After the death of their mother the two young men drifted apart in their separate careers. Although they seldom saw one another, the bond between them remained strong, as Mama eventually discovered.
The elder twin, now Baron Kikuchi, pursued his study of painting both in the Orient and in Europe. The younger twin served routinely at various army posts in Japan until the war with Russia broke out in 1905, when he was sent to Manchuria to command a company of infantry. He was in Manchuria only a short time before he became a national hero.
On a barren plain near Mukden his regiment was surrounded by Cossack cavalry. The fierce horsemen swept repeatedly through the Japanese lines, cutting down the soldiers with their pikes. Kikuchi alone was able to hold his unit intact, a triumph attributed to his decision to use the dead horses of the Cossacks as a barrier against their attacks. Like most of the Japanese officers, his Buddhist background had bred in him an abhorrence of meat, but that didn’t stop him from saving his men in the only way open to him.
At the end of three days and three nights Japanese reinforcements broke through the Cossack encirclement to find the lost regiment largely massacred. Only Kikuchi’s company had survived, safe behind the walls of rotting meat, eight feet high, that he had erected. The young Captain was awarded Japan’s highest combat decoration and singled out as an officer likely to become the youngest general in modern Japanese history.
In any case there was little doubt he would someday sit on the General Staff.
In time Kikuchi fulfilled both these expectations, but not in a way anyone might have expected. It turned out that his decision to defy Buddhist custom on the plains of Manchuria had an immediately harmful effect on him. A fly feeding on the rotting carcass of a horse during the siege had infected his right eye. He was not back in Japan many days before the sight in the eye began to fail.
Kikuchi went to a specialist who was also a family friend. The doctor told him that the infection could be treated and the eye saved but that nearly total blindness was inevitable. He would be left with a gray film over the eye, an ability to distinguish light and darkness but not shapes.
Kikuchi asked if the gray film would make the eye recognizably blind and was told that it would. He then questioned the doctor about removing the eye and replacing it with a glass eye. The doctor said that could be done after they were certain the infection had subsided.
Why not until then? said Kikuchi.
Because if we opened it up before then, answered the doctor, while the infection is still virulent, there could be further damage.
What kind of damage?
To the nerves.
But if we wait it will be apparent to everyone I’ve lost an eye, and that means I will have to leave the army.
Yes.
Yes, so we won’t wait. We will do what we have to do now.
The doctor refused to perform the operation but Kikuchi insisted. Finally the doctor agreed. Kikuchi went on leave and the operation was secretly performed. Three days later a shattering pain burst in his head, a shock so severe the doctor gave him a morphine injection. Thereafter, however, Kikuchi refused the injections, it being inconsistent with Bushido, the way of the warrior, for a man to refuse or disguise the pain life brought him.
Kikuchi returned to active duty and continued to rise in rank and power. To avoid suspicion he trained himself never to move his good eye, to stare directly forward and move his whole head when he wanted to shift his gaze. In this way no one would be able to detect the immobility of his false eye.
In the end the daring that had first made him a hero, then blinded him in one eye, brought other rewards. Among regular army officers there was the habit of questioning the patriotism of politicians and industrialists in interminable diatribes, harangues so repetitious that even the most resolute careerist was bound to fall asleep at least once during an evening. When this happened the dozing man propped his head in his hands for an hour or so with his eyes closed, excusing himself when he woke up again.
Not so Kikuchi.
He napped as often as anyone else, but when he did only his good eye closed. The other stared without blinking at the speaker, at a painting on the wall, at the snow or the cherry blossoms falling outside in the garden.
The effect on other officers was uncanny. His juniors were terrified by him, his seniors both terrified and humiliated. The wholly unnatural way he moved his head when he was awake only added to the impression that here was not a man but a demon, unfeeling and remorseless, some sort of determined, bloodless creature the dark powers had placed on earth as their instrument.
The unclosing, unblinking eye was also responsible for the speculation that Major and Colonel and finally General Kikuchi not only never slept but never ate, that he existed on only one cup of water every three days because suspended before him was the vision of a wall of dead Cossack horses eight feet high, because the stench of rotting meat within him was as strong as it had once been on a Manchurian plain.
The General could never admit to his glass eye, and thus a sense of total inhumanity surrounded him, false yet inescapable.
He was an older man when Mama met him, a bachelor who had never married, obviously ambitious. This was apparent from the fact that he had chosen to make his career in the Kempeitai. Mama assumed quite naturally that he had selected the Kempeitai because there was more opportunity for plotting there than in any other branch of the army.
The position was sensitive, and there were rumors that Baron Kikuchi made free use of the spies and dossiers of the Kempeitai to further his own interests. But the army was notorious for its cliques and jealousies, and any general would probably have acted in the same manner. At least Baron Kikuchi favored no specific faction in the army and this, together with his family name, made him more acceptable to the other members of the General Staff than any of their fellow officers.
Even for a Japanese of his generation the Baron was small, standing no more than five feet tall. He had always been so devoted to his military life that Mama thought his interest in women would probably be minor. It was likely that he looked on them as someone to relax and joke with and enjoy the traditional arts of music and song. She surmised that either sex would be unimportant to him or that he had long ago sublimated his drives, like so many professional army officers, and become impotent.
Accordingly, the ruse she used to beguile him the first night was an old one, an artifice that often worked with aging military men who found themselves embarrassed when naked.
After the bath, while giving him a massage, she pretended to find some fluff in the crevice of his bottom, from the towel perhaps. She rolled the fluff into a little ball and bounced it in the air.
She giggled and clapped her hands. The General was delighted. For an hour they played with the little ball of fluff, batting it back and forth and chasing it around the room. The next night the General came back to suggest another bath and another massage. Again Mama clapped her hands at what she had found, again the General was enchanted, again they played ball for an hour or two.
Mama’s campaign progressed as she expected. At the end of a month the General asked her to move into one of his villas in the city. Mama acquiesced. Presents followed, diamonds and emeralds and cameras, which were much more sophisticated than they had been ten years before in Kobe.
Despite the simplicity of their first days together Mama quickly sensed the General was different from the other high-ranking military officers she had known. He experienced severe headaches, for example, yet at the same time his bowels moved with vigor.