The nurse attached the tube with skilful hands. The cold needle pricked Dong-ju’s arm and clear liquid entered his body. The singing and applause swelled and receded like the tide. Then a long silence ensued.
Onstage, the prisoners dragged their heavy shackles to line up. The audience looked tense. Midori, in her white nurse’s uniform, stepped onstage to a smattering of applause. She walked over to the piano and sat down. Blank eyes watched her. She drew in a deep breath and nodded, her fingers grazing the keys.
Dong-ju closed his eyes. His breathing was calm, but his mind was sluggish. It seemed as though he were submerged in deep water. He could hear the piano from far away. As the clear liquid slowly infused his bloodstream, the solemn, sad voices rushed into his ears:
Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate;
va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,
ove olezzano tepide e molli
l’aure dolci del suolo natal!
Del Giordano le rive saluta,
di Sionne le torri atterrate . . .
Strong but sorrowful voices hurtled forward, shoving me aside. The sad beauty of the song made me wonder if I had the right to enjoy it. I was shaken awake by the joy for life. My heart heaved in turmoil; I was human, I was still alive.
O, mia patria, sì bella e perduta!
O, membranza, sì cara e fatal!
The song careened from tautness to softness, from speed to languidness, like a grand love-affair. The different notes and the varying timbres of each person’s voice melded together, howling sorrowfully and pounding majestically like a rainstorm. Midori pushed, suppressed and urged the voices on. They blended with the piano, then exploded in bliss:
Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati,
perché muta dal salice pendi?
Le memorie nel petto raccendi,
ci favella del tempo che fu!
O simile di Sòlima ai fati
traggi un suono di crudo lamento,
o t’ispiri il Signore un concento
che ne infonda al patire virtù.
The song ended, but the final chord remained ringing in the cold air. The last note dissipated, leading to a short silence. Dong-ju’s eyes were still closed as he held on to the lingering notes. The silence burst into thunderous applause and cheers. Dong-ju opened his eyes. His lashes were wet; he looked content, like a boy waking up from a happy dream. As the nurse pulled the needle out, the doctor exclaimed, ‘Good. You look more alert than usual.’
The following day Warden Hasegawa summoned me. Had he discovered my role in the underground library? Had he found out about the girl flying the kite? Frozen stiff, I perched on the chair the warden offered me. He held several newspapers aloft. The large letters danced in front of my eyes. Fukuoka Prison. Concert. Moving. Beautiful. ‘The concert was a huge success,’ he said, overcome with emotion. ‘Even the national press covered it! You contributed greatly by escorting the prisoners and watching over the rehearsals.’ He put the papers down and twisted the ends of his moustache. ‘By the way, you should know that Prisoner 331 was executed two days ago.’
Everything suddenly went dark.
‘Good job. You have successfully completed the investigation and resolved the murder.’
Choi was dead? I hadn’t even begun to figure out who the real killer was. I felt powerless. ‘Did he have any final words?’
‘No. He refused to say anything.’
‘Was his family notified?’
‘According to his file, he didn’t have any family. So I had no choice but to oversee the execution and then the burial.’
I nodded slowly.
Hasegawa thumped my slumped shoulders and congratulated me on a task well done, telling me that, as a reward, he would grant me leave in the spring. None of what he said registered. I left the warden’s office and walked mechanically down the long corridor of the administrative wing into the snow-covered yard. I felt that I was floating, as though the ground beneath my feet had collapsed. Choi’s death wasn’t an out-of-the-ordinary event at this prison, but I was racked with guilt. He shouldn’t have died. He’d risked his life to get out of this prison; his endless escape attempts and the resulting stints in solitary were the two true pillars that had supported his life. He was brought close to death, and yet he’d survived each time. But he’d failed to leave Fukuoka, even as a corpse.
I headed to the cemetery. I spotted a new marker inscribed with his number. I’d strung the noose around his neck. While I was lost in a maze, searching for the truth, he’d died alone. There was nothing I could do.
Or maybe, just maybe, there was something – I could find the man who had really killed Sugiyama.
WHAT IN THE WORLD HAPPENED?
Darkness fell over the frozen ground. The faint sounds of a piano could be heard outside the infirmary. The ivy snaking up the red-brick walls rustled in the wind. White frost nibbled at the edges of the clear window as warm light spilled into the darkness. Sitting at the piano, Midori was focused on the sheet music in front of her. She paused and turned round to look at me.
‘I want to see the charts of the patients who received treatment in the infirmary,’ I blurted out. ‘You see patients from Ward Three. You must oversee those records.’
‘I need a note from the head guard and to obtain permission from the head doctor.’
I paused. ‘Those records would help me figure out how Sugiyama died.’
Her forehead furrowed.
‘What do the charts have to do with the murder?’ she asked.
‘If I could see what he was involved in before he died, I’ll be able to find clues. Who he injured, when and how.’
‘The charts merely have simple entries about how the injury occurred and how it was treated. What could that possibly say about a murder?’
‘Records are living documents. Just as your sheet music becomes beautiful music, charts might be able to tell me more about Sugiyama’s life.’
Midori stared out the window for a long time. ‘Come back here at my next practice session.’ She turned back to the piano. Her beautiful music began once more.
Midori took out a black, hardcover file from in between her sheet music and handed it to me. As the sun set and left gold streaks across the keys, I started to read through the chart. From January to August, no Korean prisoner was treated. The mention of a Korean name was always followed by a note of the cause of death. Ward Three was lethal; at least three to four died every month. In January, a prisoner was sucked into the dye-baths and drowned, one fell to his death while repairing the ceiling and another died from a heart attack in his sleep. In February, two fell to their deaths, another suffered cardiac arrest and one suffocated. In the summer, incidents of aneurisms and heart attacks increased.
I noticed that at the end of August, the injured prisoners began to be treated. The number of Korean patients increased markedly in October. They were treated by the on-duty nurse, mostly for head injuries from falling during labour or slipping on stairs. The same prisoner names appeared repeatedly: Choi Chi-su, Kim Gwing-pil, Hiranuma Tochu. My eyes pricked. Choi and Dong-ju had received treatment once a month for head injuries and lacerations on their calves, shoulders, biceps and forearms. But the reasons for the injuries were different from what I knew to be true. I took the open file to Midori, who stopped playing.
‘I’m not sure whether this file is accurate,’ I said. ‘Sugiyama regularly beat up Ward Three prisoners. I probably brought a handful of them to the infirmary myself. There isn’t a single mention of that in here.’
Midori avoided meeting my eyes. ‘These are merely records. They differ from reality.’
‘Are you saying the treatment logs are falsified?’
‘When a Ward Three patient comes to the infirmary, I treat them. Afterwards I report the type of wound and the severity of the injury, and the doctor records the information in the log, usually as being caused by falling during labour or being struck by a falling object.’
‘Why would a doctor make thing
s up?’
‘The warden doesn’t want to have unpleasant facts live on in official prison records.’
‘But the doctors are supposed to take care of the patients. They have a duty to record why and how their patients got hurt.’
‘The injuries of a few Korean prisoners mean nothing to them.’
I glared at her. My voice cracked. ‘What’s going on? Tell me what you know.’
She stared down at the keys. ‘The Korean patients began to come to the infirmary starting around August. When I asked them what happened, they usually mentioned Sugiyama. He was a butcher, he was going to kill all the Koreans with his club. All of the wounds were caused by a blunt object. But I noticed something odd about all the prisoners’ injuries.’
‘What?’
‘Most of the wounds were lacerations about two to three centimetres long. They were deliberate – the skin was very precisely cut, probably with the tip of a whip.’
‘Hmm,’ I murmured, ‘we’re supposed to be careful not to create marks on the body.’
‘Once I was treating a prisoner for a shallow cut when I noticed that his left little finger was bent. It had broken, but hadn’t properly healed, so it was twisted. He told me he’d blocked Sugiyama’s club with his hand, and that was how he broke it.’
‘That’s odd,’ I said. ‘When a forehead is busted open, it looks like a major and bloody injury, but it actually heals quickly. A broken finger is much more serious. He wasn’t treated for that?’
‘No. And that was how it was with the rest of the prisoners. Even those with serious wounds weren’t sent to us, and then all of a sudden prisoners with minor cuts came flooding in.’
It didn’t make any sense. Sugiyama had been violent for a long time, but he had never referred anyone for medical treatment. And then, in August, he began to send people with minor cuts to the infirmary. What happened in August? ‘Choi and Hiranuma went to the infirmary once a month. But, starting in October, they began going once a fortnight. What was going on?’
Midori’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly. Was she hiding something? ‘I remember Choi being investigated for his tunnel around that time. Hiranuma—’
My eyes fixed on hers. ‘That was when Sugiyama was communicating with Hiranuma through poetry. He was still violent, but he was almost the man’s guardian. So then why would he injure him?’
The sun turned purple before disappearing in a reddish black. Darkness watched us through the window.
‘August 1944,’ I said to myself. ‘What happened then?’ My head was spinning with thoughts.
But Midori said nothing. She slid the file back into the leaves of the sheet music, crossed the auditorium and disappeared into the darkness.
I dragged myself back to the guard office, and the guard on duty looked up. I told him I would take over, as I had to catch up on reports anyway. He flashed a dazzling smile, handed me the ring of keys and scurried off. I opened the cabinet where we kept all the files: the Disinfection and Sanitation Log, Air Raid Evacuation Training Report, Ward Three Prisoner Interrogation Log, Assignment of Workers and Review of Work. I found what I was looking for on the third shelf – Diagnostic Referrals and Autopsy Requests.
Guards filled out diagnostic referral forms when a prisoner needed treatment, and gave them to Maeda for signature. The two-page form had carbon paper underneath, which was submitted to the infirmary; the original went into the file. The same procedure was followed for autopsy requests. I noticed that the forms were the same as those in the file Midori had shown me. The only difference was that we kept the two forms in separate files, while they filed them both in one. In our file, too, the referrals increased, starting on 22 August, mostly by Sugiyama. Various reasons were listed as the cause of injury. Another file, the Infirmary Inspection Results Report, drew my gaze like bait to a fish. I opened it. It didn’t start in January; it began with 24 August. So the inspection programme had begun in August. I flipped the page. There were twelve patients identified, along with their symptoms and suspected illnesses. The symptoms were listed as malnourishment, weakness, weakened eyesight, insomnia, haemorrhoids and emotional instability. These were all common; none was worthy of study by Kyushu Imperial University doctors. Why didn’t they select Japanese prisoners with more critical illnesses? I knew that many suffered from diabetes, glaucoma, hepatitis and arthritis. But these Korean prisoners seemed relatively healthy, and they were all young, in their late teens to early thirties.
Could it be that the best medical team in the nation had made a grave mistake? I laid the Diagnostic Referrals, Autopsy Requests and Infirmary Inspection Results Report files side-by-side and started to cross reference them by date. Kaneyama Tokichiro, Korean name Kim Myeong-sul, age twenty-nine, was selected during the first infirmary inspection on 24 August. He suffered from malnourishment and insomnia. I was puzzled. Even we guards experienced those conditions. Food was becoming scarce, rations were dwindling and air-raid sirens blared in the middle of the night. I found Kaneyama in the Autopsy Request file for 17 November. What had killed a healthy twenty-nine-year-old man in three months? I flipped through the Diagnostic Referrals carefully, but didn’t spot his name. He’d never received treatment for any ailment. I went back and compared the Autopsy Request forms with the Infirmary Inspection Results Report. Since October, five out of seven autopsied bodies had been selected for medical treatment. The causes of death were listed as an aneurism, abnormality of heart function and disturbances of metabolism.
I heard a loud bang and felt suddenly cold. I spun round. The wind was rattling the old doorframe. Freezing air burst through the gap in the windowsill. I looked out the window. Goosebumps prickled all over my skin. Prisoners who had been referred to the infirmary by Sugiyama hadn’t been chosen for medical treatment during the inspections. Prisoners who had been chosen died. Why did they keep dying? What was happening during these medical treatments?
The next morning I walked into Director Morioka’s office. The antique brown carpet muffled my footsteps. Next to the glistening hardwood desk stood a model of a skeleton. An anatomical diagram, a muscular model and a model of the human body hung on the walls; I could see the shoreline of Hakata Bay outside the window.
‘How are things, Yuichi?’ Morioka asked kindly. ‘Was it helpful for you to observe the medical treatment procedures?’ His smile was white and sparkling, almost blinding.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, my voice cracking.
‘Very good. I’m sure your misgivings were put to rest. I will give my recommendation to the warden that you be granted leave. I hope you will be able to visit your family with your mind at ease.’
I couldn’t wait. I wanted to flee this place and its bars and fall asleep between the dark, narrow bookcases in Kyoto, inhaling the scent of old paper and dust. But I forced myself to speak up. ‘Thank you, sir, but unfortunately, the side-effects are continuing.’
Thick furrows creased the director’s brow, but he continued to smile. He coughed. ‘I know. They’re not side-effects. We had fully anticipated these symptoms.’
I was stunned. ‘You expected that your patients would lose their memories and keep bleeding? So why are you continuing the treatment?’
The director’s face stiffened incrementally. His eyes glinted, cold and ruthless. ‘You’re Japanese, aren’t you?’ His voice was chilly.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then you must know what a great war we are waging. And how important it is to Japan’s legacy.’
‘Yes, sir!’ I’d heard this my entire life. After all, we’d been at war from the day I was born. With Russia, with China, with Mongolia, with Korea, with America, against regular armies and Communist forces and guerrillas. When one battlefront was vanquished, we moved on to yet another.
The director nodded. ‘My medical team is devoted to research. Just as you are devoted to our country. You handle prisoners for the glory of the Empire, and the doctors handle patients for victory.’
I felt nauseated
, as though I had swallowed maggots. ‘How can that be for the victory of the Empire?’
‘We’ve been working hard to develop new treatments for our soldiers. We’re on the brink of developing great, life-changing medicine.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. But I know for a fact that the patients are experiencing side-effects from those treatments.’
‘Enough about that!’
‘People are dying off. What is going on in this infirmary?’ I shouted, unable finally to restrain myself.
Morioka’s gaze grew flinty.
I pressed on. ‘One record might be false. But the truth is disclosed by many others. I’m talking about the Diagnostic Referrals, the Autopsy Requests and the Infirmary Inspection Results.’
His face drained of blood. ‘You’re actually quite intelligent. Fine. I knew you were persistent, but if you figured that out, you’ll understand what we’re doing. I’ll tell you what you want to know.’ Morioka lowered his voice, as though to soothe a cranky child. ‘My medical team is in the process of developing revolutionary medical techniques. If we succeed, we can drastically lower casualty rates on the battlefield. This will be a new era for medicine.’
‘What are the techniques?’
‘We’re looking for a new substance that will replace blood. The war is getting more serious. Blood is what the injured need most. So many good soldiers haemorrhage to death on the battlefield. Even if they’re transported to the hospital on time, we have a severe shortage of blood for them. So we can’t operate. If we can substitute blood with something else, we can save thousands of soldiers’ lives. As well as civilians’.’
‘There’s a substance that could take the place of human blood?’
‘Blood is largely composed of plasma and blood cells. Of those, there are white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets. Plasma is mostly liquid and various proteins and blood-coagulation factors.’
The Investigation Page 23