Morio took a half step back, nodded after a moment, as if pleased he’d drawn something unexpected from me. It was the look of an interrogator accustomed to getting to the essence of a man. He went to the window then, resumed that intense look he had cast at the sky earlier. Almost as if he were trying to will something from its darkening emptiness. “Go on,” he said.
I obeyed uncomfortably. I still could not tell whether he was letting me dig my own grave. Whether he was letting the know-it-all continue in his self-reverential bluster out of sadistic bemusement. Perhaps he’d then put a katana in me as a sort of definitive counterpoint. “No,” he would say to me as I let out my shocked last breaths, “that’s not how the world works at all.”
But this is what came out of my mouth: “A man will always address what he perceives to be his most immediate threat first, even if it is not the greatest threat he faces. In the case of Gray Allen, death by starvation is guaranteed if he continues on the path he is on, and yet such a fate is at a conceptual distance, and does not seem real. So instead, he mortgages his ability to survive in the future by addressing the more immediate, but in my opinion lesser, threat embodied by Jefferson, thereby ensuring, one way or another, his own death.”
Morio laughed out loud. Like he’d never heard such a soliloquy. And I confess, I was somewhat proud. I felt indeed like Kobayashi! Never in my life had I strung together such a sophisticated thought. I had risen to the occasion under the most intense of pressures. Too bad it would likely get me disemboweled!
After that smile unwound from Morio’s face, he lapsed back into the flat, affectless voice of his, his eyes cast upward out the window. He seemed to me obsessed with that sky, its promise of bombers. “You are too smart to be a soldier. Too smart even to be Kempeitai.”
He cast a glance at me then. “But your conclusion is wrong.”
Somewhat heartened by his brief outburst of levity, and perhaps emboldened, I asked why he thought this.
“Because you didn’t torture him. I did.”
I was surprised by what occurred in the following moments. He divulged to me what had happened during those interrogation sessions with Gray in the days before he was assigned to the mine. This was not, I think you can appreciate, the sort of thing Kempeitai shared with virtually anybody. With other Kempeitai, certainly, and with the higher-ups they reported to, but not mere mortals like myself and the rest of the enlisted men. I doubted very much they even shared such information with their wives.
Perhaps having that door had a downside, too. Yes, he could shut out the world when he wanted, but perhaps it also afflicted him with something that we common soldiers, with our constant communal life and cramped eating and sleeping arrangements, did not tend to experience. Loneliness. Being assigned to the Mitsui grounds, away from his wife—who I would later learn died in the firebombing campaign against Osaka in March of that year (which perhaps precipitated the obsession I perceived him to have with the skies)—and for the most part separate from the larger body of Kempeitai officers, which had been stretched thin by the war at this point, Morio began to take on a different light in my eyes. Yes, he was a peacock with all those medals and that large fire-red chrysanthemum badge on his shoulder, but in the vibrancy of that color—the purity of it, the way it had been undiminished by the hoary surroundings we found ourselves in—he was a singular creature, an isolated anomaly amongst us. For the guards and prisoners wore a unified earthy tone of khaki, olive, and dust, the colors of us rendered neutral by the earth. The colors Morio wore were conspicuously unblemished by the earth, more ideals than truths, as if he floated above our toil, more god than man. But a god in those hellish circumstances, he must have been lonely! I can think of no other reason he would have engaged me.
“You think him subhuman, do you?” he asked.
I nodded yes, that this was the case. The whole superiority of the Yamato blood and all that. Half because I expected that was what he wanted to hear, but half because I believed it as well.
He told me to produce my hands.
I was discomfited by this but did so.
He took my palms in his, slid his hands over so that they gripped each of my thumbs. He looked me in the eye, then very slowly pulled my thumbs against their sockets, reversing their articulation back toward the wrists behind them.
“Does that hurt?” he asked clinically.
I wanted to say no but I ended up gasping yes; it felt as if the meat of my palm was about to split open.
He smiled as if corroborating inner things, and let go of my hand. “The subhuman reacted better than you did.”
I buried my hands in my pockets because I did not want to shake them out in front of him. They hurt terribly.
“You should not feel bad, private. I would not endure much more than that either. Pain has a thing about it, doesn’t it? You would do anything not to feel it. Even if it is inevitable to the process of living. We spend our entire lives trying to figure out how to avoid it.”
At that time, hearing this as a young man of eighteen, I thought it was an absurd generalization. I did not spend my time trying to avoid pain. I rarely thought about pain. Of course, all these years later, with the benefit of experience and contemplation, I now know that a man’s surface thoughts are rarely what actually drives him; those thoughts are effectively just a movie projected upon his consciousness, a facile narrative to render the confusing experience of life into a most easily digestible shorthand. The really interesting stuff is what is going on over in the darkness by the projector. The real currents of the soul.
“The subhuman came to us, and I must say, he was a curiosity from the start. With our increasing setbacks in the war effort, we were receiving fewer and fewer prisoners of war, especially officers. This is one of the problems of island-to-island fighting, particularly when the edict is to stay and fight to the last man. Rarely are there boats out, especially ones carrying prisoners. Yet, as was the case in Okinawa, where we had a certain amount of high-ranking brass on the island, there was a selective retreat. In other words, if you had more than two stars on your uniform, you were spared the expectation to die where you fought, or commit seppuku. I say this to you in confidence, of course. Such men are expected to lead by example, but brass always seem to have more pressing issues than dying for the cause, don’t they? Whatever the case, a handful of Allied prisoners—primarily officers, ones who were deemed to be potential sources of information—accompanied the brass on their flight from the front lines. The subhuman was amongst them.
“Now, as I say, he was a curiosity from the start. He wore the uniform of a medic, the helmet of a commander, and, strangest of all, had a set of German dog tags around his neck. No doubt this was a man worth questioning!
“Should you ever become Kempeitai—and you will not, because this war will soon be over and Japan will have serious consequences to pay—one thing you should know about interrogation: the first thing you should do when you bring a prisoner into the room, with hopes of extracting information from him, is give him alcohol.
“They expect violence. You give them beer.
“If they have brains in their head, they know you are feigning goodwill, but they invariably drink it anyhow, because they tend to be dehydrated, and few men, facing the prospect of serious torture, will turn down alcohol. They vainly hope that it might somehow dull the pain they’re sure to experience.
“Gray played that role perfectly. There was a distrust in his eyes, but a willingness to drink the beer, and drink it quickly, which he did. As soon as he was done with the first, we gave him another.
“I asked him if he was a medic, a commander, or a German. I asked him this through an interpreter. I made sure the interpreter knew to make this a bit of a joke.
“Gray didn’t smile. Didn’t answer. Which was expected. No prisoner answers the first question you ask them.
“So we slid him another cold beer. It’s important the beer is cold. We take them out of the icebox for a few min
utes before handing it to them, so that the transpiration beads perfectly on the glass of the bottle, thereby heightening the allure of it. He was not yet finished with the second beer, but we simply put the third beer next to it, as if it were ready whenever he was.
“I watched him drink the beer. Told him that perhaps he was a German, the way he went through beer. It was another attempt at a joke. Again, he stone-faced us.
“Everyone is tough in the first five minutes. One hundred percent of men.
“Thus I took the beer bottle he’d finished, broke it against the table, and turned to him, holding the jagged neck of the bottle. The idea, of course, is to shock them. They expect violence is coming, but not this quick. You puncture one of their fingernails suddenly with the broken glass and their eyes go wide. You put it right through the flesh of their finger and bury it in the table. Noncompliance at this stage goes from one hundred percent of men to about seventy percent. As an interrogator, you really hope you have one of the weak-willed ones before you, because your work’s a lot easier that way, and you can be back to your quarters sooner—read, have tea, sketch, that sort of thing.
“But in the case of our subhuman, it was not meant to be. He was a seventy-percenter; the sight of his own blood was not enough to jar him into blubbering confession.
“We asked him the requisite questions: who he was, was he an officer, what could he tell us about Allied intentions beyond Okinawa. He answered none of these, so we went to his thumbs, as I did to you.
“The thumbs, there are a couple of stages to that process. First is the unnatural physical articulation of pushing the thumb back against its normal range of motion, back down toward the wrist and away from the palm—the opposite of what evolution intended. It’s a fairly intuitive thing, if you think about it. The way to inflict pain is not terribly mysterious—you simply do the opposite of what a million years of evolution has trained the body to do. Push a knee or elbow back in on itself, reversing its natural flexion. Force a mouth or eye to stay open, thereby depriving it of its natural ability and necessity to lubricate itself. Those sorts of things. It’s not terribly inspired, but there is a logical and brilliant simplicity to it. The body is a marvelous creation, but a stubborn one. It dislikes intensely new movements, anything it was not initially designed to do.
“Whatever the case, we began with the thumbs. It was fairly rote for us at this stage—as I say, seventy percent of men by their obstinacy trigger this step, so we are quite used to doing it. You forget sometimes that you are doing it; you simply pull back the thumb with force, as a factory worker might pull a lever that he has pulled a thousand times before. And where that factory worker would become inured to the sound of the machinery around him as he pulled that lever, we also became desensitized to the considerable din that would come out of the prisoners’ mouths as we did our own work. They’d grunt and scream and groan and cry, and frankly they all sound the same for the most part. Wounded animals sound like wounded animals. They’re uniform in the things that issue from them. What was pained, what was nonsensical, what was nonverbal, we tuned out. It was white noise. We were trained only to hear words. Specific, actionable information.
“Now, when a thumb goes, it does not break, as you think. The tendons go, detach from the bone. The meat of the palm tends to tear. At that point, the damage is done, because its articulation is ruined. It just hangs there. And, it seems to me, that it’s the sight of the unnatural dangle of a man’s thumb rather than the pain itself that unhinges most of them. Those seventy percent of men that came to this stage as holdouts quickly shrink to less than twenty percent. Most men, seeing this irreversible damage to their body and its fundamental operability, scramble to find a way out of the situation. They say anything. Everything. It takes a little while to discern whether they’re lying, but once you’ve got them talking, it’s only a matter of time to get to the essence of the interrogation—to find out whether they have real information, or whether they’re worthless—so that everyone can get on with things afterward.
“Gray was suitably pained, no doubt about it. The usual groaning and wincing and doubling over. The eyes brimming with young-boy tears trying to be squinted back and suppressed. But he did not talk. Our work had been effective: you could see the small telltale hemorrhaging inside the meats of the palms; they were blossoming, purpling beneath the skin pretty good.
“We asked him again, quite forcefully this time, whether he was an officer. What he knew about Allied plans. He again didn’t answer. Now, you have to understand, he’d arrived to a place in the process that less than twenty percent of prisoners did. But this is not some mark of esteem, some medal of honor for one’s fortitude. They are idiots for putting themselves through such pain. And they are wasting our time. There are far more enriching things to do besides ruining a man’s thumbs for life. That is, if they even survive the session. And drawing the ire of the interrogators it not a promising way to ensure that.
“So, we went to step two. Bound his thumbs, tightly, behind his back. You pull the cords tight around those mangled thumbs, and the sheer magnitude of that pain tends to break another ten percent of men. They blubber and they talk and we can get to the heart of the matter.
“But, as you can surmise, our subhuman friend climbs into the more-rarified airs of idiocy by refusing to talk. So now he is really in a bad place with us, for not only has he forced us into unnecessary additional stages of action, but he’s also heightened our suspicions about him.
“Because, the ones that go on this long, you start to think there is something to them. Why do they remain silent? You would think as a common soldier, if you knew nothing, you’d say as much, early in the process. As an officer, you might lie, try misinformation if you’re feeling particularly heroic. But the ones that withheld in silence this long, something was up with them. There was something, it would seem, they were trying to protect. Why else build a fortress of silence around yourself like that? At least experience has shown this to be the case. Because as the sessions went on, and the methods became more intense, such men invariably did reveal something they’d been trying desperately not to. There was no reason otherwise to hold out.
“So we hoisted him up by his thumbs. Pulled the cord up behind his back and strung him from the rafters. He winced and growled and gasped in that universal language of pain, but he did not talk. This method is nothing new—the Italians during the Renaissance called it the Strappado. If you jerk the rope a few times, allow the prisoner to fall a foot or so each time, the jerking action quickly dislocates both shoulders. You can actually hear the sinews through the skin, popping, violently readjusting, tearing, which is a sound far worse than the whimpering and screams that accompany it—for while those whimpering and screams can be dismissed as a personal thing, the utterances of a particular person for whom you have no respect or compassion—when you hear the anguish of the body itself—well, I don’t know how to explain it other than to say that the body is somehow a universal thing, without language or culture, and to hear a bone snap or a sinew pop, it’s just primal, and despite yourself you are wincing along with the victim, even if you are the one administering the pain! At least that was the case with me. What comes from the mouth is divisible, nationalistic. What comes from the body is the species itself talking.
“It’s an accursed line of work we are in, Kesuke. But we do it for the Emperor, so we all must make our sacrifices. Still, pain, it has an atmospheric quality; if you’re around it enough, you realize it is something more than just a physiological phenomenon, more than just nerve endings firing away within a body. I say atmospheric because it really does escape the body and its neural structures. It infects the air. Like an invisible but very real cloud. And, depending on its intensity, the people that move through that cloud, they can feel it, they can breathe it in. It is a shared thing, pain. A pollution of the collective soul whether we acknowledge it or not.
“And this is to say nothing of psychological pain, which dw
arves all other pains.
“But we try to shut it out for the most part; and amongst our peers, we act like we’ve completely shut it out. Very important for a man, you know, to be untroubled by pain.
“And in a strange way, I suspected that our friend up there, Gray, was subject to keeping up the same appearances, despite the fact that we were dealing in considerable amounts of agony. He was toughing it out, between all those drooling, growling gasps, for some reason. Protecting something no doubt. Showing us he was protecting something. Showing us that pain was a lesser thing to ideals like loyalty, cause. What else could it be? His pain, it would seem, was his defiance.
“What a fool, right?
“We beat him. We pulled him up to the rafters again and again, let him drop again and again, let those tendons pop and grind again and again. Men either break or pass out at this stage, but he did neither. His eyes went lax, I must say that. But he yet breathed.
“That particular day was waning, so we decided to leave him. Part of the problem sometimes was our very presence. It gave the prisoner something to rebel against. Even if we were administering the worst sort of beatings, it was the sight of us that sometimes gave them the strength they needed to endure. We learned in these more rarefied cases that often the best thing to do was nothing. Let the real enemy take over the assault. Leave them alone with their thoughts.
“So we’d turn in. Do a bit of meditation, unwind the tension from our bodies, repair to our quarters to write letters and such. Leave it all behind. And let them sway there in that locked room with their mind while we slept quietly in ours.
“Now, in the mornings, when you would come in, it was as if there was a stiff breeze moving through the room the prisoner was in. Now, of course, there wasn’t, but if you looked at the prisoner and the energy with which their body swayed, you’d swear there was a crosswind blowing strongly through the room. But this was due to one of the main physiological effects of the Strappado, something called brachial plexus injury—which is effectively nerve damage. Yes, the tendons and muscles are heavily damaged, but it’s the nervous system that really suffers. It overloads, short-circuits. The arms spasm indiscriminately, the nerves firing in chaotic confusion. Everywhere is involuntary movement along the denervated arms. And thus the body swings and sways and generally looks like a sail in the wind. Or a fish on the deck of a boat, in the final weakened throes of its struggle to survive. Everything about it is insensate, as if the brain and nerves are dead, and only the body is not yet in on the joke.
The Far Shore Page 24