The Narrow Road to the Deep North(90)

The man who had thrown the rock, Tenji Nakamura, formerly a major in the Imperial Japanese Army’s 2nd Railway Regiment, was sheltering from the bitter rain in an erratic archway made of the fallen beams and debris of fire-bombed buildings that had, by chance destruction and some judicious burrowing, formed over a back street. As though this pile of rubble was a grand gate to their great city, those locals who had to pass through this chaotic tunnel to and from the devastated pleasure district of Shinjuku called it the Shinjuku Rashomon. Foxes, rats, whores and thieves were the Shinjuku Rashomon’s most common inhabitants, living in its burrows, nests and the half-collapsed rooms. Mount Fuji, which Nakamura could glimpse even from this ramshackle gateway, again stood above their world, as it had a century and a half before for the great Hokusai to paint, once more fully visible, ever-changing and immutable, still and immortal.

Yet the world Mount Fuji now presided over was ferociously mortal, and in it people died every day but had to continue living. The streets were full of people senseless on kasutori, the cheap, lethal drink of choice for the starving and despairing, or shabu stolen from army warehouses, or both. Nakamura’s poverty had broken Nakamura of his own shabu habit and he was determined not to return to it. Hungry dogs roamed the sunken lanes that had once been roads in large and threatening packs, and hungrier children would appear to work the streets as pickpockets and beggars and pimps.

Wolves, all of them, thought Nakamura.

With their slow eyes and sudden movements, there was about them something Nakamura found eerie, at once vulnerable and threatening. They looked an emaciated six or seven years of age but were often already teenagers. Women sold themselves everywhere, a few finding a curious honour and reduced income in refusing to service the American devils. Most, however, revelled in the affluence being a pan pan girl brought. One night, after he had been with such a woman, he grew angry at her trade, in which he now saw his own life reflected, and he asked her how she could go with the Americans. A freshly lit Lucky Strike on her smiling red lips, she asked him—

Aren’t we all pan pan girls now?

Since being demobilised two and a half months earlier, Nakamura had lived amidst such ruins of people and place, and among their number he was nothing and glad of it. He was armed only with a crowbar that served both as the means by which he procured a precarious living and as a weapon of self-defence on the spine of which every few minutes he crushed some more lice ripped from his itching body. With it, he extricated broken pieces of timber framing from destroyed buildings, from the silt and mud and ash of what had once been Tokyo, pulled them apart as best he could and then sold the pieces to a charcoal burner. As he turned over the charred remnants of the once great capital of the Empire, Nakamura’s thoughts tended to turn to where he might be able to get some miso soup or a bowl of rice. Occasionally, such scrounging yielded unexpected rewards: the day before, he had unearthed some stale acorns that even the rats had missed, buried deep in the rubble. Since eating them, though, he had had nothing.

To divert his thoughts from hunger, he picked up a newspaper that lay trampled on the ground. It was several days old, and he managed to read a few stories without taking in a word, until one suddenly brought his mind to white-hot attention. He read carefully, desperately. It was about warrants being issued by the Americans for the arrest of more ex-POW camp staff in relation to possible war crimes. The article ended with a list of the wanted suspects’ names, and halfway down the list he found what he had for so long dreaded—his name mentioned as a possible Class B war criminal.

Nakamura began again to itch. He was no war criminal, yet the Americans who were the real war criminals would kill him if they could and make a lie out of his life. Rage began to rise within him. But underlying his anger, punctuating his day-to-day thoughts of survival, was the dull but ever-present fear of an animal that knows destiny is searching for it. For Nakamura had heard how the Americans, whose hulking, loud bodies seemed to him to be everywhere, were hunting down those they believed to be war criminals with a grim efficiency, and high on their list were those who had had anything to do with POWs. He was determined to survive, to not be caught and not be executed, because his honour demanded it. His itching grew violent, and he reached inside his pants and tore at his crotch. He pulled out a scabby mix of skin, hair and lice and threw it on the ground.

As he waited for the weather to improve, Nakamura ran his finger up and down the weary green paint of the crowbar, crushing the few lice that still remained on his hand between his fingernail and the iron. He thought on his situation: scrounging timber was no way to survive; his crowbar had lost half a tooth from its nail pull, and the side of his face throbbed from a gouge made by a jagged beam that had fallen unexpectedly across his body two days before; the terrible, inescapable cold only made him hungrier and now the Americans were after him. As he again looked at his name on the newspaper list Nakamura realised with horror that for several days at least now the Americans had been hunting him—methodically pursuing leads, eliminating false trails, homing in on others—and every hour drawing closer to him, and he to his death at the end of a gallows-rope. To survive, Nakamura realised, he had to do something, and that meant he would now have to contemplate doing anything. But then this feeling of defiance gave way to one of utter hopelessness and defeat. What could he do? What? The honourable thing, Nakamura thought, would be to do as others had done and kill himself.