The Narrow Road to the Deep North(104)

9



THE YEARS PASSED. He met a nurse called Ikuko Kawabata, a young woman whose parents had been killed in the firebombing of Kobe in the final months of the war. After the peace her brother had died of starvation. That city, too, was a wasteland of rubble and ruins, and Ikuko’s story was so commonplace that she, like so many others, found it better not to talk about it.

Ikuko had lustrous skin and a large birthmark on her right cheek, both of which inexplicably moved Nakamura more than he wished to admit. She also had a lazy smile, which he found both erotic and irritating. She would seek to end any disagreement between them with it, something that was at once agreeable to him but also suggested, he sometimes felt, stupidity and weakness of character.

Through Ikuko, Nakamura found work in a hospital, first as an orderly and then as a storeroom clerk. He was glad to leave behind his black-market work, as it was neither overly lucrative nor particularly safe, and he worried at all times about being exposed and handed over to the Americans. Even in his new work he avoided others—but then there were many doing the same, and it seemed to Nakamura that everyone seemed to understand why so many wanted no one to either know or understand them. He moved in with Ikuko, as much to preserve his solitude as for any wish for human company. She was healthy and a good housekeeper, and he was grateful to have found a woman with such virtues.

In spite of his solitary ways, he grew into the habit of playing go with a doctor at the hospital by the name of Kameya Sato, and over several years the habit grew into a trust, and the trust in turn grew into a quiet friendship. Sato, who came from Oita, was devoted to his patients and was a quiet and humble man, and unlike other doctors had the eccentric habit of never wearing a white jacket. Sato was a far better go player than Nakamura, and one evening the ex-soldier asked the surgeon what the secret of playing go well was.

It’s like this, Mr Kimura, said Sato. There is a pattern and structure to all things. Only we can’t see it. Our job is to discover that pattern and structure and work within it, as part of it.

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.