“There were a few. We came upon some people working through the wreckage of what had been a shopping district. We joined, and worked long through the day and night locating people. Most were dead, but there were a few survivors. We had conflicting emotions as we pulled the survivors out, for while we were excited to have discovered another, we also could see that they were, like so many of the rest near the blast site, horribly burned. I confess I began to purposely blur my vision; it was a defense, a childish one, I know, against the horrors I was seeing. All this burnt flesh. It was easier to simply glaze your eyes, make this thing before you a bit more indeterminate. I just didn’t want to see. We worked onward through the night like this. Saving people with broken limbs, charred skin. We would hand them off to people with vehicles, who would drive them over to Koba. After midnight, a lot of the rescuers began to thin out due to exhaustion, amongst other things. Some just needed a break from the carnage. Some were starting to talk about radiation, how the bomb was apparently atomic in nature, and how we were likely doing irreparable damage to ourselves by exposing ourselves to the fallout. But I couldn’t think that way; I didn’t want to think that way. It was another horrific concept thrown atop the rest. So it wasn’t long before we had thinned out into small groups, and in my case, I was moving alone through the midnight ruins, as Isa had chosen to take a break, catch an hour of sleep before rejoining the effort. You cannot imagine how dark it was there. All the city lights had been obliterated, and the leftover haze from the bombing blocked out any of the weak light the stars or thin moon would have afforded us. It was a black world of cinders, with me in the middle of it. I searched and I searched and I searched, calling out. I wanted to undo this somehow, even if it was a person at a time.
“And that’s when I found the girl. I’m guessing she was five. She was trapped in some heavy debris where the main market had been. She called out when she heard my voice and I went to her. She was lodged in there pretty good, but I felt I had a good chance of getting her out. It would just involve a lot of effort. So I began. And as I hefted away some of the heavier wood, I could see that the shifting wood was causing her discomfort, the way the bigger pieces shifted the whole pile, and would press up against her. I asked her where it hurt and she said her legs. She said her legs were squeezed pretty hard. By now, my eyes had acclimated to the darkness, so I could see into the small hole in the ruins where she was. She was maybe two, three feet down—her face anyhow. I made a conscious decision to talk to her as much as possible as I worked through the wood above her, because I could see that it was causing her distress. I imagined her legs were pinned and perhaps broken. I asked her her name. Yuka. I asked her if she had been with anyone that day. Her parents. But they were below her, she said, and they were dead. I decided to take another tack. I decided distraction. I asked her what her favorite color was, that sort of thing. She thought this was a weird question, given the circumstances, so I thought I would appeal to a different part of her. I told her it was one a.m. Had she ever stayed up so late—one a.m.? She didn’t know what the notion of ‘a.m.’ meant. So while I was lifting away the debris around her, I explained that there were in fact two one o’clocks, one during the daylight hours, one during the nighttime hours. It seemed to be an incredible revelation to her. Unfortunately at this stage, I was freeing a larger piece of debris from above her head, which allowed a fraction more of the ambient light to reach her face. I could see she was badly, badly burned. The hair had been blasted away from the side of her head, along with part of her ear. I have to tell you, it is one thing to see the horrors of the body inflicted on grown-ups—I have trafficked in that. But the body of a child is an entirely different temple. To see it so profaned…”
Morio paused then. It was clear he was deeply affected by this. But his voice did not quiver, nor did tears come to his eyes, though it was clear that all the ingredients were right there under the surface.
Morio set his teeth, opened his lips, and exhaled, as if trying to re-center himself, expunge this. It was in this moment that I first saw his gums. They were black with blood under the skin. He continued, seemingly unaware of this, “I got to a point with the girl—with Yuka—where I knew I was only a few minutes from freeing her. But she was so ghastly, so broken…I found myself slowing and finally stopping. And this calculus went through my head: if I had not happened upon her, me being the only soul for a half-mile maybe, she would likely die down there in her condition. Certainly by sunup. She would go through a few hours of abject suffering and be dead. And yet I was here, this person that could deliver her. But deliver her unto what? For were she to survive this, to come out of that hole, those few hours of intense suffering she would have otherwise experienced before death would become days, weeks, months, years. Her body ruined, her face a horror, her veins poisoned with radiation. It was a terrible realization. What was really ‘saving’ her?” He looked to Gray dolefully. “Perhaps as a medic you can answer this for me.”
Gray looked at the ground, shook his head.
Morio nodded, expecting as much, then with a detached voice said, “I walked away. Left her there in that infinite blackness calling after me. Of all the things I have experienced in my life, that was the most horrid moment, hearing that thin, terrified voice. It was a pain like none other. A shame with no border.”
He studied his hands for a bit. Cast a glance to Gray. “Did I do the right thing? Did I shorten the Pain, the Suffering, for another? By doing something so abhorrent, had I somehow lessened the larger burden of the world, if only by a few hours and days of a single life? Can we destroy to heal?”
“We’re soldiers, we’ve got the destroying part down, that’s for sure.”
“You are a soldier, but you’re also a medic.”
“It wasn’t my choice to be a medic.”
“Maybe the real question I am asking, to both of you, is…when this war is over in a few days, will we still be soldiers?”
I didn’t answer, nor did Gray.
“Or is it that we will forever be soldiers?” Morio asked.
Gray considered it, looked down at the stained floor beneath his boots. “We’re part of the human race. You tell me.”
Morio reflected on this. Then got to his feet. He took the box of sticky rice I had brought him and placed it down on the floor beside Gray. An offering. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you,” he said in his flat, affectless voice. “I was looking for a way out of this.”
He put on his boots, nodded to both of us. “But there is no way out of this, is there?” And then he went outside.
He would become deathly ill a few days later, which coincided with the arrival of the American liberators.
We learned on the sixteenth of August that the Emperor had agreed to terms for the unconditional surrender of all Japanese Imperial Forces.
Shortly thereafter, as more prisoners and guards continued to melt away from the camp, the first of the Allied detachments showed up at the gates. It was a strange thing to see—healthy American GIs, well-fed, well-armed, pulling up in freshly painted jeeps. I’d seen Americans almost exclusively as a desperate, starving, broken race up ’til then, which made it easy to look upon them as subhumans. But these GIs that showed up, their skin was healthy, their eyes alive. By comparison, as I looked around, it was the Japanese soldiers, subject to rationing all these months, that now look malnourished. It suggested that we too had been deprived, prisoners in our own country. So much was being turned on its head, perception-wise, for me that I could hardly think. I was utterly confused. The idea of Japan as this eternal, invulnerable reality had shattered. Everything that I had been brought up to believe—in loyalty, humility, subservience to that eternal reality—had likewise shattered. What was I to do? What would happen when I removed my uniform and left the gates? Who would tell me what to do, who would give me the unerring direction and guidance life required?
When the Americans came, I found myself one of the first to face them, for the rest o
f the remaining young guards shrunk back at the sight of them. I was a bit like the deer in the proverbial headlights, I suppose you could say. Standing there wide-eyed as the Americans approached. You see, to me, the war was over, wasn’t it? That heightened game of youth had been surrendered. It was time to put down the make-believe guns and uniforms and go home, just like one did all those years before.
The Americans had a translator, who requested that I get the senior officer in the camp. I complied. Morio at this point was confined to his quarters, the effects of acute radiation poisoning ravaging his body. I went to him; Morio’s gums were black now, his skin shedding, hanging in loose, drying curls around the fringes of his undershirt. He was very weak from severe nausea and diarrhea. His mental acuity was largely gone. He seemed to have entered a haze from which perhaps there was no exit.
I assisted him out into the light of the midday camp, where the Allied officers then took possession of him. They sat him in the back of one of the jeeps, gave him water, began asking questions. At this point, I was shooed away by some of the other Americans. They were rough. In fact, the camp around me was quickly devolving into a frightening chaos. Many of the prisoners, seeing their liberators, turned on the guards. Took whatever was available—picks, planks of wood, stones—and began beating them savagely. I instinctively moved back toward the American officers, for I thought it was with them that I was most likely to find my best chance at civility. They did not have that same vengeful fire in their eyes; they had not experienced what the prisoners had in this camp. And the American GIs that had liberated the camp did make an effort to still the simmering violence. They shouted down the prisoners, tried to keep them at bay from myself and the others. They ordered the prisoners to fall in, to form a column, for they were going to get everyone out of the camp as quickly as possible.
The GIs ordered me to fall in as well, along with the other Japanese guards. We were going to be detained, apparently. Could one become a prisoner of war, even though the war in question was over? These were the questions that I was asking, because I honestly didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. My mind was a complete blank slate as to what could or could not be, what should or should not be. I was scared. Being part of the Imperial Army, I had always been promised a certain future. Without that, I hadn’t a clue of what would become of me.
It was at this stage that I saw Gray, standing amidst the still-chaotic camp. He seemed equally overwhelmed. He stood there in silence, with those broken eyes and that broken body, absorbing all that transpired around him. There was still violence—for you must understand, the liberation force that came to the camp was composed of perhaps two dozen men—and there were still over a thousand prisoners in the camp. What those thousand prisoners willed was destined to be. I watched—as did Gray—Isa go down beneath a hail of blows. Prisoners kicking him, gouging his eyes out. Some of my peers met a similar fate. By the time the liberating GIs got to them and restored order, the bodies of the victims were just bloody lumps inside torn Imperial Army uniforms.
The liberating GIs decided that the other prisoners were such a threat to the remaining guards that they fashioned a buffer out of cargo net around me and the others, and strung it between the jeeps. It was to be a sort of moving jail cell, one that would keep us from being torn apart by our one-time subjects. I, of course, welcomed this—never before had a jail cell seemed so comforting! As I waited fearfully between the jeeps for the caravan to start, I looked again to Gray, who still engaged no one, still watched the savagery around him with those eyes. He had not yet joined the column. Men were taking everything—the souvenirs of war—the freshly bloody caps off the fallen guards, their kogatanas. There was a great hollering roar from Morio’s quarters when his stash of yen was discovered. A few GIs and prisoners emerged with the boxes held high, a few notes spilling haphazardly. The look on their faces! It was like everything else had been forgotten, and there was nothing but them and that money. Some of these men had spent years in the mines, subject to all that depravity, and it was as if this money was somehow recompense. I wondered if they knew it was worthless. They surely didn’t, for no one would smile like that over boxes of intricately decorated but otherwise irrelevant paper, which was essentially what they were. Maybe it was just the very idea of taking control of what their captors had previously controlled, had previously valued. What’s yours is ours now. Maybe that’s where the glee came from.
Gray saw this too. He looked at them, that money. That money he’d rejected. It was hypnotic, the way he looked at it. I watched him as he watched the GIs tote the money across the yard. There seemed to be no connection in his eyes, no judgment. There was just a blankness. I remember this moment well, because it perhaps summed up everything that was going on in my mind too. None of this, I was thinking, none of this means anything. One side had wrested power—control of the things in this place, the land beneath it, the ideas that surround it, its narrative—from another side, who in turn would almost certainly one day wrest it back. It seemed a premature celebration to me, for tomorrow was fully unknown. The story, as certain as it seemed, was sure to change. I had been a fool, because I had believed the story foisted upon me in my youth. It was the first time I realized that life was not life, but rather the story people told about it.
Gray then did something that put me on edge. For the first time since I had laid eyes upon him, Gray moved. Still separate in intent from the rest, but with clear resolution. He moved for Morio, across the yard, still sitting in his half-lucid state on the back of that jeep.
I could only watch this from the confines of my makeshift cell. Morio had been left momentarily unattended by the American officers. He sat there inert, staring into the dust, oblivious to the fact that Gray was moving purposefully for him.
I was pretty sure Gray was going to kill him.
Gray neared Morio. Morio looked up with his sick, tired eyes. They were far enough away that I could not hear the exchange of words between them. Both of their faces were unreadable in pantomime. Something was said. Brief. Without emotion. Gray asked something of Morio. Morio’s answer was apparently weak, for Gray leaned in aggressively, repeated the question, pressing his ear near Morio’s lips. Morio said something very brief. Then for a long moment Gray surveyed him. I cannot imagine what was running through his head as he looked on at his tormentor.
Then Gray moved away, left Morio there like just another inconsequential piece of equipment scattered across the camp.
Shortly thereafter, the column of prisoners was ordered to begin the exodus from the camp. We shuffled along in our makeshift prison between the jeeps as the procession started.
I did not see Morio, but managed to see Gray one last time. He had joined the column a few dozen yards ahead of me. But a few minutes after exiting the camp, he fell out, stood by as the long parade of soldiers started to pass. You must understand, it was a pretty chaotic environment—well over a thousand men, in various stages of trauma, being marshaled to freedom, given triage treatment where needed, and all of this on a quick timetable. From the time that the GIs first arrived to the moment the prisoners began marching couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes. The liberators checked on whom they could, but they were outnumbered thirty to one. And thus they didn’t see, or properly process, what Gray was doing. A couple of prisoners patted him on the back as they passed, a GI called to him from the jeep behind me, told him to keep moving, but then turned his attentions elsewhere. I, though, looked back over my shoulder, kept watching Gray. Gray looked at the ground for a bit, then turned the other way. Without looking back, he moved down one of the rural paths the led away not only from the camp but from the procession. No doubt about it, he’d made a decision. He was moving away from the soldiers. Away from freedom. And deeper into Japan.
Within less than a minute, he disappeared into the foliage and it was the last I ever saw of him.
After that, I walked another few miles with the procession, until the prisoners and g
uards were separated out, the Allied prisoners going into a hastily established military base alongside the harbor, no doubt for treatment and recuperation, while the guards were sent to a warehouse that had been repurposed as a sort of prison camp. The American soldiers that were tasked with guarding us were surprisingly civil. I remember them providing fresh water and bread. What I remember most about them was that they seemed spooked to be so near Nagasaki. Like there were ghosts everywhere in the land. Or maybe it was the radiation. Whatever the case, I and the other guards did not suffer at their hands as we thought we might.
That evening, we were given blankets, cots. The entire experience had been so draining that most men fell asleep as soon as it became dark. I was near drifting off when a couple more prisoners were released into the warehouse by the Americans. One of them was Morio.
Morio weakly shuffled over, spotted an available cot just beyond me. As he passed, I could not help but put out a hand to stop him. We met eyes in the failing light. Morio vaguely nodded. “Don’t worry. You will not be held accountable. Only the senior officers.” Which, of course, meant him. Morio smiled the faintest smile, perceiving my reaction to this. He shook his head, as if I should not fret. “It doesn’t matter, private. My fate is already sealed.”
He moved to pull his arm free. Sick, resigned, ready for the oblivion of sleep.
The Far Shore Page 28