The Investigation Read online

  ‘Yuichi, be good to your mother.’ Father’s frozen words mixed with his white breath, the whistle of the black train and the stomping of military boots. The crying of women fell away, buried by military song, as Father walked slowly into the black steel monster.

  Mother rented a small shop front, installed bookshelves and hung up a white tin sign. A few strands of hair kept falling across her forehead. I bought her a butterfly pin as a fulfilment of Father’s last request. At the front of the shop Mother repaired torn covers with thick paste, replaced missing covers with stiff strawboard, restitched unravelled bindings and re-created ripped spines with silk cloth. Books ruined beyond salvation ended their lives there, becoming kindling or a sack containing warm roasted sweet potatoes on a winter night, or the paper with which to wipe a young child’s nose. Even after the books died, their sentences lived and breathed. Plato’s wisdom printed across a sack of sweet potatoes might attract the attention of a poor student; Dumas’s words might move the father who wiped his young son’s nose, prompting him to unfold the sticky sheet.

  Our days began and ended in that small bookshop. Every day at dawn we went there, stepping through the chilly air. When we opened the locked glass door, the stale smell of books rushed at us in greeting. After school I returned to the cradle of books. Mother was at the front counter greeting customers while at the back, among the narrow bookshelves, I stamped the inside of each book with our shop’s seal, like a cowboy branding a calf, to welcome the books into our family. I sneezed from the dust, sliced my fingers on the sharp pages and bruised myself with the heavy corners, but I was happy. I organized the books by field and subject and displayed popular books at the front; each and every book became a world of its own. Universes were organized on the shelves according to my will. I exerted absolute control according to my own order and rules, putting Tolstoy’s essays on the same shelf as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and a yellowed copy of Othello next to King Lear. Soon I could guess the age of a book just by its scent and understand a book’s core from a quick glance at the table of contents, like a farmer who could tell the maturity and sweetness of a fruit from just its colour and the texture of its skin. I could conjure up people’s interests by taking in their expressions as they entered through the glass door. Most of the time I handed them the books they asked for, but sometimes, when they sought books I wanted to keep forever, I didn’t – The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; a book of Van Gogh’s paintings in colour; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. When the customers turned away in disappointment, I felt both guilty and secretly thrilled.

  A maze of books beckoned at me from the back of the shop. I hid in the sewers of Paris on the eve of revolution and met a woman in snowy, frigid Siberia. I ventured into the world of heroes and gods and visited a lone island where a dethroned prince was imprisoned. Books were cities I’d never visited, filled with pillars of great thoughts and streets of phrases, mazes of abstruse sentence structures and alleys of complicated syllables. They were stores that displayed a wide range of things, punctuation twinkling like the crest of a venerable family, sentences breathing peacefully, words whispering. I returned to reality when the roof of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion shimmered from far away and the sky turned orange. As darkness descended, Mother closed the doors. The world of sentences sank into the night, the heroes and kings and ladies mourning lost love falling asleep. On our way home Mother looked lonely; I would make endless conversation, asking about the books that had been sold that day, who bought them and what they were about. I was always pleasantly surprised when Mother gave me detailed answers about what she’d read long ago, or books she’d wanted to read but hadn’t got round to. Mother sometimes laughed, although her laughter was always hollow. I knew I couldn’t take on her loneliness or her exhaustion; I could almost smell Father’s cigarettes and sweat and faint sorrow. Like a drawing in sand, Father’s face eroded with time. We didn’t receive a single letter from him. Eventually I found myself no longer waiting for him to write, no longer pining for his return. I forgot him; I had to forget him first, so as not to be forgotten myself. I didn’t want to waste my whole life hoping for a miracle.

  Mother was lonely and I was withdrawn, but we weren’t unhappy. That fortress of books was our refuge. I discovered this only a long time later, but it was also the price of my father’s life, what he’d given us when he walked into the war zone in Manchuria. I might have been a little less sad if I’d never known that. But the timing of everything is always off. Man is in pain because he finds love too early, because he hasn’t seen someone for too long and because he discovers the truth too late.

  I SEE THE BACK OF A SAD MAN WALKING ALONE UNDER A METEOR

  The next morning, Maeda greeted me in his office with a smile. He poured me a cup of tea. ‘What have you discovered?’

  My voice as hard as a log, I answered that I didn’t have anything special to report.

  He fiddled with the brim of his cap. ‘No, it won’t be easy for a young student-soldier like you. But make it your business and see it to the end.’

  I took out the piece of paper from my inner pocket and unfolded it. ‘I discovered this note in the dead guard’s pocket. There’s a mysterious verse written on one side of it.’

  Maeda looked at me, then at the note I placed on his desk. He laughed. ‘Of course. You can’t get rid of your habits that easily. He couldn’t help himself.’

  My curiosity was piqued.

  ‘Sugiyama Dozan was a bookworm, but he was like a lost dog among the sentences.’ Maeda smiled slyly. ‘He was also the censor of Ward Three.’

  The role of censor sounded important, but I knew that all he had to do was sit in a back room. When I was in Ward Four the censor there was an old guard. It was a position given to him out of respect because he found it difficult to manage the prisoners. He sat in his small office and dozed all day, reading letters. How could a top-notch guard like Sugiyama have been the censor?

  ‘Ward Three is a separate entity within the prison,’ Maeda explained, noting my surprise. ‘The most evil criminals are kept there. Compared to these Koreans, the prisoners you’re used to in Ward Four are gentlemen. To inspect their correspondence, the censor has to be just as vicious and unmerciful. Sugiyama was not just an excellent guard, he was also the best censor in the prison.’

  ‘But he seemed not to care for words . . .’ I said, unbelieving.

  ‘Quite. Since he was new to reading and writing, he could be an excellent censor.’

  ‘How?’

  The water boiling on the stove melded with his voice. Maeda cleared his throat. ‘When those Koreans poured into Ward Three, we found that we needed a different censorship method, because they think differently from us Japanese. First we banned all correspondence not written in Japanese. So, to inspect their Japanese, we wanted someone new to literacy. A novice would read and write the language the same way as Koreans who aren’t used to Japanese. So he would be able to pinpoint suspicious expressions.’

  ‘So Sugiyama was the perfect man.’

  ‘He’d never even crossed the threshold of an elementary school, but his capabilities of comprehension and learning were amazing. Instead of reading like a normal person, he instinctively zeroed in on forbidden words and expressions. His eyes caught every expression with an ambiguous meaning.’ Maeda shook his head in awe.

  I knew that censorship was essential. After we bombed Pearl Harbor, the war had intensified and daily life had grown more chaotic. Thugs and subversives, armed with knives and petrol, roamed the streets. All anti-Japanese Koreans were arrested, but subversive activities continued. The delusion of independence floated hazily over the streets and universities of Tokyo, infecting other Koreans. Every time a Korean political offender was arrested, all their writings, books and documents, including personal promissory notes, were confiscated to disarm them of vicious ideas. Upon sentencing, the boxes of confiscated documents and a list of their contents accompanied the prisoners into prison. />
  Maeda explained that Sugiyama was given special orders to act as censor for Ward Three; consequently he had to learn to read and write. Sugiyama protested at first; he despised literacy. To him, writing was merely a tool with which to corrupt the world, applying various -isms to set fire to the hearts of the weak and prey upon them. But in the end he was a soldier; orders weren’t for him to understand, they were to be followed. He began his education by writing down words he didn’t know on a sheet of paper. The inspection office was a makeshift structure at one end of Ward Three and was once used as an interrogation and execution room until a large-scale execution area was built, complete with gallows and a place for fusillades. Sugiyama spent all day in that office, studying diligently like a silkworm gnawing through green mulberry leaves. That office was his solitary battlefield, his enemy the Korean prisoners – Communists hell-bent on destruction, terrorists eager to assassinate high-ranking officials, anarchists trying to overthrow the government, thieves, robbers and swindlers. Sugiyama pawed through papers, ferreting out seditious meanings from each phrase and sniffing out forbidden expressions. No suspicious phrase ever got past his prying eyes. He sorted boxes of confiscated material, assigned them unique numbers, organized them in the storage area and incinerated them. His red pen slashed the page. He paid no heed to the use of a word, the length of a sentence, the strength or weakness of an expression; if it didn’t fit his strict standards, he marked it with his red stamp: To Be Incinerated.

  Sugiyama had come home alive from the war zone. For seven years and three months he’d experienced trench warfare in the rain, gun battles in snow-covered fields, sieges and bayonet fights in the heavy darkness. But according to Maeda, Sugiyama considered this silent war in his quiet office the most valuable of them all. Books and records marched forward like enemy soldiers, and within them he found the enemy that gnawed through our healthy empire like a swarm of moths. He would look up when he noticed the setting sun dyeing the small westward window red, only to leap back into the world of paper and ink. When he raised his eyes again, it would be dawn. Only then would he rest. When day broke he moved the seditious books and letters he had uncovered to the new incinerator that had been built in the empty lot next to the inspection office. Watching the flames quietly swallow the forbidden documents, Sugiyama would feel relief, as though he were burning a rebel village or executing a traitor.

  Maeda paused and rifled through his pockets. He pulled out a lighter, shining in his heavy palm, and lit a cigarette. ‘This was Sugiyama’s. Take it. You’ll need it.’ He took a deep drag. ‘Without Sugiyama, there’s nobody to act as censor. There’s already a backlog. For the time being, you’re it.’ He flicked white ash from the tip of his cigarette.

  I was horrified. I felt like Abraham having to kill his own son. ‘There are well-qualified guards with more experience than I. And I don’t know what censorship entails.’

  ‘As far as I’m aware, you’re the right man. You have skills they don’t have.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘I looked at your records. You were not only a liberal-arts student, but you’d won a prize in the Emperor’s national essay contest. You can find subversive ideas between the lines.’

  I understood what Maeda wasn’t saying. There was a hierarchy in the world of guards; exchanges and vigilant competition, surveillance and jealousy, plots and conspiracies helped a guard rise through the ranks. Nobody wanted to sit in a back room like an old man and flip through prisoners’ letters all day. Maeda was boosting my ego to force me to do work nobody else wanted to do. But I didn’t want this, either. I tightened my grip on the lighter. ‘But I’m supposed to settle Sugiyama’s affairs and investigate his death.’

  ‘Nobody told you to find the murderer,’ Maeda scoffed. ‘That would be impossible. You just have to tie up any loose ends before this gets out. We can’t have detectives from the Special Higher Police poking around. But censorship is different. You can do it.’

  Maeda didn’t really seem to want me to conduct a thorough investigation; he was tying me down with censorship duties so that I wouldn’t have enough time even to think about the murder. They must be trying to hush the whole thing up. Why else would the warden entrust me with this investigation?

  ‘The censorship rules are simple,’ Maeda explained. ‘I don’t have to tell you to burn letters not written in Japanese, right? If you’re not sure, just burn everything. Every last page. Understood? Now, get yourself to the inspection office.’

  I realized I didn’t have a choice. I suddenly resented Sugiyama; if he hadn’t died, this wouldn’t be my problem.

  The inspection ward was at the end of the corridor. I opened the heavy, squat door to step into Sugiyama’s isolated world. I ducked to go through; a narrow hallway was on the other side. I took a few steps into the darkness, then saw a door to the left. I unlocked the padlock and pushed it open. It was an interrogation room, fitted out with an old wooden desk and two chairs. Sugiyama must have interrogated the authors of seditious writings and the owners of banned books here. At one end was a leather-covered metal chair – a torture rack. I closed the door and locked it. Another door led to the library, filled with wartime citizen-action guides, manuals on how to increase industrial production, educational books emphasizing the duties of the Emperor’s subjects. The inspection office was at the end of the hallway. When I unlocked the big, heavy padlock and opened the door, the scent of paper and dried ink seeped out. I was suddenly overcome. I’d yearned for this musty old smell of dust hovering in the air; I’d been desperate to fall asleep over print. I walked dreamily between the narrow bookshelves. A wooden desk stained with blue ink held the tools of censorship: knife and scissors, magnifying glass and tweezers, red pens and an assortment of dictionaries – Japanese, English, Chinese characters and Korean.

  I noticed a shelf lined with files marked ‘File Room Log’, ‘Prohibited Writings Log’, ‘Censor Report’, ‘Log of Documents to Incinerate’. I opened the censor report. Sugiyama had written down the details, pinpointing problematic sections in the prisoners’ writings. The titles of books that had met their deaths were listed on the log of documents to incinerate. Ivan Turgenev’s First Love and Fathers and Sons, a collection of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dante’s Inferno . . . Sugiyama had slashed through the titles in red ink; it looked as though the dead books were bleeding. The list was expansive, even including a Korean rice-dealer’s credit ledger, and the reason for incineration was given as ‘Infinite repetition of meaningless numbers that cannot be decoded’.

  There were two mailbags next to the desk, one with outgoing and the other with incoming post. Prisoners’ postcards mostly requested various goods and necessities from loved ones. They were fated to receive unsatisfactory answers in this time of government rationing. I blacked out troublesome expressions with a thick pen and returned them to the bags. I opened the shallow desk drawer and found a stack of files – the previous year’s duty report, with the cover and steel tie removed. A thought flitted through my head. I took out Sugiyama’s ratty paper from my pocket. The back of the crumpled sheet was dated; it was from an earlier date than the files in the drawer. I flipped a page in the top file and discovered something written on the other side in blue ink:

  CONFESSION

  In the bronze mirror stained with blue rust

  My face remains so disgraced

  A relic of which dynasty?

  I reduce my confession to one line –

  What happiness did I wish for during my twenty-four years and one month?

  Tomorrow or the day after, on some happy day

  I must write another line of confession

  – At that young age back then

  Why did I make such a shameful one?

  Night after night

  With my palm, with the bottom of my foot

  I polish my mirror.

  In the mirror

  I see the back of a sad man

  Walking alone under a mete
or.

  I felt as though I’d been stabbed. The powerful symbolism amplified the anguish running through the poem. The poet’s introspection reminded me of Rilke; his pure, poetic language was reminiscent of Francis Jammes. My head was roiling, fearful and confused, like the ocean on a stormy night. Who wrote this? What did he have to do with Sugiyama? I knew Sugiyama wasn’t the author, from the expression ‘twenty-four years and one month’. After all, Sugiyama had learned to read and write only after his arrival at Fukuoka. Why did he copy this poem and keep it in his drawer? Did this poem have anything to do with the one I had found in his pocket? I examined it again from the beginning, but despite its perfect structure it didn’t allow for easy analysis. Whoever the poet was, he wrote it when he was twenty-four years and one month old. And he’d committed a humiliating act at that time. That was all I could glean. I looked up. The hallway beyond the bookshelves had sunken into black darkness. I rubbed my tired, dry eyes.

  The next day I continued with my censor duties, culling books to make room for the next batch to be reviewed. I picked ten books and piled them into a wheelbarrow. Romeo and Juliet, a novel by Stendhal, two volumes of Communist ideology and six Korean books. The incinerator was about fifty metres from the inspection room. I compared the log of confiscated materials with Sugiyama’s list of documents to be incinerated. There was no discrepancy. The incinerator was an altar awaiting offerings. My feet dragged; I felt as reluctant as I imagined an executioner might feel as he climbed up to the gallows. I yanked the door open – the smell of paper, smoke and ash poured out, sending me into a coughing fit. I pulled out the lighter. Flame, not poison and dagger, would kill Romeo and Juliet. A small spark would fell Stendhal. And the Korean authors whose names I couldn’t read – I peered at the faded title on the cover of a Korean book; the author’s name trembled under the bluish light. How would I atone for annihilating the soul of a poet condensed on these pages? It was a good thing I didn’t know Korean; if I did, I doubt I would have been able to burn that book. I squeezed my eyes shut, ripped out the first page and lit it. I threw the whole thing into the incinerator. The flame licked the edges of the book and erupted when it reached the middle. Korean letters, round as well as hard-edged, shrivelled in the fire. Into the blaze I shoved the rest, all of which had once comforted me. All ten books disappeared; only a line of smoke and a fistful of ash remained. I reached out, my hand hovering over the ash blinking with embers. I felt the heat of the dying books. My breath came out ragged, like a whale spouting after a long-held breath; I reminded myself that incineration was a part of my duties as censor, that I’d burned seditious literature confiscated from unwholesome elements. These had to disappear from the world. Although, deep down, I wanted to keep guard over sleeping words and sentences, really I had become an executioner of literature.