told her that he assumed official orders had been to take no prisoners. Horrific as that was, there was a certain logic to it. The army was nearly destitute itself; they could not afford prisoners, having nowhere to put them and nothing to feed them, so it became necessary to kill prisoners. But how is this accomplished? Sheer numbers make it a hell on earth.
‘But did they teach you this, at officer school?’ Keiko asked. ‘Did they teach you how to make so many thousands of people die?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘They did not. I believe it is accomplished by means of hunger.’
Hunger was something she understood.
First, the soldiers would confiscate the Chinese forces’ food supplies. They would eat that food themselves, and the Chinese soldiers would be easier to kill because they were weak. The Chinese forces would be in disarray from the lack of food, and they would be undisciplined, which would help the Japanese. In this confusion the rest of it would happen.
Ikkanshi tried to explain to Keiko, and in doing so, he tried to explain it to himself. Officers would order soldiers to kill every Chinese who might be a soldier, rather than capture him. The soldiers would also have to kill every man who might become a soldier.
And orders must be carried out. It is strange to say, he
told Keiko, but the work of killing people all day long, or slicing off heads and stabbing through hearts, will build up a fearful appetite.
Keiko placed her hand on his knee and they sat for a moment, both rocking for comfort, as a mother would rock a baby.
The soldiers loot every store and pillage every home. These soldiers were poor men and subject to a brutal training and what had become a senseless ordeal. Did the soldiers steal out of a sense of duty to bring home something for their suffering families? This much he understood. But the rest of it he could not. And he spoke of it to Keiko, this gentle, strong, but simple woman. He spoke of it to her as if she would be able to offer him some consolation.