The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  The stricken went quietly to their deaths. Their loss of spirit was swift and complete, standing in eerie contrast to the easygoing mood that otherwise prevailed.

  Our commanding officer, a first lieutenant, made daily rounds of the squad huts. As he came to each hut, he would stand somberly in the doorway, gazing in on the ailing soldiers crowding the floor.

  The sergeant commanding my own squad bitterly assailed the lieutenant for failing to immediately order a headlong dash to the northern end of the island, where we could have crossed over to Luzon as soon as the American forces had landed. We would never have been ordered by battalion headquarters to report on enemy activities, he groused, nor would we have been immobilized by an outbreak of malaria if the lieutenant had not kept us dawdling around in these mountains.

  It was the voice of noncom egotism. Underlying his position was the myopic presumption that the island of Luzon remained, and would continue to remain, an invulnerable safety zone. The lieutenant, on the other hand, was a seasoned veteran who had seen action at Nomonhan,1 and his view of the fate of Japanese forces in the Philippines could hardly have been so sanguine.

  The young lieutenant had gained his rank by way of the reserve officer training corps. He was only twenty-seven, but he had a taciturn, mournful air that made him look no less than thirty. Never once did he speak of what he had seen or experienced at Nomonhan, but I daresay it showed in the expression of his eyes, of his face. Sometimes I even thought I could smell the stench of his dead comrades still clinging to his person.

  “A garrison must think of its post as its final resting place,” he often repeated, and I cannot believe that he was merely mouthing a commonplace.

  The lieutenant took no special precautions to keep our position concealed from the Americans. Contrary to the usual custom, he paid the guides who had shown us the way through the mountains from San Jose with food and allowed them to return home. A note of resignation manifested itself in everything he did or said. His movements were languidly deliberate, and his occasional smile appeared weakly on his lips, as though he had just barely managed to squeeze it from between his teeth.

  In a way, he seemed to yearn for death. On punitive expeditions conducted during our occupation of San Jose, he always fought in the vanguard, making no effort to shield himself from danger. He had been cast in the mold of the sensitive commander—the kind who accepted the dictates of the war as his highest calling yet felt a deep sense of personal responsibility when it came to passing those dictates on to his subordinates. As a rule, men like him find it difficult to justify what they ask of their subordinates with anything other than their own deaths.

  When the Americans finally attacked our mountain encampment, the lieutenant strode forward alone to survey the American positions and became the first to die, taking the direct hit of a mortar shell. It was no doubt exactly the way he had wished to go.

  I identified closely with this young CO and was privately very fond of him. Though in a considerably different sense from him, I, too, lived in the face of my own certain death.

  I had long since given up believing in a Japanese victory. I held nothing but contempt for the General Staff who had dragged our country into such a hopeless fight. Yet since I had not had the courage to take any action toward preventing that fight, I did not feel I could claim any right, at so late a stage, to protest the fate to which they had consigned me. This reasoning, which placed a single powerless citizen on an equal footing with the massive organization by which an entire nation exercises its violent power, seemed almost comical to me; and yet had I not taken such a view, I could not have kept from laughing at the absurdity of the predicament in which I found myself, traveling rapidly toward a meaningless death.

  All the same, this reasoning did nothing to efface the disemboweling wretchedness I experienced as my comrades and I, herded aboard like a cargo of slaves, stood on the deck of a transport ship in Moji and peered down at the red and green lights of toylike ferries plying the waters below while waiting for the ship to get us under way on our voyage to death.

  Until the day we shipped out for the front, I had lightheartedly resigned myself to joining my own fate to my country’s, wherever that might lead, and I had scoffed alike at the wartime opportunists so full of lies and the defeatists with their fruitless dissents. The moment I boarded that transport, however, I was struck utterly dumb by the looming figure of Death sitting squarely before me.

  At thirty-five, I could not yet say I had lived a full life, and there were farewells to be said, loved ones with whom I found it indeed painful to part. But the act of boarding the transport ineluctably pushed all that behind me. The future held nothing but death, which we humans can envision only as absolute nothingness; yet if I could be transported to that nothingness as easily as I had been brought aboard that ship, then what possible good would fretting do? I reminded myself of this again and again. Even so, the idea of death continually returned to assault my consciousness in everything I did as I went about my daily activities. Eventually I realized it was not the nature of death that troubled me; it was simply living with my own certain extinction so close at hand.

  In fact, the proximity of death brought with it elements of pleasure. The vibrant colors of the Philippine sunrises and sunsets, of the islands’ palm and flame trees, were a delight to behold. Though my eyes saw the shadow of death in every direction, they also feasted greedily on the tropical landscape in which the flora so overpowered the fauna. I thanked the Fates for bringing me into the midst of such a lushness of life in the time before my death. After we retreated into the mountains, the palm trees were missing, and the teeming, luxuriant growth of the lowlands was replaced by the more temperate landscape of the highlands, but to me it seemed only the more beautiful. I became convinced that the ever-increasing pleasure I experienced in the embrace of nature was a certain sign that my time was drawing near.

  Yet once we had lost our only route of escape and my brothers in arms began dying one after the other, a peculiar transformation came over me: I suddenly believed in the possibility of my survival. The 99 percent certainty of death was abruptly swept aside in my mind. I found myself imagining instead a medley of ways by which I might actually ensure my survival, and I determined to pursue them. At the very least I would exercise all due care in everything I did. It seemed senseless to do otherwise.

  Clearly, the deepening shadows of death that surrounded me had triggered an inborn determination to survive. What our instincts compel us to do in the face of extremity is always highly pragmatic; the schemes they make us dream up, on the other hand, are typically quite preposterous.

  I had one particular friend whom I shall call S. He was my own age and, like myself, a married man with children. His father sat on the board of directors of a large fisheries firm, but S had “had it up to here” (as he put it) with the self-serving egotism of the capitalists on the home islands, and he dreamed of going to the front to fight as a common soldier instead of becoming an agent of the capitalists’ greed. During our training back in Japan, he had concealed the likelihood of his being sent to the front from his father, who had high connections in the military, thereby deliberately severing all chance of remaining safely in Japan. Once he had actually seen conditions in the war zone, however, his dreams were shattered. Finding the manner in which our forces were conducting the war utterly witless, he declared it would be a pure and simple waste to die on such a battlefield.

  His words came as a revelation to me. Suddenly I could see the patent self-deception in proudly insisting to myself that I had chosen this path of death at my own volition. To die helplessly in these faraway mountains as the victim of some foolishly conceived war plan was indeed a “pure and simple waste” and nothing more.

  We developed a plan for escape together. Since there could be no doubt that the Americans would eventually force us from our refuge, we would somehow make our way through enemy positions to the island’s west coast. There we would c
ommandeer a sailboat and, catching the prevailing winds, steer a course that skirted the string of islands leading to Borneo (sailing techniques I had learned on trips to the beach would come in handy at this point). When I questioned whether Borneo would be safe and suggested instead that we cut across the South China Sea to Indochina, S convinced me that our limited food supply and navigational skills required us to settle for the next best plan.

  If we could not obtain a sailboat, we would return to the mountains and subsist on roots and whatever else we could forage while we waited for the war to end. Recalling some of the details of Robinson Crusoe, which we had both read as young boys, we got some tribesmen to show us how to start a fire with bamboo.

  The plan was a sheer fantasy, but not for a moment did we doubt that it would succeed.

  Even as three more of our comrades continued to die each day, we rehearsed our survival plan over and over, like a pair of cheerful grave diggers. (And, in fact, we did dig graves.) We contemplated, too, the threat of malaria, our most immediate enemy at the time, and we adopted the only means at our disposal for staving off the disease: striving our utmost to maintain what reserves of strength we had. We voraciously devoured any rice gruel left uneaten by the sick, and we did not hesitate even to eat spilled rice we had retrieved from the ground.

  Though we thought we had prepared ourselves for every eventuality, we had failed to consider the possibility that the Americans would arrive at the precise moment when the disease had struck the two of us. Almost as if by appointment, S and I both came down with fevers on January 16. My temperature stayed relentlessly at 104 degrees, rendering me completely unable to stand on the second day and slurring my speech on the third. S’s symptoms were milder, but his temperature, too, remained above 102 degrees.

  I now faced my first genuine battle. “Take up your arms,” I commanded my heart. I was not particularly robust in physique, but I knew that I had a relatively high resistance to disease. Observing my symptoms carefully, I devised my own strategy for treatment. Since the onset of my fever had led immediately to diarrhea, I decided to avoid all unnecessary stress on my digestive system—this was how I reasoned at the time—by not eating anything. I felt confident that I had enough reserves of energy to go without food for a week or two without its affecting my constitutional strength.

  In the mountains, the medics had invented a truly bizarre prescription for malaria: no water. Though I had blindly followed their instructions before, this time I abandoned my docility. Objecting strenuously, I presented argument after argument as to why such a prohibition was misguided, but I succeeded only in angering my sergeant, who forbade my squad mates from bringing me water. The only way I managed to keep my canteen filled was by waiting for men from other squads to pass by and secretly soliciting their aid, or by dragging myself on hands and knees to the spring about sixty feet away.

  I had noticed that death struck the sick with precipitous speed, so I constantly monitored my physical state to reaffirm that I had not yet reached the fateful threshold. Since I had seen many of the sick become incontinent before they died, I made a point of crawling outside to urinate whenever I began feeling the least bit worse.

  One of my squad mates died, and his body was hauled away over my chest. Since the entire squad was afflicted to one degree or another, those with relatively light symptoms were called upon to help with the burial. A fellow whose long siege of fever had at length eased a bit was sent to deliver the deceased man’s equipment and personal effects to our company HQ a hundred yards or so up the mountain. Reentering the hut on his return, he looked to be suffering. The next morning he, too, was dead.

  That man died on January 22. My fever eased a bit the same day, and in the evening I ate a small amount of rice gruel for the first time since falling ill. As I was eating, a report came that the lookout had spied three American ships entering the bay at Bulalacao.

  Our sergeant went to the command post and remained there for quite some time. When he finally returned, he lay down sullenly without a word. We learned from a passing soldier that a party of four scouts had been dispatched to investigate.

  I remember feeling surprised when I awoke the next morning and saw the light of day fully risen and our little hut still intact. I had vaguely expected the Americans to attack at dawn. Another day passed without incident. The scouts sent out the night before failed to return.

  “I wonder if they didn’t attack today because they want to surround us first?” I speculated to my sergeant that evening.

  “Aw, shut up,” he snarled. “What would an invalid like you know?”

  The next day, January 24, a second party of scouts left at dawn, this time with an officer in command. One of the scouts returned around 7:00 A.M. to report that they had met an ambush at the foot of the mountain and that the officer had been killed.

  Our sergeant was summoned to the command post again, but this time he returned without delay. The sick were to evacuate along with all noncombatants to the position of the platoon on the ridge overlooking San Jose. Everyone capable of walking was to prepare to march immediately, he said, and he quickly began gathering up his gear. He, too, had recently joined the ranks of the sick.

  I had finally recovered enough strength to walk to the latrine, but I doubted I could manage the fifteen kilometers to where the detached platoon was camped. Even if I made it that far, there was no telling how much farther I would have to walk next. I resigned myself to dying there in that hut.

  The original complement of my squad was twelve privates, but we had lost two, leaving ten. Four of those ten decided to stay behind, including myself. As S packed his gear, I went outside and slowly worked my way around the hut on my feet.

  “I won’t be going,” I told S.

  He had recovered much of his former strength. Now he thrust his arm under mine and said, “You can do it. I’ll help you. Come with us.”

  I decided I should at least go with him until my legs gave out, and I told my sergeant I had changed my mind. He said nothing.

  The men went about their preparations in silence. No one exchanged farewells.

  The time came to move out. As I started to fall in after the others, the sergeant turned toward me, though avoiding my eyes, and said, “Ōoka, you think maybe you should stay?”

  His words made me realize how much of a hindrance I was likely to become to the others, as well as how my present condition must have looked to the eyes of a professional soldier. I replied, “Yes, sir,” and lowered my rifle from my shoulder.

  For some reason S had been one of the first to move out and had already climbed out of sight. Under the circumstances, I could not bring myself to call him back. I parted from the buddy with whom I had planned to escape without even saying good-bye.

  Those of us remaining behind had received no orders, but we wrapped our gaiters and laced up our boots to prepare for combat and then lay down to rest.

  In my case, there should never have been any question that I would stay, since my fever was worse than anyone else’s, but I was surprised by the other three who chose not to go. They seemed no worse off than the men who had gone.

  One was an office worker named K, the son of a famous rakugo critic of the Taishō era.2 His ever-phlegmatic response to orders, exerting himself not the slightest bit in excess of the minimally required effort, did not sit well with his superiors. Since K is a relatively unusual surname, I asked him one day if he was related to Dr. K.

  “Give me a break,” he spat out between gritted teeth.

  Something in his tone made it difficult for me to take this as meaning “No, we’re unrelated,” and I felt quite certain that he must be Dr. K’s son. Put off by his manner, though, I chose not to pursue the matter. Later, when I had my first bout of fever just before the Americans landed at San Jose, he happened to be confined to quarters at the same time by a leg injury, and he kindly fetched water for me in my mess tin and put cool compresses on my forehead. His nursing had a curiously femin
ine gentleness, which seemed rather sharply at odds with the egotistic and standoffish attitude he usually displayed. I repeated my earlier question, and this time he answered straightforwardly that he was Dr. K’s second son. Without further prompting, he went on to detail his family’s history since his father’s untimely death in the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923. We became friendly after that, but he laughed scornfully at the escape plan S and I formulated in the mountains.

  K’s symptoms were so mild that some suspected he was only feigning illness. At the very least, there could be no question that he was in far better shape than S, who had chosen to evacuate with the others.

  “It won’t make a whit of difference whether we go or stay,” he said with a sneer. He had a gentle spirit, but he apparently did not apply it to himself.

  Another of those remaining behind was a civil engineer. He had impressed his superior officers with his efficiency during our stint at San Jose, and he often drew assignments that would normally have gone to PFCs. I disliked him because he struck me as a bootlicker, but even after we had retreated into the mountains where rank and promotions could no longer be anyone’s concern, he continued to work just as hard, volunteering to carry the heaviest loads and so on. No doubt it was owing to these exertions that he became the first in our squad to fall ill. Inwardly, I felt ashamed that even at my age I remained such a poor judge of character. He had now emerged from his long bout with the fever, but the illness had perhaps taken a greater toll on his strength than was readily apparent.