Two nights and three days from Wonsan to Harbin the train clattered on, the lush greenery interrupted by trucks and depots manned by soldiers in military khaki. Despite the inspections and unexplained transfers, this man I shall call S remained impassive, shadowed by a dusky light that had nothing to do with the time of day or the dimness of the car’s interior; he sat leaning against the window, face set, impervious to the din around him. Later, I would come to recognize this as a posture of self-recrimination, but at the time I had barely recovered from our initial journey by sea, and I was in a contemplative mood myself, in no condition to pause over the state of others, much less engage with my colleagues, who by now had begun drinking in earnest, liquor still being plentiful then, loosening even the most reticent of tongues. So I excused myself and must have promptly nodded off, for the next moment it was dawn, the day just beginning to break, the long length of the train still shrouded in sleep. I was the only one awake, the only one woken by the sudden cessation of rhythm, which drew me to the window, still dark except for my reflection superimposed on it.
We had apparently stopped for cargo, the faint scuffling I could hear revealing a truck ringed by soldiers, their outlines barely visible against the paling horizon. Later, I would learn the significance of this stop, but for the moment the indistinct scene strained my eyes, and I pulled back, hoping to rest for another hour.
Forty years later, this scene returns to me with a visceral crispness that seems almost specious, when so much else has faded or disappeared. Perhaps it is simply the mind, which, in its inability to accept a fact, returns to it, sharpening the details, resolving the image, searching for an explanation that the mind, with its slippery grasp on causality, will never be able to find. Most days I am spared by the habits of routine. But when the air darkens like this, turning the windows inward, truncating the afternoon, the present recedes, its thin hold on consciousness no match for the eighty-two years that have already claimed it. If hindsight were more amenable, I might long ago have been granted the belated clarity that might have illuminated the exact steps that led me into the fog of my actions. But hindsight has not offered me this view; my options and choices are as elusive now as they had been then. After all, it was war. An inexcusable logic, but also a fact. We adapted to the reality over which we felt we had no control.
For what could we have done? After seven years of embroilment and two years of open war, the conflict with China had begun to tax the everyday, small signs of oncoming shortages beginning to blight the streets, thinning out shelves and darkening windows, so that even menus at the fanciest restaurants resembled the books and newspapers blatantly censored by the Tokkō thought police. Then, when officials began making their rounds of sympathetic universities, seeking candidates disposed to patriotic service, our director submitted a list of names, eliciting more visits from other officials, this time escorted by military men. Were we alarmed? Some of us were. But the prospect of a new world-class facility with promises of unlimited resources stoked our ambitions, we who had long assumed ourselves dormant, choked off by the nepotism that structured our schools and hospitals. If any of us resisted, we did not hear about it. Flattered and courted, we let ourselves be lured, the glitter of high pay and breakthrough advancements all the more seductive in the light of our flickering lives.
So the day we set sail, we were in high spirits, the early sky heavy with mist, the hull of the Nippon Maru chopping and cleaving as the sound of rushing water washed away our coastline, leaving us to wend our way through our doubts and worries to arrive in Wonsan, stiff and rumpled, but clear in our convictions. After two turbulent days, we were grateful to be on steady ground, overwhelmed by new smells and sounds, the bustling travelers and hawkers broken up by the young, bright-eyed representative dispatched to meet us. This youth was energetic, if brashly so, and perhaps it was this, along with the sudden physical realization that we were no longer in Japan, that reminded me of my son, but it plunged me into a mood that would last the rest of the trip. Of S I have no recollection at this time, not until a few hours’ gap resolves into the memory of that cold window of the stilled train, my eyes pulling back from the soldiers and the truck, their dark outlines replaced by the reflection of my face, above which I caught another face, its eyes watching me.
No doubt it was the hour, and the invasiveness of having been watched, but the shock colored all my subsequent encounters with S, so that even decades later I am left with an ominous impression of a man always watching as the rest of us adapted to our given roles and fulfilled them perfectly. Did we exchange words? I regret that we did not. For by the time I gathered myself, he was gone. Two hours later we pulled into Harbin, our Emperor’s celebrated new acquisition.
From Harbin we were to head twenty-six kilometers southeast to Pingfang. But we were granted a few introductory hours in the famed city, and we set about familiarizing ourselves with the cobblestone streets flanked by European shops and cafés still festive with wealthy Russians and a few well-placed Chinese, all of whom politely acknowledged our entourage. If people were wary, they did not show it, and we, for our part, acted the tourist, taking turns deciphering the familiar kanji strung together in unfamiliar ways on signs and advertisements as onion domes and minarets rose beside church steeples and pagoda roofs, obscuring the city’s second skyline: the “Chinese” sector of this once Russian concession city. Once or twice unmarked vans stole by, but overall our impression was of wonder and delight as we strolled through the crowd, the hot sun on our backs coaxing out a healthy sweat despite the chill in the October air.
If not for a small incident, Harbin may have remained an oasis in my memory of China. But our young representative had irked me from the start, and the farther we walked the more he chatted, pointing out this or that landmark we must have heard of, and soon his loud voice, lilting with presumptions, began grating on me, and I snapped back with an energy that surprised even me.
My colleagues were quick to intervene, rallying around him like mother hens, clucking at my lack of magnanimity. But, you see, my son and I had been getting into it just like this, and I could not abide the youth’s hooded eyes; I lashed out, admonishing his audacity, his misguided courage and naïve ideals—the very things that I believed had pushed my own son to run away, presumably to enlist. I might have lost my head, save for the tether of my wife’s face, her pleading terror checked by her refusal to blame me every day I failed to find him. I dropped my voice and let myself be pecked back, the sun-dappled street once again leading us on, this time, to our first proper meal in days.
The day’s specialty was duck. Despite our meager group of thirty-one, the restaurant had been requisitioned, its large dining room conspicuously empty, its grand floors and walls cavernously echoing the stamps and scrapes of our shoes and chairs as we accepted the seats arranged around two large tables set in the center of the room. S was observing us, his stolid face amplifying the garishness of ours as our tables brimmed with plates and bowls, exciting our chopsticks to swoop and peck, securing a morsel, punctuating a quip, our cheeks growing rosy as platter after platter crowded the wheel ingeniously fitted at the tables’ centers. At last the duck was set before us, its dewy skin crisped and seasoned, the complex aroma of fruit and game emanating from it. For most of us, this was our first taste of the bird, and the pungent flesh, voluptuously tender, provoked our passions, prompting us to trade stories of our youthful lusts. But I for some reason found myself remembering the days I had spent toting siblings who never tired of feeding the ducks that splashed in the pond behind our house. I earned my title as the group’s sentimentalist that day, but I believe it was at this moment that we fell in with each other, our shared pleasure piqued by our unspoken guilt at gorging on such an extravagance when our families back home had mere crumbs grudgingly afforded by the patriotic frugality demanded of them. Perhaps this is why Harbin has stayed with me, nostalgic and laden, edged with a hysteria I would come to associate with this time.
&nb
sp; —
I believe few of us forget what we keep hidden in our memory’s hollows. True, many of us are capable of remaining professionally closed-faced, tossing out facts of our wartime accomplishments the way we toss our car keys, casually and full of the confidence of important men who have worked hard and earned their keep, rightfully. But forgetting?
My two colleagues and I have been debating this point over our yearly meals taken here in the rural outskirts of F City, where by chance we converged fifteen years ago. They claim that, if not for these meals, they too might have forgotten, these memories, stowed for so long, buried by a present that discourages remembrances so that trace feelings, occasionally jostled, might momentarily surface, but nothing more. For why dig up graves from a banished past, selfishly subjecting all those connected to us to what can only amount to a masochistic pursuit? Isn’t it better to surrender to a world populated by the young, who, taught nothing, remain uncurious, the war as distant as ancient history, its dim heat kindling the pages of textbooks and cinemas, occasionally sparking old men with old grudges, but nothing to do with them?
I would like to disagree. But life did move on, the war’s end swallowing us up and spitting us out different men, who, like everyone else, slipped back into a peacetime world once again girdled by clear boundaries and laws meant to preserve lives, not to destroy them. And yet, for me, S has continued to tunnel through time, staying in my present, reminding me of our shared past, which we, with all our excuses, have been guarding as tightly as the walls that surrounded us in Pingfang.
You see, you must understand something: We had always meant to preserve lives. A few thousand enemies to save hundreds of thousands of our own? In that sense, I hardly think our logic was so remarkable or unique.
What was remarkable was Pingfang. Its imposing structure looming in calculated isolation, its vast grounds secured by high-voltage walls, its four corners staked with watchtowers overlooking its four gates armed with guards whose shouts were regularly drowned out by the clatter of surveillance planes circling the facility. Approaching them for the first time in jostling trucks, the walls of the fortress compound seemed to unroll endlessly, each additional meter contracting our nerves so that our faces, initially loose with excitement, began to tighten, eliciting a lustrous laugh from our young guide, who turned to remark, Of course, we don’t bear the Emperor’s emblem here.
Sure enough, when we stopped for authorization at the northern gate, we saw that the walls were indeed ungraced. In a world where even our souls were expected to bear the mark of the Emperor, the absence was terrifying, and perhaps this was when I saw Pingfang, its forbidding grandeur, cloaked by its unmarked walls, presaging what it was capable of. By then it was clear that the warning emanating from it made no exceptions, even as it opened its gates and saluted us in.
In increments we would become privy to the extent of Pingfang’s ambitions. But first we were dazzled. Our days snatched away by seminars and orientation tours, we scarcely had time to unpack, our bodies as well as our minds collapsing into white sleep always flooded with sunlight, so that even the hardiest of us grew weary, dragging from conference rooms to auditoriums, the occasional outdoor tour whisking us off in rattling trucks that clattered our teeth and fibrillated our brains until we developed an aversion to Pingfang’s astigmatized landscape. After a fortnight, we reached our threshold. We broke down, all of us mere husks of ourselves, our individual drive wrung out of us. Until then we had been accustomed to mild routines with little expectation; to be inducted into a life ruled by the exigencies of war proved transformative. We readjusted, our senses and sensibilities recalibrated to accommodate the new demand. After all, humans are remarkable in their ability to adapt. Time and again we would find ourselves reminded of this fact, which, I believe, was at the root of what came to pass at Pingfang.
—
Had I understood what I glimpsed that night from the train window, would I have turned back, returned to the circumscribed safety of my home and career? I would like to imagine so. And in my right mind I am certain I would have. But, you see, there is the problem: the issue of “transgression.” In peacetime lines are clearer; even if proceedings are flawed and verdicts inconclusive, one can and does know if one has transgressed—certainly, the court need only assemble one’s intentions to make that determination. But in war? Does transgression still require intent? Or is it enough for circumstances to conspire, setting up conditions that pressure one to carry out acts that are in line with, but not always a direct result of, orders? I do not know. Yet I find myself looping through memory’s thickets for that exact bridge that let us cross our ambivalence to another side.
My two colleagues believe it happened in Harbin. They claim that, as tourists, we were set up to accept the exotic and so dismiss what would have been, in another context, obviously amiss. I do not dispute this view. Yet I wonder whether we hadn’t been set up—inoculated—long before we set sail for Wonsan. By then the mood of war, long since gathering in the air, had precipitated into crackdowns, the once distant patter of the jingoists’ tattoo pounding down doors, sending us scurrying under the official wing. Even our mandatory participation in the bucket brigade, as well as our patriotic duty to look the other way, had already become two more chores as seemingly unavoidable as the war itself. Resisting would have been foolhardy, the hard-line climate a meteorological fact, its terrorizing power mystical in effect. Yet I am a man of science; I have never been swayed by weather’s mystical claims. Nor have I been captive to its blustery dramatics. So I was arrested. My son, Yasushi, was six then, a bright child already fiercely righteous. He never mentioned my arrest, but I believe it left an impression. He became rebellious, his childish disobedience erupting into full-scale mutiny by the time he was fourteen. My wife urged me to confront him; I did nothing of the sort. Because, you see, I recanted my beliefs. True, I was thinking of them, my wife and son, their torturous road if I refused to cooperate. But finally, I could not bear it, the dark shapeless hours sundered by wood and metal and electricity; in ten meager days, I gave in.
Four decades later I do not have reason to believe Yasushi is still alive, but every so often there is news of yet another Imperial Army straggler emerging from the jungles in Southeast Asia, and I am unable to let go.
The latest straggler, one Captain Nakahira Fumio, is currently on the run. His hut, discovered on Mindoro Island two weeks ago, had evaded detection for thirty-five years. Widely speculated to be the last repatriate, the authorities finally released his picture.
What could I do? I bought up the newsstand. The image, a grainy reproduction of a school portrait, showed a hollow-chested boy with an affable face. A little thin-framed, he was nevertheless generic enough to be any youth. Could Yasushi have taken his identity? Because, you see, Yasushi had been too young for service. Needing my consent, he had approached me with the forms. I, of course, refused, taking precautions to prevent him from forging them. But forms are traceable; Yasushi, realizing this, opted to trade in his identity. What name he assumed we never found out. Even then the military was eager for soldiers, and I, despite my connections, had a record: An official charge of treason.
Comparing the images for quality, I tucked several newspapers under my arm and hastened into the street still burnished with morning light. That’s when I saw him—S—his old man’s shape bearing the shadow of his younger self, his ornithic neck bobbing forward, his once languid gait sped up to a near footloose shuffle. I opened my mouth to call out. But what could I have said? Had I been a different man, able to withstand the eyes of those eager to condemn me for what they themselves might have done in my position, I might have mustered the courage to catch the attention of the one man who may yet have the right to judge us. But I am not that man; I did not call out. Humans may be adaptable, but that has no bearing on our ability to change.
—
All told, I spent twenty-four months in Pingfang. Officially, we were the Boeki Kyusuibu, the Epidemic
Prevention and Water Purification Department, Unit 731, a defensive research unit. Materially, Pingfang spanned three hundred hectares, its fertile land dappled with forests and meadows, its innumerable structures—headquarters, laboratories, dormitories, airfield, greenhouses, pool—luxuriously accommodated within its fold. Locally, we were known as a lumber mill, our pair of industrial chimneys continually emptying into the impending sky.
I remember the first time I stood beneath one of these chimneys. Having finished a procedure, we had followed the gurney out, the damp air white with frost, the bare earth crunching underfoot. S, like the rest of us, was in a morose mood; our work, bacteriological in nature, was making useful gains, but we had not succeeded in developing the antidote we had been after, and I, for one, had become increasingly restless. By then the war, in gridlock in China, was beginning to fan southward, and I was convinced that if Yasushi had indeed enlisted, he would end up in the tropics, where the fruits of our work would be most vital.
I do not know why I risked airing these thoughts. Perhaps it was my way of acknowledging my son. I approached S. Until then we had all been careful to keep to the professional, repeating stock answers whenever we strayed. But S was sympathetic. He replied openly, agreeing with my prognosis, adding only that the war was likely to turn west before pushing farther south—an unentertained notion at the time. I was about to press him on the feasibility, indeed the audacity, of such a course, but just then a flare of heat drew our attention, and the gurney, now emptied of our maruta—yes, that’s what we called them: “logs”—pulled us back to our duty.
Because, you see, that was what Pingfang was built for, its immaculate design hiding in plain sight what we most hoped to control: the harvesting of living data. For how else could we compete? Our small nation, poor in resources and stymied by embargoes egregiously imposed by the imperial West. Our one chance lay in our ability to minimize loss, the most urgent being that of our troops, all too often wasted by war’s most efficient enemy: infectious diseases. But war spares no time. We found ourselves beating against the very wall that had always been the bane of medical science. In other words, our problem was ethical; Pingfang sought to remove it. Its solution was nothing we dared imagine but what we, in medicine, had all perhaps dreamed of. All we had to do was continue administering shots, charting symptoms, studying our cultures—all the things we had always done in our long medical careers—except when we filled our syringes, it was not with curatives but pathogens; when we wielded our scalpels, it was not for surgery but vivisection; and when we reached for sample tissues, they were not animal but human. This was perhaps Pingfang’s greatest accomplishment: its veneer of normalcy. We carried on; the lives of our soldiers, indeed our entire nation, depended upon us.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 15