Midori told me that this had been the first kite the girl had won, and that her mother had told her that flying the kite had been her lonely daughter’s sole source of happiness.
In my mind’s eye, I saw a girl carefully working on her blue kite, grinding bits of china to embed onto her line, in the afternoons when she was left home alone. While the other children rushed to the hill near the shore to catch the marine wind, the girl headed to the empty lot near the prison. There, nobody teased her and no bully entwined his thick line with hers. One day, from within the high prison walls, a kite flew up. With it came faint shouts from the other side of the walls, cheering her on. The girl approached the white kite, danced with it and circled the air. She eventually cut the white kite’s weak cotton line and watched as it spiralled to the ground. She hung her first prize on her wall.
Dong-ju’s reclaimed kite smelled faintly of ash and gunpowder. The shaft had broken and the bottom was torn. I flipped the kite over and saw traces of black ink. I could decipher a familiar, careful hand:
To the best kite-fighter in Fukuoka,
Congratulations! Today, you won.
If you’re reading this, you clipped our kite. We tried our best, but we couldn’t beat your power and speed. Or your surprising talent. Since you won, you can take this as your prize. But we’ll make a new kite. Tomorrow we’ll stand off again. Maybe tomorrow we’ll be able to take your kite. Or maybe the next day.
After the winter is over and kite-flying season ends, I’m sure your room will be filled with our kites. Keep them safe. They’re proof that you’re the best kite-fighter in all of Fukuoka.
Who would have known that gentleness was hiding behind Sugiyama’s hard, metallic voice? I wondered how he’d been with those he loved, like the woman he tuned the piano for. Did he listen with all of his being as she played clumsy jazz? Did he drink coffee with her? Did he dream of having soft, peachy babies with her? Could he have been a good husband? A wonderful father? Who had killed him in the end?
I raised my head, realizing that I hadn’t asked the most crucial question. ‘How did you even know all of this was going on?’
‘When the poet gave up writing poems, Sugiyama-san came to me for help. Tuning the piano was only an excuse.’
The golden sunset outside the windows pooled on the piano’s shiny black surface. Midori looked down at Sugiyama’s rough hands, at the knife wounds and the twisted knuckles. She wondered if his hands remembered their victims, then decided that they wouldn’t; they couldn’t produce such beautiful sounds with such brutal memories.
Sugiyama asked her to play something. She began the opening bar of ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny’. He closed his eyes, frowning and smiling, revelling in the colour and vibration of each lingering note. He opened his eyes only after the last note disappeared completely. His rough hands came together to clap. ‘Much better. Almost moving.’
The sunset drew red shadows over Midori’s face. ‘The sound?’
‘No, not the sound – the playing. Your playing has become so natural.’ Thick veins bulged in his neck.
To Midori, he seemed angry, but actually Sugiyama was embarrassed. He was ignorant of most emotions. The world had never been gentle to him and he didn’t expect kind treatment; he had wrapped himself in the armour of fury. When he hated something he got mad. He expressed his love and embarrassment in anger, shouted to express sympathy and was brusque when he was showing interest. He was most comfortable with silence.
He placed a hand on the piano and swallowed. ‘I have a favour to ask. I have to find someone outside the prison . . .’ He trailed off. As a soldier he had to maintain barracks life, but a nurse was free to come and go as she pleased.
She widened her eyes and looked round. ‘Who?’
Sugiyama couldn’t bring himself to speak for a long time. Then he spoke hesitantly. ‘I don’t know whether it’s a man or woman, or their age or address. Or what they look like. But I know they must live somewhere around here. Every Tuesday someone flies a kite outside the prison walls. Might be young. Supposedly thirteen or fourteen, and lonely.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Hiranuma Tochu. I mean, Yun Dong-ju. You must know him?’
Midori’s eyes flickered in fright. She not only knew Dong-ju, having met him in the infirmary, but she’d grown to know about his poems and his favourite music. She respected him. She had included ‘Va, pensiero’ in the concert at his suggestion. She hesitated. ‘Has he – done something wrong?’
Sugiyama shook his head. The more he got to know Dong-ju, the more he was convinced that the prisoner had done nothing wrong. He looked down at his thick, calloused hands. ‘He hasn’t written a single line since he got back from solitary. Makes sense. Solitary destroys your body and soul. And while he was in solitary the child flying the kite disappeared.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Tell her to fly her kite again. Tell her she’ll be able to fight us if she flies it right outside the prison.’ He looked out of the window at the golden sunset that was listening in on their clandestine conversation.
‘And a few days later the girl’s kite flew up. This must be the one she cut down that time.’ Midori touched the mangled kite, whose broken shaft and ripped tail contained beautiful memories of soaring in the sky against the wind.
‘So now we won’t be able to see the kite again.’
‘When the war’s over and the girl returns, the kites will fly again.’
‘It was smart of Sugiyama to bring her back into kite-fighting. It enabled him to control the prisoners effectively.’
‘Sugiyama-san didn’t bring her in for that,’ Midori shot back. ‘What he sent over the walls weren’t kites. They were poems.’
A stray cat came up to the window. I could hear its footsteps crunching on the snow. ‘What do you mean?’
She explained Sugiyama’s ruse. He’d had Dong-ju write poems and fly kites; he brought the girl into the fight as part of an intricate plan to smuggle Dong-ju’s poems out of the prison. ‘Sugiyama-san had a deal with Dong-ju. He would allow Dong-ju to write poems in Korean if he recited them in Japanese. Sugiyama-san became his audience. When Dong-ju recited his new poem in Japanese, Sugiyama would write it down and then use that paper to make a kite. Dong-ju didn’t know that. But his kites would often fall outside the prison, releasing his poems into the world.’
All winter Dong-ju read his poems out loud in the interrogation room and Sugiyama wrote them down as though he were taking down a confession. The poems Dong-ju recited were dark but glorious, steeped in sorrow but brimming with joy – they sang of a wanderer’s thoughts as he walked down a dark snow-covered road, a man suffering in a strong tempest, a young scholar betrayed by the times. His poetry illuminated the darkness briefly, line by line. Sugiyama copied it all down. He was the first to hear the young poet’s new work, poems that had formed in Dong-ju’s head over weeks or months, poems previously unknown to the world.
The poems flew up like doves on the belly of Sugiyama’s kites. They leaped over the walls with the breeze. The kite danced and circled in the blue sky in tandem with the girl’s kite waiting on the outside. The prison’s feeble kite, cut by the girl’s glass-studded line, tilted in the wind and sank. The girl chased after the kite as it took off sluggishly over the fields. Often the kites disappeared from the girl’s sight and became stuck inside a thorny bush, fell in mud or ended up in a narrow, dirty alley. The girl looked all over for the missing kites until, late in the evening, she found them impaled on an electric pole in the harbour or torn and wet on the sandy beach. She discovered clumsily written poems on the back of the creased kites and, upon returning home, hid them deep in her cupboard.
OUR LOVE WAS MERELY A MUTE
Dong-ju often entered the interrogation room looking grey and pallid, as though he had been doused in ash. But he regained his vitality as I began to question him. He talked about things that didn’t exist but could be perceived, that couldn’
t be seen but could be inferred, that vanished from earth but remained in memory, that he couldn’t possess but longed for. We sat facing each other. We talked not as a guard and prisoner, but as equals. We discussed writers and their tales, conversed about poets and novelists, philosophers and artists.
But the very fact that we were in this interrogation room enraged me. ‘Poetry?’ I spat out once. ‘Hope? It’s ridiculous. We’re in a barren prison.’
‘We’re waiting for spring, but maybe spring is already here,’ Dong-ju insisted, ever optimistic. ‘One realizes that spring has come and gone only when it’s summer. There’s happiness even behind these cold bars.’
‘No,’ I argued. ‘There’s nothing in this forsaken hell. There’s no beauty or virtue or intellect in this place.’
‘But we can look for it.’
‘There’s no point.’
‘If we look and we can’t find it, I guess we’ll just have to create hope and happiness and dreams and beautiful poetry. The poetry we both long for isn’t on paper. Look around you! It’s everywhere; in the narrow cells and behind the thick bars. Thanks to the thick steel that imprisons me, I can write even more heartfelt poems.’
I hoped that was true.
‘After I came here, I gave up on poetry for a while,’ Dong-ju confessed.
‘How were you able to write again?’
‘Sugiyama – I had Sugiyama,’ Dong-ju said, looking pained. ‘Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to write again.’ He suddenly looked very old.
I wanted to lighten the mood. ‘I have a question about your poem “The Blowing Wind”. You say, “I haven’t loved a single woman.” Are you saying you’ve never loved anyone?’ Although I’d read many of Dong-ju’s poems, I hadn’t come across a single poem about love. Had he truly never loved anyone? There had to have been a happy period in his life, when he’d been able to laugh, sing and love.
‘Everyone has secrets,’ he answered obliquely. He frowned, gave me an embarrassed smile and began to recite a poem. ‘“The Temple of Love.” Suni, when did you come into my temple? / When did I enter yours? / Ours is / A temple of love steeped in old customs. / Suni, lower your crystal eyes like a doe. / I will groom my tousled hair like a lion. / Our love was merely a mute. / Ah, youth! / Before the weak flame on the holy candlestick extinguishes / Suni, run towards the front door. / Before darkness and wind slam into our window / I will carry my eternal love for you / And disappear through the back door. Now / You have a cosy lake in the woods, / And I have steep mountains.’
I stopped transcribing the poem and laid down the pencil stub. ‘Is it still love if you can’t say “I love you”?’
I thought of Midori. In front of her I was a mute. She didn’t know of the passionate feelings roiling in my heart. Or maybe she knew, but pretended not to.
Dong-ju’s voice broke me out of my reverie. ‘No, that’s still love. It may even be deeper love than the one you can talk about.’
I quickly changed the subject. ‘Suni – do you know where she is now?’
He smiled bitterly and shook his head.
For a moment I was worried that I had brought back unpleasant memories. But I realized that there was no such thing as a bad memory. All memories are precious, and even a painful one is formative. That meant that my time at Fukuoka would also become a formative part of me. When time passed, would I think of Midori in the way Dong-ju was now thinking of his girl?
He recited two more poems: ‘Boy’ and ‘Snowing Map’. ‘Boy’ depicted a boy’s passionate love for the beautiful Suni, and ‘Snowing Map’ drew a boy’s pain as he said farewell to his beloved Suni one winter morning. All three poems traced the tale of meeting a girl, falling in love and parting. Did Dong-ju really love a girl named Suni? Was she real? I couldn’t ask. I was afraid Dong-ju wouldn’t remember. I didn’t want to confirm that his memories were rusting, crumbling, vanishing.
He looked famished, not from his physical starvation, but from a deeper hunger in his soul. ‘Can I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge just once?’ His voice broke.
I understood. Some books had the power to heal illness and provide the essence of life. I had experienced that myself when I took comfort in the bookcases in our bookshop. Would The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge make Dong-ju stronger and help him recover his memories?
I ran to the inspection office and retrieved the book from his box. The yellowed pages were so faded that they might crumble at a mere touch. I returned to the interrogation room and placed the old book on the desk. With a trembling hand Dong-ju caressed the old cover, as if it were the face of a woman he’d once loved. He turned the pages slowly and stopped. I stole a glance at the page he was reading:
I think I should begin to work on something, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight, and just about nothing has happened. Let’s summarize: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad, a drama called Marriage that tries to prove something false by ambiguous means, and poems. But alas, with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good. For poems are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a line of poetry one must see many cities, people and things, one must know animals, must feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to paths in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one long saw coming; to childhood days that are still not understood, to parents one had to hurt when they brought one a joy and one did not understand it (it was a joy to someone else); to childhood illnesses that set in so strangely with so many profound and heavy transformations, to days in quiet, muted rooms and to mornings by the sea, the sea altogether, to nights travelling that rushed up and away and flew with all the stars; and if one can think of all that, it is still not enough. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which resembled another, of screams in the delivery room and of easy, pale, sleeping women delivered, who are closing themselves. But one must also have been with the dying, have sat by the dead in the room with the open window and the spasmodic noises. But it is still not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them, if they are many, and have the great patience to wait for them to come again. For it is not the memories themselves. Only when they become blood in us, glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves, only then can it happen that in a very rare hour the first word of a line arises in their midst and strides out of them.
Rilke’s sentences brimmed with passion. I knew that the same poetic passion thrummed within Dong-ju. Perhaps he understood this book intuitively because he was now close to Rilke’s age when he wrote it. I hoped I, too, would be able to comprehend it in that way at twenty-six.
Dong-ju stroked the page. And that was when it happened. The book might not be able to recognize me, but I recognized the book. I snatched it out of Dong-ju’s hands and hurriedly flipped through the pages. When I found what I was looking for, I felt as though I would faint. A barely visible line was drawn under a sentence I had read a long time ago:
At first he did not want to believe that a long life could be spent forming the first, short, false sentences that are without meaning.
One long-ago autumn day, crouched in the corner of our dust-filled bookshop, I was caught by a raging fervour for literature that I had not been able to shake off. That night, as we walked home, my mother had told me about a young Korean man who’d asked her to reserve for him a copy of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge if it came in. Thinking about the copy I had hidden deep in the bookshelves, I felt a small pang of guilt and a slight relief. After I enlisted in the military, my mother, finding that copy, would have remembered the Korean student. And she would have handed him the book that carried her son’s fingerprints. This old book linked u
s. It was an implausible coincidence; we loved the same poet and the exact same book, almost as though we were in love with the same girl.
Dong-ju pushed it towards me. ‘You can have it.’
I turned the pages one by one. This book had come to me from some stranger and stayed with the young poet before returning to me. Rilke’s words had wandered through the world, embracing and healing damaged spirits. That night, the world became a little more beautiful.
Dong-ju’s memories were fleeting. He murmured to himself in Korean as we walked towards the interrogation room. He was trying his hardest to cling to the words that were attempting to desert him. Snow fell silently outside.
‘Can I rest for a while?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ I said.
He looked into his reflection in the window. ‘The snow blankets everything in white.’ He started walking slowly again, murmuring in Korean.
The heavy chain dragged along, pressing down on my soul. Dong-ju accidentally took the wrong corridor. Had he forgotten this familiar route? At our destination I had to grab his shoulder to stop him; he would have continued to walk past the interrogation room. The room was freezing. It didn’t seem to bother him, though; he opened his mouth as soon as he sat down, perhaps fearing that the words in his head might die there and vanish without a trace.
‘“Another Morning at the Beginning of the World.” The snow blankets everything in white / And the telephone pole weeps / conveying God’s words. / What revelation is forthcoming? / When spring comes / Quickly / I sin / And eyes / Are bright. / After Eve finishes the hard work of delivering a baby / She will hide her nakedness with a fig leaf and / I will have to sweat, beading on my forehead.’
I was struck dumb – original sin was reflected against a pure sense of self and a bleak situation. I could feel Dong-ju’s powerful will for life, the will to construct his own reality. His emotive poem drew out deep feelings within me; perhaps the more so because he recited the words in a calm, low voice. I put down the pen and lobbed my nightly questions at him. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Where is your home town?’ ‘What’s the date today?’ ‘When will you be released?’ ‘What words can you think of now?’ I didn’t ask for his prisoner number or his Japanese name and I didn’t make him recite the multiplication tables again. Those questions polluted and ruined his memories. He deserved to recall happier times.
The Investigation Page 20