The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  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.

  And at the moment he resolved to take his destiny into his own hands and die honourably, Nakamura heard some muffled shouts from above. He found his whole being filled with an insatiable curiosity as to what those shouts were, as though doing something, anything, was better than contemplating his wretched fate.

  He crawled out of the hollow, stood up in the rain and slowly turned his head, listening intently. Then he heard a woman hissing. The sound came from somewhere above, in a pile of rubble that formed the left-hand side of the Rashomon.

  As quietly as was possible on rubble, Nakamura crept up the large mound of loose masonry and broken buildings that formed the left wing of the archway, hand gripping his crowbar tightly. He came upon a small hole in the rubble, the size of a fist. Looking through it he saw into the remains of a bombed-out room, lit from an opening where the top half of the far wall ought to have been. Nakamura could see that the room had perhaps once been a neat and pleasant place, but now the chrysanthemum wallpaper was only just visible through a thick smear of dust and soot, and it seemed to Nakamura that it had been turned into a sort of animal den. The remnants of a rotting tatami mat and some cushions formed a bed, and by it was a three-legged table, propped up with broken bricks, on top of which sat a dirty mirror.

  The woman’s hissing began again, very close now, and by twisting his body in the direction of the woman’s voice, Nakamura was able to see into a far corner of the room. There stood a pan pan girl and a young boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, holding a long kitchen knife. Below them lay the uniformed body of an American serviceman whose throat had been so recently cut that it was still weakly spurting blood. The pan pan girl was remonstrating with the boy, asking why he had killed the American, but she was not sad, only angry.

  Hidden from their view, Nakamura quickly took all this in, but what caught his eye was not this drama—about which he couldn’t have cared less—but what sat on the makeshift dressing table: two gyoza dumplings and a bar of American chocolate.

  2

  NAKAMURA CAREFULLY AND quietly crawled down from his peephole and crept over the top of the Rashomon and around to the opening in the wall. As he slowly raised his head over a loose sheet of roofing iron, the pan pan girl was rifling through the dead man’s pockets. When she rolled the American’s body over onto its side, it gave a low murmur. She jumped back up, but, realising it was just air being forced out of his lungs, she went back to searching his clothes. From a back pocket she pulled a roll of American dollars.

  But it was the gyoza dumplings that Nakamura was focused on. He was remembering how they ate them all the time when he had served in Manchukuo and thought nothing of it. He felt his mouth filling with saliva at the memory of them then, and the possibility of them now.

  Unable to think of anything other than how much he wanted those gyoza dumplings, Nakamura braced himself and threw himself through the hole. He rolled into the room and jumped to his feet, brandishing the crowbar. For a moment all stared at each other over the body of the dead American—the pan pan girl in an expensive floral print shirt, wide slacks and glossy black geta sandals holding the wad of American dollars, the boy with the knife, and Nakamura with his crowbar.

  With a roar the boy leapt at Nakamura with his knife, and Nakamura, feeling some heightened sense of himself that was at once terror and calm experience, dropped to a slight squat to balance better, and swung the crowbar as if it were a sword. It passed through the air in a wide upward arc that ended with the soft, sloppy sound of it hitting the boy’s head. That sound—of a hammer burying itself in a watermelon—seemed to Nakamura to stay in the air for a long, long time. And in that same odd eternity that was also only an instant, all the boy’s violent forward momentum ended. There seemed to Nakamura to be a strange break in time before the boy dropped noiselessly to the floor.

  Both Nakamura and the pan pan girl said nothing. Though the boy’s body spasmed violently, they knew he was dead. As blood began to appear, the spasms slowed, then stopped, and Nakamura noticed lice swarming in seeming sudden panic around the boy’s filthy long hair. He became acutely conscious of the chill odour of damp dust that filled the room.

  The pan pan girl began to whimper. Nakamura took two steps over to the three-legged table and stuffed both gyoza dumplings into his wet mouth. As he gobbled them down, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on her. A new idea came to him.

  Using the crowbar to talk, he pointed at the wad of dollars in her hand. With a shaking hand she passed it to him. He pocketed the cash, and then with the tip of his outstretched crowbar lifted the edge of her floral print shirt. Slowly, she raised her eyes from the crowbar to his eyes, and then she bowed and took a step backwards. She began to strip.

  Naked, she was bowlegged. Her unpleasantly thin thighs were covered with little sores, buttercup-yellow. The silky hair of her crotch contrasted with the scaly white skin underneath. Her breasts were still more swellings than breasts, and her skin was sickly in colour. Nakamura could smell her now, unwashed and sweaty, like a stabled cow at the end of winter.

  She went over to the three-legged dressing table and lay down on the filthy tatami mat, feet pointing towards him. He could hear her breathing, short pants. She disgusted him, selling herself to the American devils and now offering her filthy, sullied body to him. He picked up the pan pan’s clothes, pocketed the chocolate bar and went to climb out of the cave. For a moment he halted and looked at the two corpses.

  The American was already nothing. The Japanese boy had a badly pimpled face. Too much was made of killing, thought Nakamura. Maybe one should feel remorse, guilt, and at first in Manchukuo he had. But the dead soon ceased to be faces. He struggled to remember any of them. The dead are dead, he thought, and that’s it. Still, two corpses and one of them American . . . it would mean trouble for him if he wasn’t careful, and he was a wanted man already.

  Avoiding stepping in the large puddle of dark blood, Nakamura knelt down over the American. He smelt of the DDT they had deloused Nakamura with when he had been demobilised. He felt the American belonged to some other species, so oversized and strange did he look. The Australians had not looked anything like this in the jungle, like this large and too-dead American.

  Making sure he never touched the corpse, he artfully wormed one end of the crowbar into the American’s half-closed fist and laid it across his chest. Then, thinking on it, he rubbed the bar around in the man’s hand, pushing it hard on his fingers, then dropped it in the puddle of blood. As long as the pan pan disappeared and kept her mouth shut, the Americans and the police would draw the obvious conclusion: a pimp tried to roll the American, a fight ensued and both lost their lives.

  And with that he turned and went to pull himself up into the chest-high hole that served as this den’s entrance, when behind him he heard the pan pan get to her feet. Nakamura paid her no heed till he felt her trying to clutch at his ankles. To free himself, h
e had to give her two good kicks that sent her sprawling back onto the American’s corpse.

  As he slid down the rubble outside, he could hear a yelling behind him. He turned to see the pan pan girl, arm over her little blood-slicked breasts, leaning out of the hole, saying something about how the American raped her and her brother arrived and was just trying to protect her. Nakamura didn’t really follow her story and wasn’t interested in trying. He scrambled back up to the hole, grabbed her by the shoulder and held a brick near her whimpering head.

  Forget it, said Nakamura. Forget him, forget your brother and forget me.

  The pan pan girl wailed more loudly. He shoved the brick against her mouth.

  You survive if you forget, he said angrily.

  He pushed her back into her hole, scrambled down the Shinjuku Rashomon and headed into the city.

  With the fifty American dollars he stole from the pan pan girl he was able to buy false identity papers. With the money he made from selling her clothes to another pan pan, he bought a train ticket to Kobe. In a third-class carriage with all its windows blown out, he now travelled through a brutal winter’s night, away from his past as ex-railway regiment major Tenji Nakamura and into his future as ex-IJA private Yoshio Kimura.

  Things were no better in Kobe than they had been in Tokyo. That city, too, was just craters and mud, hills of bricks and steel twisted like wire, with Japanese crawling around like cockroaches in the mess. But Nakamura felt he had put the distance he needed between him and the dead American and the dead boy. For several months he made a hand-to-mouth living from such petty thieving and black marketeering as was possible. But he never felt safe. On one occasion he thought he had recognised at a distance a tall Australian officer from one of the POW camps. Such was Nakamura’s fear that, for a week after, he only ventured out on the streets of a night.

  He began following the war crimes trials closely. He read how one Japanese soldier who had beaten a POW who had escaped several times was found guilty as a war criminal and hanged. Nakamura found this impossible to fathom.

  One beating?

  He had been beaten all the time in the Japanese Army, and it had been his duty to beat other soldiers. Why, when he was training he had been knocked out twice, and once suffered a ruptured eardrum. He had been beaten with a baseball bat on his buttocks for showing ‘insufficient enthusiasm’ when washing his superior’s underwear. He had been beaten senseless by three officers when, as a recruit, he had misheard an order. He had been made to stand-to all day on the parade ground, and when he had collapsed they had fallen on him for disobeying the order and beaten him unconscious.

  So how did one beating make one a war criminal? And what was a prisoner of war? Did not the Field Service Code specifically state that a captured officer was to kill himself? What was a prisoner of war? Nothing, that’s what. A man without shame, a man with no honour. A no man.

  One beating?

  He had been a good officer, and some of the other officers had chided him for dealing with most infringements of discipline just with face slapping.

  You’re too warm-hearted, he recalled Colonel Kota telling him after Nakamura had slapped Corporal Tomokawa for some misdemeanour. Just slapping a man for that? I would have thrashed him so hard he never forgot.

  And after that, Nakamura wanted to scream to the clear Kobe sky, what was a prisoner of war? What?

  3

  CHOI SANG-MIN was sitting in the dark on a bamboo stool, a luxury he had been allowed as a condemned man. He had heard that some ex-POWs had simply tossed Kim Lee from the top floor of a brothel in Bangkok when they had found him there. That seemed to him reasonable and sensible. He hoped Kim Lee had spat on them as they threw him to his death. Kim Lee had been a guard like him, he had killed POWs, and when the war was ended they had killed him. It seemed perfectly understandable, unlike his own situation, which did not. He despised the Australians’ hypocrisy, dressing up their vengeance with rituals of justice. In his heart he knew they had always wanted to kill him too, so why all this pretence?

  He had neither watch nor clock. Other than his intuition, he had no way of knowing how much longer the night might go on. But his intuition no longer seemed to work. The night was never-ending and yet it was already racing away from him. The Changi prison had been locked down for the evening, perhaps two hours earlier. If he had thought about it, he may have reasoned it was somewhere near midnight. But he did not think about it or anything, really. Choi Sang-min was lost in a place beyond thought. His mind beat time between two emotions. One was a panic that would come on him like a mad, nagging cough and have him once more frantically pacing his Changi prison cell trying to discover a way of escaping, only to discover there was no escape possible, either from the cell or from his imminent death.

  And then his mind would pitch to anger, not at his fate or the impossibility of escaping, but at a fact he found tormenting. As he was imprisoned as a member of the Japanese military, he must surely still be owed his fifty yen monthly pay, none of which he had seen since before the war’s end, two years earlier. His anger arose not out of arithmetic or greed, but an idea of motivation that was also a sense of injustice. Fifty yen was the only reason he was there. Why, then, was he not receiving it?

  And because in his heart he knew he would never receive any money ever again, that the fifty yen was an absurdity and yet he had somehow been robbed of it, his mind would abruptly swing back to panic, and he would once more begin pacing his cell, running his fingers over the walls, his hands over the cell window bars, the door, pushing, touching, searching for a way out, until he once again realised no escape was possible and his mind swung back to the anger he felt at being denied his fifty yen.

  His trial had been held in an Australian military court and had lasted two days. Other than when he was being directly questioned, the proceedings were all in English and he understood almost none of it. At its end, the judge—a man with the face of a windswept candle and the voice of a gravedigger—for the first time looked directly at Choi Sang-min and spoke. An interpreter, his gaze fixed resolutely on the judge’s lips, whispered in Choi Sang-min’s ear broken branches of Japanese sentences.

  Because of—of the contradictory nature, said the interpreter, evidence presented—form of written testimonies—the charge of having participated in the murder—Australian Imperial Force Sergeant Frank Gardiner—is dismissed. The translator switched to a more informal tone to add, This is very good news, very good.

  And then he returned to his fragmented translation.

  The charges—of having ordered the murder of Private Wat Cooney—these are upheld—as are several other lesser charges of—ill-treatment, including the withholding of food and medical supplies leading to avoidable suffering and death. Having—having been found guilty of being a Class B war criminal—you will—be—be executed by hanging.

  The translator this time added no gloss of his own.

  There were more words but Choi Sang-min was no longer hearing anything. When he had been questioned in court, Choi Sang-min had tried to explain how, as a Korean sergeant, he could never have ordered the death of a prisoner, but the Australian lawyers quoted from the interrogation of a Japanese officer called Colonel Kota saying he had. Kota’s evidence had already helped convict several Korean and Formosan guards and, Choi Sang-min had also heard, he had later been released without charge. Choi Sang-min had pointed out that Cooney was no longer in the camp when the order to execute him was supposedly given. But the camp records, confused and incomplete, offered no proof that this was so.

  After his sentencing, his Australian defence counsel, a flabby man with wet, glistening eyes that reminded the condemned Korean of scalpel blades, pleaded with him to lodge a petition for clemency. Choi Sang-min was resolved to dying in a foreign land and could not see the point in drawing out the agony. It had not escaped the notice of Choi Sang-min, along with the other Koreans and Formosans held at Changi as Class B and Class C war criminals, that the All
ied victors often seemed to free officers who had links to the Japanese nobility and let others more lowly, like themselves, be the scapegoats whom they hanged. Choi Sang-min thought of Major Nakamura, who had never been arrested and no doubt never would be; of Colonel Kota, who was once more free. Both were probably working for the Americans somewhere.

  All the same, said Choi Sang-min.

  What? asked his counsel, wet eyes cutting back and forth.

  All the same, said Choi Sang-min, a comment he made to demonstrate his fatalistic acceptance of life, but which his counsel understood as an assent to his attempt to prevent his execution and have the sentence commuted. The lawyer submitted the petition, and Choi Sang-min’s life and torment were extended by another four months.

  Choi Sang-min noticed how every man at Changi conceived of his destiny differently and invented his past accordingly. Some men had point-blank denied the charges, but they were hanged or were imprisoned for lengthy periods anyway. Some had accepted responsibility but refused to recognise the authority of the Australian trials. They too were hanged or were jailed for greater or lesser periods. Others denied responsibility, pointing out the impossibility of a lowly guard or soldier refusing to recognise the authority of the Japanese military system, far less refusing to do the Emperor’s will. In private they asked a simple question. If they and all their actions were simply expressions of the Emperor’s will, why then was the Emperor still free? Why did the Americans support the Emperor but hang them, who had only ever been the Emperor’s tools?