At the bottom of the stairs, Miyo is sat erect in her bedding. No sign of Father yet, no Haruyo. He pushes on a pair of sandals, the first his fingers can find, and runs through the garden to the street. Kyoko is already out there, and behind her, at an embarrassed distance, Otaki, carrying the crutch and gabbling about how Mr Kitamura was most insistent, and really, what else could he do but keep serving him, a veteran after all, a distinguished veteran.
Saburo is lying, perfectly still, on his back, but his eyes are open, and when he sees Yuji he smiles. ‘Comrade! Knew I could count on you. Knew you would come.’
He shakes off his wife, stretches up, clutches Yuji’s hand (almost pulling him over), hauls himself onto his one and a half feet, breathes deeply, looks briefly victorious, and immediately collapses to the ground again. A second attempt is more successful. He wraps an arm round Yuji’s neck, and the four of them, wedded to the drunken man’s movements, teeter towards the old woman’s gate. A dozen times Saburo stops to rage about the bastards who ‘butchered him’, or to ask, urgently, if Yuji remembers so-and-so from school, the kid with the big ears, or the one who cried a lot, or the one who, for half a sweet-bean cake, drank his own piss.
Grandma Kitamura is waiting for them with a lantern and a blanket. She tries to drape the blanket over Saburo’s shoulders but he shrugs it off, irritably. ‘Look,’ he says to Yuji, touching the tabard he is wearing, the padded cotton waistcoat written over with what, by the lantern light, Yuji can now decipher as verses from the Lotus Sutra. ‘Without this I would have been killed a hundred times. A thousand! “Oh, Buddha of sublime nature and unequalled power” . . Go to bed, Granny. You’ — he points at Kyoko — ‘heat sake. We have a guest, in case you hadn’t noticed. An old friend has called.’
‘Would it be better to sleep now?’ asks Yuji, softly. ‘After all, we could talk in the morning. We—’
Saburo tightens his arm round Yuji’s neck. He laughs. ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying.’
In a room at the back of the house, Kyoko puts out two sitting cushions, switches on the electric kotatsu, which immediately gives off a strange smell of burning. Yuji has not been in this room for years. The matting is frayed, the paper screens split and taped, the alcove, apart from an empty vase, bare.
Saburo sits, dragging Yuji with him. For a moment Saburo seems to lose consciousness, but then he looks up, shakes his head like a dazed boxer, and takes the unsmoked half of an army-ration cigarette from behind his ear. He gives Yuji the lighter, cups Yuji’s hands in his own, and several times comes close to setting his eyelashes ablaze. In front of them, the damaged foot is on show, wrapped in a pinned sock. Kyoko brings in the sake. She pours, and puts the flask on the kotatsu. As she stands to leave she glances at Yuji, quickly shakes her head. He does not know what it means. A warning of some kind? (Get out as soon as you can!) Or is it to tell him that the bruise beside her eye, the greenish shadow the powder cannot entirely hide, is not there because Saburo has learnt anything of the game they have played these last months, his idle pursuit of her, her idle acceptance of it. Is that what she means?
The moment they are alone, Saburo begins to speak, and though he sways from the waist and the nicotine-bright fingers round the cigarette are not quite steady, his voice come from a place the alcohol has not touched. Cannot touch, perhaps.
‘This,’ he says, his forehead almost grazing Yuji’s cheek, ‘will happen to you. Don’t bother fighting it. There’s nothing you can do.’
‘Do?’
‘When you come back, they won’t know you. They won’t want to know you. They won’t want to touch you.’ He draws on the cigarette, holds the smoke down, then lets it seep past his gritted teeth. ‘When I got my papers in ’36, they were still training soldiers properly. January to May at the depot, and not just square-bashing. We were cobblers, tailors, armourers, cooks . . I could strip down a Nambu and build it again in the time it would take you to eat a bowl of rice. A Japanese soldier had to know how to do everything! Fire a grenade-launcher? Yessir! Dig a latrine, read a map, march through the snow when you can’t feel your feet? Yessir! These days they give them a uniform and pack them straight off on the boat. Half of them still seasick when they get to camp. Real specimens! Worse than you, Takano. City scum. Village idiots. Can’t march, can’t fight. It’s left to us, NCOs, senior privates, to train them, and the only thing worth teaching them, the only thing we have time to teach them, is how to kill. Know how you do that? Eh? You get yourself a dozen Chink prisoners, line up the training squad, tell them if anyone looks away they’ll get their teeth knocked in, then pull out the nearest prisoner and stick him in the belly with a bayonet. The army bayonet is the Meiji type thirty. It is fifteen and a half inches long. Chinks are mostly skinny as you. Stick them right and you get eight, ten inches of steel out the other side. That’s what we want to see, we say, though in fact we’re usually trying not to piss ourselves laughing at the sight of their faces. Then the sergeant asks for a volunteer. And guess what? There’s always someone who wants a go, some mama’s boy who suddenly realises what he wants to do in life is jab a man in the guts. They all do it in the end, even the ones who look more scared than the Chinks they’re sticking. The next day when you line them up, they’re different. They’ve changed. There’s no going back then. It’s like . .’ He reaches out a weebling hand for his sake but the cup is too far away. He gives up.
‘Now, taking heads,’ he says, ‘that needs a bit of skill. Use too much force and you’ll make a mess of it, have them running all over the place like a chicken. Just keep it nice and calm, get the prisoner to kneel in front of you, pour a little water both sides of your blade, swish it off, lift the blade high, breathe out, breathe in . . let it fall. Do it properly, you hardly feel the contact. Head pops off. Two big fountains of blood. Body tumbles into a hole. You wipe your blade, try not to look too pleased with yourself. Officers have the best swords, of course. Old family swords, or ones they’ve been given as graduation presents. Beautiful, some of them. They don’t get knocked out of shape like an NCO’s blade. You can keep chopping for as long as you’ve got strength in your arms. I knew a pair of captains, decent sorts really, family men, who had a competition to see how many heads they could take in an hour. When they’d finished, they had themselves photographed standing by a mound of Chink heads, like it was some office golf tournament. You’ve heard of the “Three Alls”, Takano? Seize all, burn all, kill all. That’s the army’s motto. Seize all, burn all, kill all. And don’t tell me it makes any difference who you were before — if you were educated or you could hardly write your own name. The educated ones can be the worst, like when I was up in Shunsi Province. What a shit-hole that is. Me and Yasumizo escorting a pair of Chinks to the hospital. No idea who they were. Big one might have been a communist, had that look about him. The other was probably just some peasant they pulled off the fields to make up the numbers. Anyway, we took them along to the hospital and when we got there they said we were in the wrong place. Have to go to the school next door, they said. Gave us a funny look. Well, we went over there. Just an ordinary middle school but they’d set up a kind of operating theatre in one of the classrooms with a sign on the door that said, “Training”. The hospital director was there, a smug bastard called Nishimura, and a colonel from the medical service, and about six doctors, just arrived from the home islands by the look of them, all hoping to impress the brass. Anyway, we handed over our prisoners. The big Chink lay down on the bed without any trouble, but the other, the little one, he starts crying at the top of his lungs. “Ai-ai-ai-ai!” One orderly was pulling him, another pushing, but he was stronger than he looked and he knew what was coming. In the end it was the nurse who got him on the trolley. She could speak a few words of Chinese, and though she was only young she talked to him like she was his mama, patted his hand, nodded and smiled at him right until the moment one of the doctors rolled him over and gave him a jab in the spine. Tell you the truth, I’d have been happy to go then, have a smoke outside, but when you’re a soldier no one cares what you want. You’re not even a human being any more. Just a tool. Pick up, put down, throw away. So we stayed, me and Yasumizo, in a corner of the classroom, scruffs from the infantry. “Now, then, gentlemen,” says the colonel, “shall we start with the appendix?” I remember that. Shall we start with the appendix? Like he was ordering something at a restaurant. Well, those doctors must have been hungry ’cause they jumped to it. Ever seen an appendix? Doesn’t look like much. Sort of thing you might use for fishing bait. Then they really got busy. Cut off the little peasant’s arms, made a hole in the big Chink’s throat. They were all chatting away, and when one of them made a mistake, got his nice white coat splashed, they all looked at each other and laughed. They cut off the Chinks’ balls. I don’t know what for. Science, I suppose. At the end of it the little peasant was good and dead but the other one was still breathing, a sort of “heh, heh, heh” noise. The colonel ordered one of the doctors to inject air into his heart but that didn’t work so two of them tried to strangle him with a piece of string. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just cut off his head. They’d cut off everything else and it wasn’t like they didn’t have enough knives in there. Then this old non-com medic, you know the type, bows and says, “Honourable doctors, if you inject him with anaesthesia, he’ll die.” So they do it and he dies and they all go off to wash their hands and have a drink while me and Yasumizo put what’s left of our prisoners into a pit in the old playground. A big moon that night. The pit was as big as your garden. Stank like a tanning factory . .’