The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  He found himself no longer afraid of enclosed places, crowds, trams, trains—all the things that pressed him inwards and cut out the light—but he saw many other things now as an evasion of that light. He had seen too much to be frightened any longer of the rest of the filler that packs out evenings, days, years, sometimes the best part of a life, but he did find it dull. Still, he could do boring, and boring he did at countless memorial dinners, fundraising breakfasts, charity events, sherry parties and the vertiginous horror of dinner parties, and later at the meetings of hospital and college boards, of the numerous charities, clubs, and societies that prevailed on him to be a patron.

  It all bored him. Ella bored him. Ella’s friends bored him. Home brought on a weary headache. He bored himself. He was more and more bored by routine surgery, which was what he knew responsible surgery should strive to be; it was the non-routine where complications occurred, where things went wrong, where lives were ruined or abruptly ended but sometimes saved. He was bored by the sex of his adulteries, which was why, he presumed, he pursued them ever more ardently, imagining that there must be somewhere someone who could break the spell of torpor, his soul’s strange sleep. Occasionally a woman misunderstood him and imagined a future life with him. He would quickly disabuse her of the malady of romance. Thereafter, they thought him only interested in the pleasures of the flesh; in truth nothing interested him less.

  The more he advanced forward, the further the windmill receded. He thought of the Greeks’ idea of punishment, which was to constantly fail at what you most desire. So Sisyphus succeeds in rolling his boulder to the top of the cliff, only for it to fall back down, and he must return to the bottom and repeat the identical task the next day. So the forever starving, thirsty Tantalus, who brought the food of the gods to mortals, is condemned to stand in a lake and watch the water recede every time he stoops to drink, and the fruit-laden branch above his head rise out of his grasp every time he reaches to pick something to eat. Perhaps that was what hell was, Dorrigo concluded, an eternal repetition of the same failure. Perhaps he was there already. Like Socrates discovering the undying soul as he dies drinking hemlock, Dorrigo discovered the true object of his love where it was always absent: with other women who were not Amy.

  When ardour began to fail him, he reverted to a theatre of sensuality that he found even drearier than sex unadorned. It was ridiculous, comic, beyond belief and certainly beyond conversation at the Melbourne society events that were now his milieu. He would have liked to have laughed at himself in the company of others, but it was not possible.

  There was, he knew, within him, hidden deep and far away, a great slumbering turbulence he could neither understand nor reach, a turbulence that was also a void, the business of unfinished things. He drank—why would he not drink? A few wines at lunch, sometimes a whisky in his morning tea, a negroni or two before dinner (a habit he had picked up from an American major while with the occupying forces in Kobe) and wine with it, brandy and whisky after and some more whisky after that and after that again. His moods came upon him now in a more unpredictable and uncontrollable fashion and were sometimes vile. A lion in winter, he hurt Ella frequently with his words, his indifference, his rage at her affections and industry. He shouted at her after her father’s funeral for no good reason or even a bad reason. He wanted to love her, he wished he could love her; he feared he did love her but not in the way a man should his wife—he wanted to hurt her into the same realisation, a recognition that he was not for her, to elicit a response that might break him out of his sleep. He waited for a denouement that never arrived. And her hurt, her pain, her tears, her sadness, rather than ending his soul’s hibernation, only deepened it.

  4

  ELLA COULD NOT fathom living without loving. She had been loved by her parents and loved them deeply in return. Her love was simply what she was, looking for objects to pour itself out upon. She listened to Dorrigo’s problems at the hospital, she grieved with him when he lost a patient. She sympathised with his struggles with the idiotic bureaucrats who, he said, were going to be the death not just of him but of medical care in Australia, with the surgeons who disapproved of his methods.

  She had matured into a striking older woman, her raven hair more remarkable now dyed, dark-skinned, admired by other women for her elegant calm and style, her compassion for others and her easygoing nature. Whether it was her full figure or her radiant complexion, she had an appearance of vigour that belied her age. Men liked the way she looked, the way she moved, the sight of her dark legs in summer, and the way she smiled with such attention when the men talked about themselves. The only blemish on her beauty was a slight upturn at the tip of her nose, which at certain angles made her face somehow look almost a caricature. Most people never really noticed it. Over the years though Dorrigo saw it more and more, until sometimes—first thing of a morning or when he arrived home from work—he could see little else of her.

  She so thoroughly believed in Dorrigo and Dorrigo’s life that she repeated his opinions as if they were her own, and she did it in a way that always frustrated him. Damned bloody bureaucrats, she would say, they’ll be the death of more than just patients. Or she would start going on in some detail about the medical ignorance of some stupid surgeons.

  And as he listened, all he could see was the slight upturn of her nose, the way it made her face which once had seemed very beautiful rather comical, and he thought how she wasn’t really that beautiful at all, but rather odd-looking. And every time he heard her repeat something he had said a month or a week ago, he’d be astonished at both the banality of the opinion and her loyalty in repeating something that he could now see was trite and stupid. And yet had she dared suggest that what he was saying was banal and ridiculous, he would have been furious. He wanted her agreement and, having got it so unconditionally, he despised it.

  With their children she would agree also, much to Dorrigo’s irritation.

  It is the parent’s job to parent, he would say to her, and their job to live.

  And having said that, he would try to hide his frustration, and would have to look away from her face so he would not focus on the tip of her nose.

  But I agree with you, she would say. I couldn’t agree more. If a parent doesn’t parent, what are we here for?

  Dorrigo, the children, her friends, and her wider family—they all existed for her as a way of divining the world. It was a far larger and more wondrous place with them than it was without them. If she hoped for the same love from Dorrigo, and if she was disappointed in her hope, she did not feel its absence as a reason not to love him. The problem was that she did. Her love was without reason and would never yield to reason. Though it longed for requital, her love in the end did not demand it.

  But when he was away at night, she would lie awake, unable to sleep. And she would think of him and her and feel the most overwhelming sadness. She may have been a trusting woman but she was very far from a stupid one. She repeated his words and echoed his opinions not because she was without thoughts of her own, but because her nature was one that wished to live through others. Without love, what was the world? Just objects, things, light, darkness.

  Damn bloody bureaucrats. Stupid surgeon. Oh, that poor, poor man, she would say. Over and over. And then, inexplicably, she would cry until she could cry no more.

  5

  FOR SOME MINUTES Tenji Nakamura said nothing. He was trying to remember the Japan he had believed in before he went to war; a beautiful, noble Japan that he recalled as strong and good in spirit, which he had served in the fullness and purity of his soul. But something in his memory of the POW painting portraits of him and his men that day in Siam troubled him, but why it did so, he had no idea, and the effort of memory or the effect of morphine meant he next forgot about whatever it was he had just been thinking. All he could think of was how, beyond his vision, frozen monsters loomed over the city, frozen monsters past which he had travelled to come to the Tomokawas’, frozen monsters beneath whic
h he would travel going back to the airport. He realised Tomokawa was talking to him and he tried to concentrate, but the monsters seemed to be in the room now.

  You know, Tomokawa was saying, but Tomokawa looked like the monster Gamera, at the beginning I was terrified they’d pick me up as a war criminal. And I used to think: What a joke! Because they only cared about what we did to the Allied prisoners.

  Nakamura could hear Tomokawa’s voice but he was seeing a huge turtle spurting flames.

  And when I think about all that we did with the chinks in Manchukuo, the turtle was saying with his breath of brimstone. And the fun we had with their women!

  Nakamura was fully awake now and looked around uneasily, but Mrs Tomokawa, he realised, was out of hearing range in the kitchen.

  Well, you’d remember it all, I’m sure, the giant turtle—who, Nakamura had to remind himself, was really Tomokawa—went on. And so I think those POWs had it easy, and they should be proud of what they achieved with that railway and us. But to hang us for that and not for what we did to the chinks! Really—it defies any reasoning. That’s what I think, anyway.

  Mrs Tomokawa came back in to the room with food, and Tomokawa, who suddenly looked human again, changed the conversation. But all the time Nakamura was thinking about what Tomokawa had said and the common-sense wisdom of it all. For they had built a railway in fifteen months that the English had said could not be built in five times that period. He rubbed his neck, where the new bump had grown even that day, or so it seemed to Nakamura, for he believed he could feel the lump growing within him every hour of every day and every minute of every hour, eating him up. He tried, of course, not to feel it. He could with an effort not think about it and focus his mind instead on what concerned him more and more: the war, for that too was growing within him.

  They had battled disease, starvation and Allied air raids. It was not easy making sick men work, but how would the railway have been built if they had relied solely on the almost non-existent ranks of the healthy? He understood that he once could have stood accused of the deaths of perhaps hundreds of romusha and POWs. How many? He had no idea how many.

  But in a jungle without end, where transport was difficult, sickness and death everyday companions, he knew that he had selflessly performed his duty with devotion and honour. The railway had been a triumph of Japanese spirit. They had shown that spirit could triumph where the Europeans, with all their superior technology, had not even dared try. Without the capacity to make railway irons they had taken apart strategically unimportant lines throughout the Empire—in Java, Singapore and Malaya—and then transported them to Siam. Lacking heavy construction machinery, they had fallen back on the miracles the spirit can achieve with the body. It was beyond his power to stop the deaths, because the railway had to be built for the Emperor, and the railway could not have been built any other way. He remembered with a sadness that felt ennobling the deaths of his and Tomokawa’s comrades, both those who had died of disease in the jungle, and those later hanged by the Americans.

  His mind raced away from them and hurtled towards his childhood, and here he tried to dwell with a child who had lived life in accordance with some unspoken natural order. But he knew he was no longer that child—that he had somehow, somewhere broken with that child’s understanding of the world. Again, he heard Ikuko’s voice, saw that irritatingly stupid smile, and he was possessed of a shame that was also a terror. The things he thought right and true had all been wrong and false, and he with them. But how was such a thing possible? How could a life come to this? He began to fear his imminent death, not because he would die but because he sensed that he had never really lived as he wished. And Tenji Nakamura did not understand why this was so.

  He understood that somewhere in that goodness his wife and daughters loved in him, that goodness which had saved a mosquito’s life, was the same unswerving goodness that had allowed him to devote his life, no matter the anguish and the doubts, to the Empire and the Emperor. And this goodness was unlike Ikuko’s patient nursing, getting up two hours before work and the touch of her fingers on his cheek. It was a different goodness, and the Emperor was its embodiment both now and in the future. For it and for him Nakamura had shed the blood of others and would willingly have shed his own. He told himself that, through his service of this cosmic goodness, he had discovered he was not one man but many, that he could do the most terrible things he might otherwise have thought were evil if he had not known that they were in the service of the ultimate goodness. For he loved poetry above all, and the Emperor was a poem of one word—perhaps, he thought, the greatest poem—a poem that encompassed the universe and transcended all morality and all suffering. And like all great art, it was beyond good and evil.

  Yet somehow—in a way he tried not to dwell upon—this poem had become horror, monsters and corpses. And he knew he had discovered in himself an almost inexhaustible capacity to stifle pity, to be playful with cruelty in a way he found frankly pleasurable, for no single human life could be worth anything next to this cosmic goodness. For a moment, as he was being eaten by Tomokawa’s oppressive armchair, he wondered: what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil?

  The idea was too horrific to hold on to. In an increasingly rare moment of lucidity, Nakamura recognised that what was imminent was a battle not between life and death in his body, but between his dream of himself as a good man and this nightmare of ice monsters and crawling corpses. And with the same iron will that had served him so well in the Siamese jungle, in the ruins of the Shinjuku Rashomon and at the Blood Bank of Japan, he resolved that he must henceforth conceive of his life’s work as that of a good man.

  His mind felt suddenly serene. He had always used his powers for the sake of the Empire and the Emperor. He wished to tell his children that he was going peacefully, with good grace, to the land of the dead, where his parents and comrades awaited him. His idea of his own goodness, though, was becoming harder and harder to hold on to. It came close to collapsing altogether when Ikuko touched him, when he saw her skin still beautiful at her age, her slightly stupid smile, and he instinctively understood that her goodness was something that, at heart, was not within him. He tried to recall good things in his life—separate of the Emperor’s will, of orders and authority—with which to build some other idea of goodness, that might offer evidence of a good life. He remembered offering quinine to an Australian doctor. And despairing of the violence of a beating. But these thoughts gave way to a general hopelessness that was mixed up with images of skeletal beings crawling through rain and mud, and among the monsters in Tomokawa’s apartment he began seeing those crawling corpses everywhere, amidst ceaseless rain and the fires of hell. And Tenji Nakamura understood that these deaths would have been no more welcomed by those who inhabited those awful bodies than his own would soon be welcomed by his.

  You remember that prisoner painter? asked Tomokawa. I’ve told her it wasn’t you, but she never hears. It was an Australian. He used to get about with that sergeant. The one who used to sing of a night. All those horror stories they tell about us! And prisoners singing—it can’t have been so bad.

  How we lived, Nakamura thought.

  It was the happiest time of my life, Tomokawa said.

  Beyond Nakamura’s thoughts, snow swept through the world heavily, endlessly, erasing all that existed. Soon he would die, and all good and all evil would be as nothing. The monsters would melt and run into the black ocean. For a moment he thought he smelt DDT and saw many things: Sato looking up from the go board about to say something, lice fleeing a dead boy’s body, a man less than a man crumpling in the mud of a jungle clearing. He had a fulfilling sense of having cheated destiny in his life. His body suddenly jolted and he was awake. He had no idea how long he had been asleep.

  Some carp sushi, Commander? Mrs Tomokawa asked in her strange way, half-conversation, half-mastication.

  Nakamura felt without emotion, yet his body was trembling as he imagined the hospital sc
ales had once trembled when the American’s heart was placed on them.

  I get it from the market. It’s a little salty, but we like our carp sushi a little salty.

  Nakamura shook his head.

  The following spring, the Tomokawas received a card from Mrs Nakamura saying her husband had died. She did not mention to them his final ravings, his petty bad temper, or his vicious attacks on her and her daughters, who were nursing him, for even the simplest things such as stroking his cheeks or just smiling. Instead, she wrote of how the night before he passed away, knowing his time was rapidly approaching its end, and being something of an amateur poet and in accordance with tradition, he set out to write his death poem.

  A humble man to the end, continued Mrs Nakamura, he struggled for some hours, but, weakened by his illness, he concluded it was beyond his powers to better the death poem of Hyakka, which, he said, expressed everything he felt, but far more beautifully than he could ever manage. Mrs Nakamura added that she felt that Mr Nakamura had in this final act been inspired by his visit to wintry Sapporo the year before, and for that reason she was forwarding them a copy. His family had been with Mr Nakamura when he died, concluded Mrs Nakamura. They knew he was a kind man who could not bear to see even animals suffer. He knew he was a blessed and lucky man who had led a good life.