The Investigation Read online

  ‘I know you’re crafty. But it doesn’t work with me. I know you’re the one who’s behind all this!’ Sugiyama shouted. He avoided meeting Hiranuma’s eyes, afraid that doing so would change his mind.

  ‘Yes, you caught me. But it was worth it. I learned a lot about you.’

  Sugiyama’s heart sank – had 645 been conducting a secret investigation of his life? He could guess how it happened: 645 would have written his first postcard very carefully, suppressing any emotion and avoiding any expression that might become a problem. After that first postcard passed review, he would have gradually got bolder. One day he would have slipped in a suspicious word, and on another he would have cleverly inserted a phrase with dual meanings. He would have figured out how Sugiyama took the meanings of the words, inferring from the blacked-out letters the prisoners received which expressions Sugiyama disliked. Sugiyama had been fooled into thinking that he was in complete control. He hadn’t been watching Hiranuma; in fact, Hiranuma had been looking straight into Sugiyama’s heart.

  The thick veins in Sugiyama’s neck thrummed. ‘You’ve gone too far. I’m no writer, but I’m not so stupid that I don’t realize what’s going on.’ He was incensed; he gritted his teeth and rubbed his hand over his prickly hair. ‘You knew you’d get killed, but you still tried to fight me!’

  ‘You can’t kill me.’

  ‘You knew full well that you’d be beaten if your plot was revealed!’ It dawned on Sugiyama that the prisoner was right. If he were the type of censor who would kill a man for writing postcards, he would have been stricter with several of Hiranuma’s postcards. Hiranuma must have sensed that Sugiyama didn’t catch the seditious undertone of the postcards or had looked the other way. That quiet passage of the postcards informed Hiranuma that this guard, no matter how violent, wouldn’t be able to beat him, let alone kill him. Sugiyama shook his head. ‘Don’t you know they call me The Butcher?’

  ‘I know more about you than your nickname.’

  ‘Oh, really. And what do you know about me?’

  ‘That you understand and love the secrets harboured by words.’

  Sugiyama smirked. But it was true that he’d seen the world; the roots of the sentences created a gigantic forest of meaning. His voice hardened. ‘What makes you say such foolish things?’

  ‘Because I know the real you. You yourself aren’t even aware of who you are.’

  Sugiyama recognized that the young man was taunting him. He had to fend him off. He had to fight with vocabulary sharper than knives and with sentences more fatal than spearheads. The odds were against him: Hiranuma was an intellectual, while Sugiyama had barely thrown off the cloak of illiteracy. Sugiyama sensed that he was being dragged into a black, unfathomable swamp. But there was nothing he could do. The battle had begun; all he could do was fight.

  Under the shadow of the wall, Hiranuma continued to listen as the men in front of him sobbed and yelled and shook their fists. He soon became familiar with their stories; what their childhoods were like, what crimes they’d committed, how wronged they felt. He wrote postcard after postcard, recalling their voices, expressions, intonation. He had to accurately convey what they wanted to say, but delicately plant two or three other meanings in one phrase to avoid censorship. Each morning Hiranuma woke up from the same dream, drenched in ink-black sweat – the red censor stamp was branded on his forehead. He didn’t know when Sugiyama would tire of this game. But on the other hand, if the censor was firm, the rules Hiranuma had to toe became simpler. He was persuading the censor, one postcard at a time, in a slow and insistent seduction.

  Sugiyama felt himself changing. He was getting pulled into the prisoners’ writing, so much so that he subconsciously looked forward to the postcards. The faint letters written on the brownish paper contained longing and hope, tears and sighs between each line. Reading them made him feel relaxed, as though submerged in a warm bath. All day long Sugiyama felt overcome. He struggled to get away from the tug of those postcards. He handled the prisoners with even more cruelty.

  Hiranuma observed Sugiyama from far away. The guard was becoming more and more violent. He swung his club and swore and hollered. Hiranuma smiled to himself. It was working. Violence was the final line of defence. He could tell that Sugiyama was in flux. A letter had arrived a few days ago from a prisoner’s wife. Sugiyama had censored the letter, which was streaked with red lines. But Hiranuma could still read the words underneath; before, Sugiyama would have completely obliterated the sentences with black ink. Now, Hiranuma thought, he could begin using bolder, more overt expressions.

  O MY SORROW, YOU ARE BETTER THAN A WELL-BELOVED

  Sugiyama glanced at a postcard written by a prisoner to his thirteen-year-old son; it started off with praises for the beauty of the season and went on to describe the burdens of war. Imprisonment, destitution, death . . . These were bold words, the first overt descriptions of the war in a postcard. Sugiyama rubbed his stamp on the red ink pad.

  Don’t despair that Father isn’t there with you. No matter how sad you are, no matter how difficult it is, you can always learn from pain. Pain can destroy us, but it can also help us grow. Francis Jammes, a wonderful French poet, wrote in a poem entitled ‘Prayer for Loving Sorrow’: ‘O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved.’ In another he wrote, ‘These are the labours of man that are great.’ Read his poetry collection when you have a chance, you’ll learn about retaining hope and gain the courage to stand up to any hardship.

  It was a daring message, but there wasn’t really a reason to censor any of it. After all, the postcard was encouraging the child to embrace pain. Sugiyama thought for a moment. Was he expressing criticism and scorn for the challenges of the times? Or was he merely offering his son a burst of hope to help him come to terms with his sadness? Sugiyama realized that he would have to read the poems mentioned in the postcard to determine that. His impatient feet led him to the library of confiscated documents. He dug through Prisoner 645’s box and found a yellowed old book, The Poetry of Francis Jammes. He opened the book and scanned the table of contents: ‘Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys’, ‘Prayer to Have a Simple Wife’, ‘The House Would Be Full of Roses’, ‘Orchard with Raspberries in the Sun’, ‘These Are the Labours’. The pages created a breeze at his fingertips. He took in a deep breath and started to read ‘Prayer for Loving Sorrow’:

  I have nothing but my sorrow and I want nothing more.

  It has been, it still is, faithful to me.

  Why should I begrudge it, since during the hours

  when my soul crushed the depths of my heart,

  it was seated there beside me?

  O sorrow, I have ended, you see, by respecting you,

  because I am certain you will never leave me.

  Ah! I realize it: your beauty lies in the force of your being.

  You are like those who never left

  the sad fireside corner of my poor black heart.

  O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved:

  because I know that on the day of my final agony,

  you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow,

  so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

  Sorrow was something better than a well-beloved. Sugiyama understood that instinctively. A man’s will for life could be broken, but he would stand firm again; his desires could extinguish, but burn bright once more. A man’s acceptance of a lacklustre reality would make him even stronger. He leaned against the hard back of his chair.

  Another page caught his eye: ‘These Are the Labours’. He looked back at the postcard he had finished censoring. This was the right one. ‘These are the labours of man that are great.’ Sugiyama felt triumphant. He’d caught Hiranuma red-handed; the fool had put in a secret code, probably a seditious one. The child would read Jammes’s poems and discover the hidden meaning. Could it be that this postcard wasn’t meant for his son at all, but for some nefarious element? Sugiyama could guess at the rebellious meanin
g of this poem – something to the effect of giving your life to liberate your country, or inciting others to disregard their comfortable lives and resist the Japanese:

  THESE ARE THE LABOURS

  These are the labours of man that are great:

  he who puts milk in the wooden vessels,

  he who gathers wheat-ears sharp and straight,

  he who herds cattle near fresh alders

  he who bleeds birches in the forests,

  he who twists willows near rushing brooks,

  he who mends old shoes

  near a dark hearth, an old mangy cat,

  a sleeping blackbird and happy children;

  he whose weaving makes a steady sound,

  when at midnight the crickets sing shrilly;

  he who bakes bread, he who makes wine,

  he who sows garlic and cabbages in the garden,

  he who gathers warm eggs.

  He was stunned. No matter how carefully he read the poem, there was nothing seditious about it. There was no hidden code or concealed plot. The poem merely praised leading a peaceful life, at one with nature, a humble existence in the countryside. It celebrated waking to the crow of the rooster and working hard, before falling asleep to the sound of crickets. Sugiyama’s gaze dulled. He didn’t believe in happiness – it existed only in the chatter of weak romantics. He worked hard to dismiss the small peace inherent in the everyday, because he’d never been happy. Could it be that he’d ignored contentment, thinking it a desperate dream?

  After a very long time he stamped the postcard with a bang, marking it with the blue Censorship Completed stamp. He was a failure; he hadn’t discovered any banned communications. The postcard would fly to a young boy waiting for his father in a shabby shack in the alleys near Kobe harbour. The boy would read Francis Jammes. The postcard would deliver him the grit to deal with the weight and pain of life during wartime.

  After that, unfamiliar names and phrases began appearing in outgoing post, including stanzas cited in ways appropriate for each recipient’s age and situation. Hiranuma seemed to have in his head a huge catalogue of poems perfect for any situation. One prisoner sent a postcard to his wife containing the entirety of ‘Prayer to Have a Simple Wife’. A man sending a postcard to his girlfriend included a love-poem by Goethe. Sugiyama scoured the library to look for the writers and works cited in each of the postcards. He didn’t miss a single name or book. When he spotted Tolstoy’s name, he read all of Tolstoy’s books. Night after night he wandered amid the suspicious phrases. He couldn’t find anything to censor, but that didn’t lower his wariness.

  The prisoners changed, too. Smiles replaced their curses. A single phrase pushed men who didn’t think past that evening to start counting the days until their release. Men who fought incessantly became calm; the brawls that occurred on a daily basis decreased. Sugiyama watched the men hold replies from their loved ones, wiping away tears with their sleeves. Every change seemed to stem from the postcards. He began to wonder; one sentence seemed to change a man, and the world seemed to change, one man at a time.

  As summer deepened, Sugiyama spent one entire night reviewing a postcard from a prisoner to his son. It was a reply to the son’s complaints of being teased because of the family name they had chosen to acquire. Kaneyama was painfully obviously Korean – it was simply the Japanese pronunciation of the Korean surname Kim, plus the Japanese suffix ‘yama’. The postcard consoled the son, telling him that dealing with insults was the stepping stone to living a proud life:

  Don’t be sad about your name. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare wrote, ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.’ A name isn’t important. What’s important is having your own scent.

  Sugiyama found a reference to the play in the log of confiscated documents and rushed to the library. He found it in box 486. Discovering that Shakespeare was British, Sugiyama let out a yelp of joy. It would be easy to find this undesirable; after all, this writer was from an enemy country. He cautiously opened the dangerous book. It turned out to be a love-story. Romeo, a son of the Montagues; Juliet, a daughter of the Capulets; a ball; a romance that couldn’t be consummated because of the feuding families. He flipped faster through the pages. A duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, death, exile, Juliet asleep after taking the potion from Friar Lawrence. Romeo drinking poison. Juliet stabbing herself in the heart.

  He sat back, haunted by the beautiful scenes in Verona, the conversations between Romeo and Juliet and the afterglow of doomed love. Sugiyama shook his head to clear his thoughts. Romeo and Juliet was clearly problematic. Not only was it by a writer of an enemy country, but it was also all about a decadent love, and the death-filled conclusion stank of pessimism. But he couldn’t pick up his red stamp. Had his censorship criteria turned too compassionate? He didn’t want to be rash and stop the postcard’s transit. Otherwise, who would console the child? He finally thought of a compromise. If he questioned Hiranuma, he could obtain a more accurate interpretation.

  The sunlight seared the prison yard. The thick brick walls radiated heat and the workroom boiled as if they were the inside of a pot. During their free time prisoners rushed to the shade provided by the walls as though they were escaping hell. They sat around and talked urgently, hungrily. One man would speak passionately for a while, then another man would start. They took turns, like actors onstage.

  Sugiyama shook his head. As he crossed the yard, hot air snaked around his calves under his gaiters. He walked the way he typically did, his upper body swaying from side to side and his legs spread apart, taking big steps. Prisoners shrank away from his arrogant, militaristic gait. They didn’t know it was the only way he could stand the pain from a gunshot wound in his thigh. He headed to the hill, the site of the execution range and the cemetery. Three tall poplar trees stood side-by-side, but their sparse branches didn’t create any shade. The prisoners murmured about ghosts wandering here, nooses still hanging around their necks; the guards, too, disliked patrolling the area at night.

  Hiranuma was sitting against a tree. Sugiyama could hear him whistling.

  ‘645! Whistling, are we? Feeling good then?’

  Hiranuma didn’t answer. His eyes were cool and empty.

  ‘Hiranuma Tochu!’ Sugiyama shouted. ‘Answer me! Will you bark only if I beat you like a dog?’ He used his club to push the prisoner’s chin up.

  Hiranuma looked down. ‘My name isn’t 645 or Hiranuma Tochu. My name is Yun. Dong. Ju.’

  Sugiyama tensed. Was this a trap? Did he toss in that bit about Shakespeare, about names and existence, to pull Sugiyama into this long-standing controversy over Koreans being forced to take Japanese names? Even better. Then they wouldn’t need to talk around the subject.

  Sugiyama smiled and plucked a blade of grass to chew on; its bitterness filled his mouth.

  ‘Yun Dong-ju or Hiranuma, who cares? You’re you, whatever you may be called.’ Sugiyama recalled Juliet’s words, which he’d read the previous night:

  O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

  Deny thy father and refuse thy name;

  Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love

  And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

  ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy:

  Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

  What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,

  Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

  Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

  What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

  By any other name would smell as sweet;

  So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,

  Retain that dear perfection which he owes

  Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,

  And for thy name, which is no part of thee,

  Take all myself.

  ‘A rose by any other name still smells the same,’ Sugiyama continued stiffly. ‘A name means nothing. What’s important is your essence. Wheth
er you’re Yun Dong-ju or Hiranuma Tochu, you’re a cheeky, stubborn Korean.’

  ‘A name is the symbol of one’s very being,’ Hiranuma protested in a low voice. ‘It represents not only someone’s face and body, but also his memories, dreams, past, present and future. Just as a single word can contain various feelings, one sentence can espouse a variety of meanings.’

  One sentence can espouse a variety of meanings? Then it surely meant that the arsehole had used Shakespeare’s words to convey multiple thoughts. A rose by any other name was still fragrant, but it was no longer a rose if it wasn’t called a rose. Even the most fragrant rose will lose its scent and fade as time passes, but its name will live on, and the utterance of the word ‘rose’ will recall its beauty and scent. The rose may disappear, but the name never would.

  Hiranuma pushed on, ignoring Sugiyama’s mounting confusion. ‘Juliet’s soliloquy is a paradoxical expression of the fact that a presence is defined by a name.’

  ‘Paradoxical?’

  Hiranuma explained that it was a way to emphasize how something was said by not saying it, and to assert that it was true by saying that it wasn’t. Something clanged in Sugiyama’s head. A sentence could be interpreted the opposite way, depending on who read it? Then was Juliet’s request to discard the name really a clarification of the fact that names defined everything? Romeo and Juliet despaired because of their families, because of who they were. Their love became a tragedy. If they cast away their names, nothing would have stopped the consummation of their love. But in the end they couldn’t discard them; their names defined their existence, and that made their love ever more star-crossed.

  ‘My name is Yun Dong-ju,’ Hiranuma said, his voice steely and dignified.

  Sugiyama glared at him. ‘That’s not your name. Don’t you know that Korean is banned?’

  ‘Without the name Yun Dong-ju, I’m nothing. Hiranuma is a mask that the Japanese force me to wear.’