He saw himself with the other kids, tobogganing on sheets of scrap metal down the roof of an abandoned coal mine warehouse into the snowdrift below. And in his mind, Jun heard again the squeaking that one wheel of their overladen handcart had made, as he and his mother and sister trudged through the summer heat towards the capital city, Toyohara, fleeing the distant rumbling behind them, which was the sound of the Soviet army sweeping down to reclaim control of the collapsing Japanese colony. He remembered playing endless games of cards with Kiyo as they camped out in the square in front of Toyohara Station, waiting patiently for a train that might take them south to the port of Odomari where, rumour had it, there would be ships to evacuate them to Japan. Kiyo kept winning, which made Jun bad-tempered.
The images passed through his mind as he slipped in and out of sleep, and the same morose man arrived every morning and evening with the same two bowls containing broth and rice mixed with barley.
But then on the fifth morning, just when he was starting to think that his breakfast must be late today, the door of the cell swung open to reveal two unfamiliar men standing in the doorway. They looked like Europeans and, through sheer force of habit, Jun greeted them in Russian. One of the men was youngish — in his mid-twenties, Jun guessed — with light brown hair and a funny little moustache. The other was older and more heavily built. Both were dressed in civilian clothes: tweed jackets and woollen jerseys.
Jun’s ‘zdrazdvuyte’ produced nothing but a blank stare, but the younger of the two men then proceeded to speak to him in understandable but heavily accented Japanese. Americans, he guessed.
‘You’re coming with us,’ said the younger man, not as though giving a command but cheerfully, as though he were inviting Jun out for a drink at a local bar.
Jun followed the Americans down a long corridor, and though a hallway where sad groups of people stood silently around the walls, staring at them as they passed. Then the main door swung open and they were out in the bright light of day.
They had stepped into a wide shopping street, which looked like the coloured pictures of Japan in the series of books about the Empire that Jun’s class teacher had lent him in his last year of school. There were women wearing white aprons over their dark kimonos, delivery boys on bicycles, and an orderly column of schoolchildren on their way to an excursion. They passed a watch-mender’s, a shoe shop and a little restaurant with a plaster statue of a badger in a jaunty straw hat outside the door. Snowdrifts still lay in the shadows of the buildings, and although the sun was shining, the air was cold. The two Americans walking on either side of him had, as far as he could see, no weapons. He could have made a run for it. But then again, he had nowhere to run to.
‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked the younger man.
‘You’ll see.’
They turned into a side street, skirted around a rubble-filled construction site, and came to a gateway opening on to a path that led through a small garden of neatly trimmed bushes to a rather fine old wooden house. The house was hidden from the street by a high concrete-block wall, and there was no name plate by the door. Bewildered, Jun walked between the two Americans into a large front room furnished with heavy office furniture and a row of metal filing cabinets. The curtains were drawn, but lamplight filled the room. On a table in the centre stood a metal tray, piled high with cardboard folders, and an odd machine that looked a bit like a radio. The two Americans seated themselves on one side of the table, gesturing to Jun to take the chair on the opposite side.
‘Well, you have been in the wars, I see,’ said the younger man, after staring at Jun for a few moments. And then, unexpectedly, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
The younger American’s face made Jun want to laugh. The combination of soft pink cheeks and the little moustache gave him the air of a teenager pretending to be an adult.
The tea was brown like Russian tea, and arrived accompanied by a chocolate-coated biscuit.
The two Americans leaned back in their chairs and exchanged a few words in English. Then the younger one said, companionably, ‘Kamiya, that’s your name, isn’t it? Kamiya Jun? You can call me Mike, and this handsome fellow here is my friend Bill. Bill doesn’t speak much Japanese, so I’ll ask the questions for him.’ The older man smiled but said nothing. He had curly hair, thinning in the middle of his scalp, and a round face with a sleepy smile which reminded Jun of Colonel Brodsky’s beloved cat Lev. That was the way Lev used to smile when Jun groomed the cat’s soft tawny fur. From time to time in the course of the conversation Bill nodded his head, and Jun wondered whether he understood more Japanese than he was admitting, or whether he was just trying to be encouraging.
It was peaceful in the room, and pleasantly warm. There was a wooden clock hanging on the wall, ticking softly as its pendulum swayed to and fro. The piece of machinery that looked like a radio had two wheels inside going slowly round and round.
Jun remembered the day he said goodbye to Colonel Brodsky. One of the last things the colonel had said to him was, ‘If you ever get into trouble, remember to stick to the truth as far as you possibly can.’ And then, after a pause, ‘The trick is knowing where to stop.’
‘Well, Kamiya-kun,’ said Bill, addressing him in the diminutive form, as though he were speaking to a schoolboy. ‘We have a little problem here, and we are wondering if you may be able to help us solve it. Here we have a young man — yourself — found wandering confused beside the rail track from Aomori to Misawa, clearly having been in a fight. Nothing in his pockets but quite a lot of money and the identity card of a young man who, unfortunately, was drowned at sea three years ago. The young man — you, that is — then gives our friends in the Japanese police another name that does not seem to correspond to any name in any family registration — at least, not one that we have been able to confirm.’
Jun took a bite of the biscuit. It was so sweet that it made him feel faintly sick.
‘And meanwhile, the very next day, we have an unpleasant little incident near Misawa. A landmine placed under a rail track. No harm done, as it happens. Luckily enough a sharp-eyed rail worker spotted it in time. But it could have been a very different story if a train had gone over it, perhaps loaded with passengers — women going to market, children going to school. Nasty things, landmines. Have you ever seen what they do to trains, or for that matter to human bodies?’
Jun had not, though he had seen what a bomb dropped from a low-flying plane does to a crowd of people packed into a square outside a railway station. Oddly, when he thought about it, the only thing he could clearly remember about that scene was the dog. His sister Kiyo had been teasing him for losing at cards, and he had lost his temper and run off into a backstreet away from the crowd to try to calm down. When he heard the roar of the Russian planes and felt the shaking of the earth, he had raced back towards the station square and then stopped, trying to make sense of the vision that confronted him — why the trees that had been there five minutes ago were no longer there, and why there was a thick brownish fog hanging over the middle of the square, through which he could vaguely see a multicoloured heap of unrecognisable shapes. There were people stumbling out of the fog screaming, but he could no longer remember hearing their voices. That was when the dog appeared from nowhere, ran straight into the centre of the square, and emerged carrying something in its jaws. It was a brindled dog, Jun recalled, with an upward-curling tail, and it moved very quickly and purposefully. Jun never did see exactly what the bomb had done to his mother and sister.
‘So,’ Mike continued, ‘we ask ourselves, naturally enough, could there be a connection between these two occurrences, and is it possible that the young man — you — might be able to shed some light on the reasons why someone would want to place a landmine under a rail track?’
‘No,’ said Jun. A biscuit crumb had stuck in his throat, and he had to cough and say again, ‘No, I don’t know anything about that.’
Mike sighed softly. ‘A pity. Never mind. What you can tell
us, I’m sure, is where you came from, and how you came to be wandering in a sorry state beside the railway.’
Stick to the truth as far as you possibly can, thought Jun.
‘I arrived on a smuggling boat. I’d been working on the boat for two years as a deckhand. Before that, you see, I was in Karafuto. That’s where I was born and brought up — in a little place just outside Toyohara. The boat’s captain put me ashore by a big inlet — a kind of sea lake — maybe three or four hours’ drive from Aomori, and asked me to take a package to a man named Kitazawa at the barber’s shop opposite Misawa Station. I never saw what was in the package, and I never got to Misawa. When I tried to open the package — because I was curious to know what was inside — a man with a knife forced me off the train and beat me up. That’s all I know. That’s all I can tell you.’
Mike beamed at him, like an eager young schoolmaster who has just encountered a particularly promising pupil, and Bill nodded his head more vigorously than ever.
‘Well, that is a very good start,’ said Mike. ‘But I’m sure you can really tell us a bit more if you try. What was the name of the smuggling boat, for example, and what was the name of the place where you were put ashore?’
‘The boat was called the Tsushima-Maru, but I don’t know the name of the place where I came ashore. They didn’t tell me. I was only a deckhand. They hardly told me anything. Most of the time I didn’t even know where I was.’
But Mike was not having any of that. Slowly, patiently, he coached Jun through the story. They talked about ports the Tsushima-Maru had visited — Vladivostok, Wonsan, Pusan, Niigata, Naha, Kaohsiung. How many times had they been to each? What sort of cargo had they taken on?
‘Even if they never told you the contents of all those bags and crates and boxes, Kamiya-kun, surely you must have taken a guess — an intelligent young man like you.’
So Jun told Mike his guesses — probably some amphetamines, maybe opium, occasionally guns, but some of it was probably just sugar or coffee or scrap metal or rolls of silk.
Jun expected Mike to ask him more about the man on the train who had attacked him, or the mysterious Mr Kitazawa in the barber’s shop in Misawa, but the two Americans didn’t seem particularly interested in any of that. Maybe they knew all about it already. Instead, Mike wanted to go back in time, to Karafuto.
* * *
‘So tell me, Kamiya-kun,’ said Mike, ‘How old are you exactly?’
‘Seventeen — nearly eighteen. I was born on the twenty-eighth of May, eighth year of Showa.’ He paused to calculate. ‘That would be 1933 in the Western calendar.’
‘And how did a decent young lad like you come to be working on a smuggling boat? I guess it must have been pretty tough trying to survive in Karafuto after the Soviets invaded, huh? You didn’t come back to Japan with your family?’
‘My family all died.’
‘Oh my, I am so very sorry to hear that.’ Mike looked genuinely appalled. ‘Killed in the war? How dreadful!’
‘My mother and sister were. My father died years ago. In a mining accident.’
‘Oh, you poor kid! And you must have been, what, just twelve, I guess, at the end of the war? How ever did you survive?’
It all seemed so long ago that Jun could barely remember himself, but he told his new friends Mike and Bill the parts that he could recall — the hut in the mountains where he sheltered for weeks, teaching himself how to milk the abandoned cows in the neighbouring meadow; the skills he acquired in stealing a handful of beans or a packet of cigarettes from the shops that reappeared as peace slowly returned. Then he told them how he had been rescued by his old neighbours the Zimnikovs, whom he had bumped into quite by chance when he was hunting through a pile of garbage in a Toyohara backstreet. They had taken him in and let him work and sleep in the little bakery they’d set up to serve the incoming Soviet soldiers and civilians.
From time to time, as Jun spoke, Mike tapped the tip of his pen on the block of paper on which he had been writing. Jun felt that Mike was getting bored, but he thought that the Americans were going to be interested in the job that came after the bakery. And he was right.
‘I learned to speak quite a bit of Russian while I was at the Zimnikovs’ bakery,’ he said. ‘I worked there for over a year. So then they introduced me to a Russian officer who was looking for a Japanese-speaking houseboy, and I worked for him for a couple of years.’
‘And did this Russian officer have a name?’ asked Mike, now leaning forward in his seat with his elbows on the table and his hands clutched together under his chin.
‘Nikolai Aleksandrovich Brodsky,’ said Jun formally, giving the full name and patronymic.
There was a silence in the room that made the ticking of the clock sound louder than ever. Bill had obviously understood this part of the conversation too, and both men were staring at him.
‘Colonel Nikolai Aleksandrovich Brodsky?’ asked Mike.
‘Yes,’ replied Jun.
‘You worked as a houseboy for Colonel Nikolai Brodsky?’ Mike repeated, very slowly, as though weighing every word, and, when Jun nodded, added, ‘And what, exactly, did you do for the good colonel?’
‘I made his breakfast, polished his boots and shoes, helped buy supplies for the kitchen, bought his cigarettes and alcohol — he liked Ararat brandy, but it wasn’t easy to find in Karafuto — and I fed and groomed his cat.’
‘You fed and groomed his cat,’ echoed Mike. It was not a question. More a statement made to convince himself that these were actually the words he had just heard. ‘That’s all? Nothing else you’d like to tell us about?’
‘Sometimes I set up the rooms for meetings and parties and tidied up afterwards . . .’
‘Did you see any of the people who attended the meetings and parties? Remember any names?’
‘There were times when I saw the guests, because I had to take their coats and serve drinks, but sometimes Colonel Brodsky would ask me to get things ready and then stay in my own room until the meeting was over. I don’t remember many names. There was a man called Kriukov who used to visit. He was something important in the government, but I can’t remember his other names. And then there were two guys called Ellinsky and Zaitsev who were particular friends of Colonel Brodsky’s. Sometimes, when the colonel or his guests were reading documents, he would ask me how to pronounce a Japanese character that he didn’t know — particularly place names.’
The trick is knowing where to stop, Colonel Brodsky had said. Maybe, Jun thought, I should have stopped a little earlier.
Mike and Bill turned to each other and started speaking rapidly in English. The room suddenly seemed very hot, and Jun could feel a trickle of sweat running down his spine.
‘And was it Colonel Brodsky,’ asked Mike at last, ‘who sent you to work on the smuggling boat?’
‘No,’ said Jun. ‘It wasn’t like that at all. Colonel Brodsky was recalled to Moscow, so he didn’t have a job for me anymore. I’d told him more than once that I wanted to go to Japan, so when he was leaving, he said he’d try to arrange it. He gave me an introduction to a man in Maoka, and that man found me a berth on a smuggling boat going to Tokyo. In Tokyo, I got off and was planning to stay, but I didn’t know anyone there, and . . .’ Jun could hear the hesitation in his own voice and wondered whether he sounded as though he was lying. ‘I just felt lost there, so in the end I went back to the boat and offered to work for them. I worked on their boat until last week.’
Mike, whose face had been growing more and more serious, suddenly broke into a friendly smile again, as though he had just resolved something that was troubling him.
‘Well, Kamiya-kun,’ he said, ‘that’s quite a remarkable story you’ve told us. You must be pretty hungry by now, eh? How about an early lunch? You just wait here for a bit. I’ll be back shortly.’
He disappeared into a neighbouring room, leaving Jun and Bill to smile at each other across the table. In fact, Mike was gone for a quite long time. Jun could hear h
is voice from the neighbouring room, though the words were muffled. He couldn’t hear the sound of any other voices, so guessed that Mike was speaking on the telephone. Towards the end of the conversation, Mike’s voice rose, as though he were arguing with someone, and when he came back his face had grown rather serious. He was followed by an elderly Japanese man who was carrying a tray laden with cheese-and-tomato sandwiches and a brown fizzy drink in oddly shaped glass bottles with words written in the glass.
While the Americans conversed, Jun ate and drank hungrily, though he didn’t much like the taste of the drink.
When they had finished, Mike pushed his chair back and stood up.
‘I think that’s enough for today, don’t you? You’re probably feeling tired from answering all those questions. We’ll take you back to the police station now. Try to have a good rest this afternoon. We’ve got an early start tomorrow.’
* * *
It seemed like the middle of the night when Jun was awakened by a warder — not the normal bad-tempered one, but a younger man with a brisk manner. The night shift, he thought. The man served him the usual meal, and then said, ‘Put your stuff together. You’re leaving in half an hour.’ Not that Jun had any stuff to put together.
He was escorted out into the almost deserted reception area where Mike and Bill were waiting for him with a warm army overcoat, which he put on over his khaki outfit. It was still pitch-dark outside. A jeep was parked immediately outside the police station, with a youngish Japanese man in the driver’s seat. Oddly, the driver was wearing sunglasses.
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 5