Beasts Head for Home

by Abe Kobo

  In order to get a better sense of things, Kyūzō ducked under the train and emerged on its eastern side. It was already quite bright. The surface of the freight cars shone with a chalky texture. The first two cars were bolted tightly with wire, but the third car’s bolt had been removed, so he decided upon that one. The door was iced over, making it difficult to open. As soon as he exerted strength, his chilled body began to creak with pain. He changed position. Now the door opened easily. It was smooth, sliding back and forth properly.

  Laughter could be heard near the train. It sounded very close, and Kyūzō hurriedly crawled inside. The car reeked of oil and mouse urine. It was dark and he could barely see anything, but it was empty inside, with apparently no cargo. He closed the door and struck a match. The front contained several machine parts wrapped in straw mats, while in the back there were casually tossed a number of wooden boxes of various sizes.

  Kyūzō sat down on one of the boxes. Burying his face in the frigid gloves on his lap, he began panting like a dog.

  Along the tracks, footsteps approached of someone stepping on the railway ballast. Kyūzō shifted his body, lying flat against the wall. The footsteps hammered something a few times underneath the freight car and then disappeared. Kyūzō’s anxiety, however, suddenly returned. Was it really possible that something so vital as a freight car could be left empty? At any moment now a truck or carriage would certainly arrive and workers would begin loading its cargo onto the train. If so, it would be impossible to conceal himself. It might be safer to stow away in a car where the cargo was already loaded, even if it were one used to transport livestock.

  Raising his head, Kyūzō saw light dimly shining in above the door. There was a hole about the size of his thumb, and a dusty light could be seen whirling about. Peeking through the hole, he noted that the fog had nearly disappeared, and that several sheets of mist that had failed to escape hovered close to the ground, moving south. By the horizon a milky white light had begun to shine.

  On his left, a large patch of fog was burning off in swirls, exposing the lowland that stretched from the northwest to the southeast. This was Xinghe. Here and there the snow had become bare, revealing a surface of ice that gleamed like new sheets of zinc. Further to the right, the town of Baharin stretched out like a stockyard of black brick.

  In such light, however, it would no longer be easy to change cars. Suddenly the train emitted a burst of steam. Kyūzō stood motionless, vacillating, when again he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. They stopped directly in front of him. Someone rapped on the door with a stick and spoke in Chinese, with a provincial Shandong accent, “What happened to the cargo that was supposed to have been loaded here?”

  Kyūzō pulled back, unconsciously grabbing the knife handle under his jacket. The other man replied in beautiful standard Chinese, “I hear that it was cancelled because it didn’t make it on time.”

  The man with the Shandong accent followed up. “I’ll need certification for that. I’m an honest man, and it would be trouble if they thought I was cheating them.”

  The two men set off, laughing.

  Kyūzō leaned against the door. His shoulders heaved painfully. He told himself that things would work out, but his legs would not stop trembling. He pulled out the bottle and took a sip. The liquid flowed around his teeth.

  He moved one of the wooden boxes in the corner, piling it up on the outside so as to create a small hiding place. Putting his belongings down, he returned to the peephole. It was now completely bright out. This flat town that was typically colorless and filled with smoke was now fresh and vibrant, illuminated by a pale backlight. The shantytown roofs beyond the mill tank ran on one after the other. For Kyūzō, they looked like dried fish skins. In the center, the upswept roof of a tall, many-walled Lama Buddhist temple glittered with a faint green light. Straight ahead past the river lay the alley through which he had just escaped. On his right, part of the bridge could be seen, and the smokestack of the pulp factory appeared especially high. Slightly in front of that stood the factory dormitory where Kyūzō was born and raised. A single red flag fluttered softly.

  (“It seems I’m finally leaving.”)

  The corner of an eroded sand dune could be seen where the river sharply diverged to again touch the edge of town. A few slanting Korean pine trees stood there, under which lay the unknown grave of his mother. When Kyūzō was in middle school, he had examined the sand dune’s movement as part of science class. He discovered that as the dune eroded with the annual spring floods, it moved northward by twenty or thirty centimeters. Before long it would overtake his mother’s grave, swallowing it up. After several hundred years, in the sandy plains created after the sand dune had swept through, what would someone think if they came across those crumbled, yellow bones?

  The siren began its whine. It was 7:00. Martial law was now over.

  It felt a bit strange to think that in two hours he would finally say good-bye to this town. It was difficult for Kyūzō to grasp that the town would still continue its life after he had gone. All his memories lived in this town. Now, however, those memories must depart together with him.

  Just as today exists within yesterday, so, too, does tomorrow exist within today; and just as today exists within tomorrow, so, too, does yesterday live within today. He had been taught that this was how man lived, and he had come to believe it. Because of the war, however, this convention had disintegrated, becoming something scattered and unrelated. For Kyūzō now, yesterday and tomorrow were no longer linked together.

  In two hours, this place here would become another’s land, one that could no longer be called “yesterday.” And as for tomorrow, nothing yet could truly be known about it. What he knew about Japan was only what he had imagined from the textbooks at school. (Mount Fuji, the Three Views of Japan, a smiling island of green surrounded by the sea, where the wind was gentle, birds sang, and fish swam. In the autumn, leaves fell in the forest and then the sun would shine, ripening the red seeds. A land of diligence, with diligent people.) A lost lover has a face, but this lover was still faceless.

  Given that yesterday would never return and tomorrow could not yet be glimpsed, how could one conceive of the meaning of today, which existed between them? (“Am I happy? Perhaps I am, but I can’t really be sure.”)

  Kyūzō felt a pain deep in his eyes. He returned to the darkness of his hiding place and lay down atop his belongings. Tears ran from his eyes and froze, itching his eyelids. Suddenly he fell into a deep sleep.

  VI

  Both of Kyūzō’s parents came from obscure backgrounds. In particular, almost nothing was known about his father, Kyūjirō.

  His father had apparently been a woodcrafter who came over from Kitakyūshū together with the engineers about twenty years ago when the pulp factory was built in this town. His mother had followed him here to Manchuria six months later. Kyūzō was born that winter, but his father died soon thereafter. The cause of death was unclear. With no home to which to return, his mother was allowed by the plant manager to stay on as the housemother. When Kyūzō was thirteen, a Japanese school was built in the city of T, and his mother promptly enrolled him there. This was a period of hope, however modest. It seemed that there would still be time before the disturbance of the war came to affect this remote area.

  It was in the afternoon of August 9, 1945, in the summer of Kyūzō’s sixteenth year, when news suddenly came that the Soviet Union had entered the war.

  Like exotic horseflies, black fighter planes flew south overhead. In the evening, a Kwantung Army battalion began heading east, just outside of town. Yet nobody seemed particularly concerned about these developments.

  On the next day, however, someone was refused when they tried to buy tickets at the station. All trains were requisitioned by the military, and even the passenger cars were occupied by evacuating soldiers and their families. It was then discovered that the troops based in town had suddenly disappeared. The peasants nearby attacked what r
emained, smashing everything to pieces. The military police at the station received word of this attack, but for some reason did nothing. Finally, people became anxious.

  Early on the morning of the twelfth, the sound of gunshots rang out from across the river. A power outage broke out thirty minutes later. One hour thereafter a Red Army officer suddenly appeared at the dormitory as if from nowhere. Accompanied by several soldiers and a Chinese interpreter, he had shoulders like a wall and wore gray fatigues from which dangled three covered medals.

  With a curt manner, the officer asked if this were a barracks, school, or private residence. Upon being told that it was a residence, he cocked his head skeptically, ordered that the building be entirely vacated within two days, and then hurried out with no change of expression. That was Alexandrov.

  Who could possibly imagine that this is how wars begin and end? It had just been announced on the 9:00 news that fighting was taking place in eastern Manchuria. Some people declared that this was doubtless the Soviet Fifth Army staging a rear attack. Others claimed that it was not the main unit but probably just a small number of paratroop forces. In any event, the general consensus was that the mop-up campaign against Japanese troops would certainly begin soon. Sharp-edged wooden bayonets and quarterstaffs were distributed to the twenty households, which numbered (excluding infants) forty-eight people.

  Calls to Qiqihar were made in order to learn more about the situation, but the lines had already been cut. Around noon a military policeman fled to the dormitory, asking to be concealed. Taking off his uniform, he dug a hole in the garden in which to bury himself. “Just you wait and see!” he repeated with great bravado, but the fear on his face was even more palpable. Shortly thereafter a group of disarmed Japanese soldiers was led dispiritedly to the front of the dormitory.

  An endless mass of heavy tanks eventually appeared on the silent prefectural road, their massive guns pointed skyward, raising white sand clouds as they rolled past. The entire town shook from the ground up.

  Some people cried aloud while others merely wandered aimlessly about. Kita, the plant manager, was the first to come to his senses. “Hey! We must all place red ribbons on our chest. The Russkies like red. But don’t use the word ‘Russki’ in front of them! Say ‘Sovet’ instead. ‘Sovet’! And all you women must go cut your hair!”

  From that moment onward, Kita naturally became the leader.

  He worked hard, as expected. Not only was the dormitory seized, but most of the company housing belonging to the engineers and executives fell victim as well. By day’s end, Kita had decided on the place to which they (including the engineers and executives) would now relocate. Everyone was to live in the materials warehouse, located on the bank upstream. Kita boasted that the structure was solid because of the stable humidity level, and that one could walk to the old part of town once the river froze over. He assembled ten wagons. Eviction was set for the following morning. In the evening, a postal worker came to secretly refund their savings.

  During that night, however, Kyūzō’s mother went out to the back shed to find some empty packing crates. There she was hit by a stray bullet, shattering her back.

  They called for a doctor, but after administering an injection he hurried away without issuing any clear instructions. Everyone was in a state of high agitation. Not knowing what to do, Kyūzō merely remained at his mother’s bedside staring blankly ahead.

  The sound of the first wagon could be heard at the crack of dawn. Kyūzō went off to seek advice from Kita. Standing squarely in the middle of a pile of boxes, Kita spoke agitatedly while nevertheless keeping his gaze lowered. “You can’t rely on others at times like this. Everyone’s a victim here. We’re in a terrible situation. You have my sympathies. Of course I’ll do everything I can to help. But the doctor said that your mother cannot be moved now, and even the Russkies would not go so far as to throw out someone who’s sick and dying. So it’s best to wait and see. Let’s think more about this once things settle down. We know each other’s whereabouts.” He then added, as if suddenly remembering, “If you’d like, I can hold on to any money or valuables you might have. It may be dangerous for you to keep such things. Apparently quite a few people in the office have had their watches taken. I can hold on to those things for a while.”

  Kyūzō had no choice but to thank Kita and accept his offer. Regardless of whether the idea was a good one or not, it was encouraging to simply maintain ties with people from the company.

  Although Kyūzō had nothing that could be called valuable, he nevertheless asked Kita to safeguard the pocket watch that his father had left behind, a silver cigarette case, his mother’s ring, some clothes, and a gasoline can filled with cooking oil. As for money, Kyūzō had fortunately been able to withdraw their two hundred yen in savings. Keeping fifty yen for himself, he asked Kita to hold on to the rest.

  After 4:00, the dormitory had become completely silent. “It’s shameful, it’s shameful,” his mother droned on repeatedly. Leaving the room, Kyūzō began walking furtively around the empty dormitory.

  Although he knew that no one was there, he nevertheless felt a strange sense of uneasiness upon reaching the second floor. Wood chips, a piece of rope, old, torn newspapers, broken bowls, and various other fragments of daily life whose original forms could not immediately be recalled lay scattered about, covering the floor entirely. Bare brick lay exposed beneath the torn plaster. The dank odor of mold, which seemed to have been hiding somewhere, presently enveloped the space like a shadow of vanished people.

  An oddly sweet sense of liberation now seized hold of Kyūzō. Upon proceeding to middle school, he had been set to receive advanced schooling if his grades permitted. Angangxi was about two and a half hours north by train. If one changed to the main line there, Harbin could be reached in less than half a day. In Harbin there was a Japanese vocational school for engineering. During the semester this year, Kyūzō had filled in the name of this school on his survey form. “Get even with them!” his mother would often say. For her, Kyūzō was the warrior in whom all hope lay in overcoming the family’s obscure origins. Naturally, everything appeared to him as an impregnable fortress. Unconsciously, he may have hated this task that had been thrust upon him. Now he found himself trampling upon the devastated remains of that fortress which had so tragically collapsed.

  Kyūzō suddenly found himself standing in front of room twelve at the far end of the hall. This was one of four family apartments with three adjoining rooms. The door had been left open and part of the shattered furniture protruded outside. The room appeared painfully empty, as if a body part had been forcibly torn off.

  The chief clerk lived here. He had a daughter named Sachiko, who was the same age as Kyūzō. Sachiko was considered quite beautiful even among the adults, but she was also rather impudent. One time Kyūzō had asked to borrow her kaleidoscope, and she had dismissed him out of hand. “You have trachoma,” she said. This door had seemed so thick and impregnable! Now, however, it, too, had disappeared. Everything had become utterly equal.

  He suddenly felt himself stricken by anxiety in being left behind. Stepping into the room, he saw a mouse looking back at him from the shadows of an overturned cupboard. Slowly it made its way along a post before fleeing inside a hole in the sliding screen. Inside some scrap paper, Kyūzō found a letter for Sachiko’s father sent by someone with the same last name. It had been posted from a certain district in Shizuoka. He folded the letter, placed it in his inner pocket, and hurried out.

  “Where have you been?” his mother demanded. Her face appeared larger with swelling.

  “There are mice everywhere,” he replied. His voice was flabby and weak.

  “It’s shameful, it’s shameful,” his mother repeated.

  Kyūzō left the door open. The wind had died down, making it extremely humid. A horrible smell permeated the room. Perhaps his mother’s wound had begun rotting.

  The long dusk began. Somewhere an automatic rifle rattled like an engine.


  There soon could be heard the plaintive notes of a war song. Someone sang in a high, clear voice, and this was followed by a chorus. It was just like a concert, Kyūzō mused. Upon realizing that the voices belonged to Russian soldiers who were coming to occupy the town, however, he began to panic. His mind raced about like a mouse searching for a hole, and yet his body remained paralyzed.

  A military vehicle, crablike in appearance, was the first to arrive. Out stepped Alexandrov and three noncommissioned officers. Then a steel amphibious vehicle about the size of a small freight car appeared, fully loaded with communications equipment. Dark-eyed Mongolian soldiers rode up bareback, guiding their mounts smoothly like trick riders. There were four of these soldiers with a total of eleven horses. The animals had doubtlessly been expropriated from the Japanese forces, but were already following the Mongolians like shadows. Finally a group of Russian soldiers arrived, their footsteps echoing heavily. They immediately set to work hoisting a red flag over the gatepost, erecting an antenna tower in the garden, and attaching a large red star to the exposed red brick above the entrance.

  Kyūzō and his mother were dealt with in a way that was simpler than they had feared. A young medic was called in. He readily examined Kyūzō’s mother’s wound, checked her pulse, and looked into her pupils. He then asked Kyūzō something.

  “I can’t understand Russian,” he replied in poor English.

  The doctor appeared to understand that this was English. Alexandrov offered to interpret. Fortunately, his English ability was at the same level as Kyūzō’s. This would later prove useful in improving Kyūzō’s situation somewhat.

  “Can she urinate?”

  In fact, she hadn’t urinated since last night. Kyūzō tried asking his mother. “He asked if you need to urinate.”