One Man's Justice

by Akira Yoshimura

  As he sat down against the cart and wiped his face and neck with his hand towel, he spotted something blue down in the expanse of reeds between the river and the embankment. It looked like a pair of trousers. Straining to see through the rustling reeds, he made out a pair of feet protruding from the trouser legs. Maybe a young couple was there, trying to enjoy themselves away from prying eyes. As the reeds swayed and hummed in the next strong gust of wind Takuya got a clearer view of the blue cloth of the trousers, then he caught sight of the man’s shirt and the back of his head. He was obviously alone.

  Takuya lit a cigarette. The reeds bent over again with the next gust of wind and the man lying in the reeds was exposed to view once more.

  Each time the wind blew strongly enough to move the reeds, Takuya found his eyes drawn to the man. The sweat on his face was almost dry by now. In the distance he could see a train slowly pulling out of the station just this side of Himeji castle. There was no one to be seen anywhere near him. The only person visible was some distance away along the embankment, a woman dressed in a dark work kimono, bent over picking wild vegetables.

  Maybe this man had been doing the same and was taking a rest before starting again. Takuya remembered how he used to pick bamboo shoots and parsley in the woods and fields around his village, and thought that if there were something edible down among those reeds, perhaps he should go and pick some for himself.

  Hat in hand, Takuya got to his feet and walked down the embankment and on to a little path through the sea of reeds. They were so high that each time the wind blew, the fluffy tops brushed against his face.

  Before he had taken many steps along the winding path a faint sickly-sweet smell brought him instinctively to a halt. The black, swollen feet of a dead body were poking out of the blue trousers. From a distance it might have seemed as though the man was taking an afternoon nap, but the terrible smell of decaying flesh wafting in Takuya’s direction was unmistakable.

  Waving his hand in front of his nose at the stench, Takuya watched as the wind flailed the reeds against the man’s body. The man lay face down, his shirt pushed up to reveal the reddish-black skin on his back.

  Takuya edged backward two or three steps before turning round and scurrying a few more paces back down the path. The sickly-sweet smell of death still clung to his clothes, and as he scrambled up the embankment he was hit by a wave of nausea.

  Back beside his handcart, Takuya retched as he stared at the blue cloth down among the reeds. Had the man been murdered, or had he starved to death? Takuya had seen only the man’s feet and part of his back, but he guessed that the man had probably been at least middle-aged. He knew he should report it to the police, but of course that was the last thing he intended to do. Being questioned by the police was just too risky.

  The dead man has nothing to do with me, he thought. Eventually that woman picking wild vegetables, or maybe some children playing in the reeds, would find the body. If the man had simply collapsed and died on his way somewhere, his body would be carried away and disposed of.

  Takuya lifted the handle of the cart and started walking. The revolting smell persisted, clinging to him. He retched again and again as he walked down the road. This smell was different from the one that had wafted up from the shallow graves when they had exhumed the decapitated bodies to destroy the last evidence of the fate of the American airmen. That smell had been something akin to wet, rotting cardboard, but it was equally pungent. Maybe there was a difference when a corpse decomposed in the sun.

  Despite having no proof, Takuya somehow sensed that the man had died a natural death. But if that was so, why had he wandered off the road and down into the reeds? Had he been so hungry that he’d remembered his childhood days and gone searching for birds’ nests? Or had he ventured down the embankment to look for wild vegetables? The thought of that poor man lying there dead, face down among the reeds, deeply affected Takuya.

  He tried to picture the families of the men who had been executed in that clearing in the bamboo grove. They would have had parents, perhaps brothers and sisters. Their families would have mourned their deaths and no doubt despaired at the fact that there were no remains on which to focus their grief.

  As a crewman on a B-29, the man whom Takuya had beheaded had been party to the slaughter of countless Japanese, but the clear memory of the man in his mind included nothing of what Takuya imagined a murderer might look like, no suggestion of anything criminal. He had just been playing his part as a cog in the wheel of the American war machine in its attacks on the Japanese mainland and, even if that had resulted in the slaughter of civilians, it was unlikely that he felt any guilt about his part in the process. To him, there may have been only a tenuous connection between the bombs that tumbled out of his plane’s bomb bay and the carnage down on the ground.

  Takuya mused that his involvement in the executions was essentially the same in nature as the actions of the man he had killed, in that both were merely carrying out their duties as military men. The difference was that whereas the killing committed by the American had been by bombing, which precluded witnessing the bloodshed, Takuya’s act had involved wielding the sword with his own hands as he beheaded the airman. The fact that the American had killed countless people as opposed to Takuya’s one victim brought him some comfort.

  Takuya shook his head and frowned. He wished he had never seen that blue cloth. As recollections of that afternoon in the bamboo grove swirled inside his head, he felt ashamed of his loss of nerve. These days he hardly ever checked his pistol to make sure it would be ready for that moment of truth if he was cornered, and he even doubted he’d have the courage to pull the trigger if the worst came to the worst.

  The reeds waved this way and that before bending right in unison as a gust of wind blew from downstream. Takuya fixed his eyes on the ground and pulled the cart off down the road.

  Temperatures dropped with each passing day. There were no articles in the newspaper about a murder, and, as the body in the reeds must have been found by now, the authorities must have decided that the man had died a natural death.

  Takuya delivered his cartloads of matchboxes, his routine unchanging from one day to the next. He had attached a long canvas strap to two points on the deck of the cart so he could move it more easily, and, once a hard knot of muscle formed under the skin on his shoulders, pulling the cart was no problem at all.

  The first colours of autumn could be seen on the low hills near Himeji. Fine weather continued, with pleasant days followed by glowing red sunsets.

  One day towards the end of autumn, when the reds and golds of the surrounding hills had begun to mute to softer yellows and browns, Takuya saw something that made him stop in his tracks and stare down the road. A convoy of four US Army trucks, their canvas canopies rolled up, was moving towards him, kicking up clouds of dust.

  He had often seen American lorries and Jeeps trundling along the main road and over the reinforced concrete bridge just downstream from the rickety old wooden bridge he pulled his cart across, but never once had he seen them using this old road. It was barely wider than the wheelspan of a big lorry, making it impossible for two vehicles to pass. Maybe they were lost, or maybe they had decided to take a shortcut. There were no side paths to push the cart off into, and all that separated the road from the paddy fields on both sides was a narrow ditch.

  The lorries were coming towards him at considerable speed, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what he should do. His load of matchboxes stuck out on both sides of the cart, so if he didn’t move it off the road there was no way a lorry would be able to pass.

  For a second he thought of turning round and heading for the last crossroad, but that was almost a kilometre back down the road, so there was no way he could make it in time. There was nothing to do but push the cart to one side of the road and hope that the lorries would be able to squeeze past. He summoned all his strength and hurriedly pushed the cart back a few metres to a spot on the side of the road whe
re it was slightly wider than where he had been standing.

  The sound of the trucks’ engines and tyres grew louder as the front vehicle closed rapidly on him. The sunlight reflected off the windscreen so he couldn’t see inside, but he could see an elbow sticking out of each of the windows.

  The lorry’s horn blasted the air for what seemed an age, leaving his ears ringing. The full width of the road was taken up as the convoy bore down on Takuya and his cart. Fear seized him at the thought that the driver might not slow down at all, and would instead choose to smash both the cart and Takuya out of the way. The tyres looked enormous, and the chassis with its white star on the side was far higher than that of any Japanese vehicle he had ever seen.

  The sound of the horn was followed by the screeching of brakes, as the lorry halted ten metres short of the handcart. Takuya clasped the bar tightly as he stood his ground. Shouts of surprise came from the soldiers sitting in the back of the lorry, and heads poked out to check why they had stopped so suddenly. Seconds later the vehicle was engulfed in the cloud of dust floating up from behind.

  A fresh-faced young soldier leant out of the window on the passenger side, yelling something and gesticulating excitedly at Takuya to get out of the way. Evidently enraged, he shouted the same thing again and again with increasing urgency.

  Takuya moved the cart. His vision seemed to blur for a moment as sweat poured down his forehead. He manoeuvred the cart forward and backward to get it as far off the road as he could.

  The horn rent the air once again before the vehicle started to roll forward. Edging the cart back, he looked up to see a husky, red-faced man sitting behind the steering-wheel. The man leaning out of the window on the passenger side was still furiously shouting something at Takuya. The lorry closed on him, and the wheels kicked up little stones as they turned.

  Realising that it was impossible to keep the cart up on the road, Takuya stepped down into the ditch, pulling the handcart with him. One of the wheels slipped down off the road and Takuya leant over sideways trying to keep the cart from toppling over. He threw all his weight against the cart’s metal bar and just managed to stop the weight of the load from tipping the cart into the rice paddy.

  The truck rolled forward on a course which would take it within inches of Takuya’s cart. The soldiers in the back, both black and white men, seemed to be laughing as they looked down at Takuya. They all had sub-machine-guns slung over their shoulders or resting against their knees as they stood peering down over the side.

  As Takuya concentrated all his might on keeping the cart from slipping into the paddy field, he pitched his gaze diagonally up at the Americans. Maybe this looked comical to the soldiers, for a gale of laughter erupted from them. This was the first time he had seen foreign military up close since the afternoon of the day the war ended. Every one of them seemed to be smiling.

  As the leading lorry passed him and moved off down the road, the second one approached slowly. Once again the back was full of soldiers looking down at Takuya and his cart perched precariously at the side of the road. A round-faced man with mousy hair leant out of the passenger window, smiling widely at Takuya. He couldn’t have been much more than seventeen or eighteen years old. The cab went past and the back came level with Takuya. Again the soldiers smiled down at him, their eyes seemingly genial. Takuya could sense a fawning, obsequious expression coming across his own contorted face.

  Suddenly one of the soldiers thrust his upper body forward and swung the steel helmet he had been hiding behind him down onto Takuya’s head. The lack of anywhere to retreat, and the speed with which the helmet was wielded, made the blow impossible to avoid. The other soldiers must have been waiting for that moment, because a loud cheer went up from them. Takuya caught sight of a black soldier giving the culprit a few congratulatory slaps on the shoulder as he felt himself and the cart slowly tipping over sideways into the rice paddy. The load of matchboxes spilt into the water and Takuya felt his face slap hard into the mud.

  The soldiers’ jubilant faces quickly moved out of view, and the remaining lorries accelerated down the road now that the obstacle had been ejected from their path. The clouds of dust settled and the noise of the engines faded into the distance.

  Barely conscious, his eyes almost shut, Takuya’s first thought was to see this as an officer of the Japanese army being insulted by a lowly American soldier, but for some reason this didn’t anger him in the slightest. He just couldn’t understand the grinning looks on the young soldiers’ faces, their joyful animation as they celebrated Takuya’s difficulty. He felt that the soldier’s smashing him over the head with a steel helmet was part of some frivolous game, like the bomber crews whiling away their time inside the B-29s by flipping through pornographic magazines and listening to jazz.

  Some time passed before he slowly opened his eyes again. There was no pain, but his ears were ringing as though a hundred cicadas had got inside his head. He tried to get up, but the side of his face was stuck to the mud and wouldn’t move. His vision seemed to be all right, for he could see the bar of the cart directly above his head, as well as the canvas strap hanging down on top of him. Beyond these he could see the clear blue sky, with only a few delicate clouds.

  A man dressed in peasant clothes appeared. Takuya felt himself being lifted and dragged out of the paddy field and up the slope, where he was helped into a sitting position on the side of the road. Some more men, probably ten in all, appeared around him. Some tried to push the cart up out of the mud, and others carried his spilt cargo back up on to the road. A man wearing shorts asked him something, and while Takuya could sense himself replying, the sound of his own voice was drowned out by the ringing in his ears.

  He looked up at the blue sky and the clouds moving across it. There were women in work clothes among the crowd. Takuya could feel someone holding him in an upright sitting position.

  People were milling around the handcart, stacking the load back into place. The cicada-like ringing seemed to echo from one side of his head to the other.

  Terasawa appeared in front of him, talking frantically. Again he felt himself answering but was unable to hear his own reply. Kameya’s face came into view, and Takuya felt himself being lifted into the lorry. The glare of the sun made him squint.

  He closed his eyes.

  8

  Takuya spent three days recuperating in bed.

  ‘You poor thing,’ said Terasawa’s wife every time she put some food down beside his pillow. The ringing in his ears was gone, but he still had a splitting headache.

  Evidently a farmer working in a nearby field had seen Takuya toppling into the rice paddy with his handcart. The people who came to his assistance after the trucks left had seen the company name painted on the cart and sent someone to report the incident to Terasawa, who had rushed to the scene with Kameya in the lorry.

  ‘We told the police, but they just nodded and said that when it comes to the occupation forces there’s nothing they can do,’ explained Terasawa in a despondent tone.

  Takuya couldn’t imagine pulling the cart again. If US Army trucks had chosen that road once, they might choose it again, and if he got in their way a second time the same thing might happen again. He sensed a strange malevolence in those cheerful Americans. Their physical size equally overwhelmed him. Thinking of how intimidated he felt now, he couldn’t believe that just two years ago he had the nerve actually to stand up and behead one of their countrymen.

  When Takuya asked timidly if he could be switched from deliveries to a job in the workshop, Terasawa agreed without a moment’s hesitation. He said that he understood Takuya’s reluctance to get back out on the road, and that another man had been asking for a job doing deliveries.

  For four days Terasawa’s wife nursed the swollen wound on Takuya’s head with antiseptic. Five days after the incident, Takuya came back to work again on light duties, and two weeks after that, when he was fully recovered, he started on heavier duties, carrying pieces of timber around th
e workshop.

  By now the hills in the distance were covered with a white blanket of snow.

  Orders for matchboxes went up with the increase in the black-market production of matches. Production capacity was pushed to the limit, and to compensate for the time lost during the day because of the power cuts.

  At the end of December, Terasawa’s wife’s niece, a well-built twenty-five-year-old by the name of Teruko, came to live with them to help with the housework. She got up early in the morning to help Terasawa’s wife boil the sticky concoction they used as glue each day. In addition she helped with the cooking, washing and cleaning, and went out to collect the week’s rations.

  A bathroom was added on to the house and hot water was generated by burning the scraps and sawdust from the workshop. Terasawa let the staff who lived away from the workshop take turns soaking in the new bathtub after work. He also followed rises in the wage market, and increased his workers’ wages as often as he could. At the end of that year, Takuya’s live-in wage was raised to one thousand three hundred yen a month.

  Kameya sometimes spent his spare cash down in the brothels near the station, returning late at night.

  ‘Do you want to come down sometime?’ he asked Takuya, holding up three fingers to indicate that three hundred yen would buy the services of a young lady for an hour.

  Takuya smiled and said nothing.

  Lugging timber around in the workshop was hard work, but not having to venture outside lifted a weight from his mind. As when he’d been pushing the handcart, most days he kept a small towel wrapped round his face, more for function than disguise now.

  In his free time Takuya gazed at the white walls of Himeji castle or tried to imagine what was happening in his village back in Shikoku. Almost two years had passed since he left home. He wondered what his parents and brother and sister had done during that time, and whether his father and mother were still in good health. They must be wondering what had happened to him, too. The police would be checking their mail, so sending them a letter was too risky. All the same, he wished he could put their minds at ease with the knowledge that, for the time being, he was still alive and safe.