He paused and looked at the simple spire of the village church just appearing in a dip in the fold of the fields in front of us, as if its precise and purposeful shape presiding so confidently over the trusting and sleeping land, rebuked the shapeless, unformed and dim-lit region wherein his imagination moved so like a lone sleep-walker at midnight. Thereupon, he broke off the apparent continuity of his thought at once and asked me if I knew how the Japanese calculated the age of an individual? I said ‘No’ and he explained that at birth they added nine months to a person’s life, counted in all the days between his conception and emergence from the womb. Didn’t I see the significance of that? Didn’t I realize that such a system of reckoning life was not just an artless and naïve accident of minds more primitive than ours? If I paused to reflect how biology clearly establishes that we recapture and relive in the womb the whole evolution of life from amoeba to pithecanthropus erectus, surely I too would recognize implicit in this system of reckoning a clear instinctive acknowledgement of the importance of the dim past to the Japanese character. He certainly looked at it that way and until now he had been forced to think of them as a people whose spiritual and mental umbilical cord with the past was uncut; as a people still tied by the navel to the mythical mother and begetter of their race, the great sun-goddess Ama-terasu. Even in that they were characteristically perverse, reverse and inside out, for to most races in the past the sun was a bright and shining masculine deity, but to them only a great, darkly glittering mother. While the moon, so beloved and eternally feminine to the rest of mankind, was male and masculine to them. Perhaps it was that inside-out, upside down subjection to the past which gave them their love of death.
If I had ever attended a feast of the dead in Japan as he had often done I would not be surprised at his use of so strange a word as love to illustrate his meaning. That feast was the gayest and most cheerful of all Japanese celebrations. Their dead were happy, cheerful, contented and benevolent spirits. Why? Because the living, one felt, really preferred dying to living as they had to live; not only preferred it but also thought it nobler to die than to live for their country. Not life but death was romantic to them and Hara was no exception. He had all this and more, deeply ingrained in him, underneath and beyond conscious thinking; he had more because above all he was a humble, simple and believing country fellow as well.
‘I shall never forget one night in prison,’ Lawrence continued, picking up yet another thread of our prison yesterdays, and weaving it as if it were something new and freshly made into this pattern of Hara in his mind until my heart was heavy that so much should remain for him apparently immune to time. ‘Hara sent for me. He had been drinking and greeted me uproariously but I knew his merriment was faked. He always behaved like that when his heart and mind were threatening to join in revolt against his long years of exile from Japan. I could see that the drink had failed to blur the keen edge of nostalgia that was like a knife-stab in the pit of his stomach. He wanted someone to talk to about his country and for some hours I walked Japan from end to end with him through all four of its unique and dramatic seasons. The mask of cheerfulness got more and more threadbare as the evening wore on and at last Hara tore it from his face.
‘“Why, Rorensu,” he exclaimed fiercely at last. “Why are you alive? I would like you better if you were dead. How could an officer of your rank ever have allowed himself to fall alive in our hands? How can you bear the disgrace? Why don’t you kill yourself?”’
‘Yes. He asked me that too once,’ I interrupted, more with the object of letting Lawrence know how closely I was following him than of telling him something he didn’t know. ‘In fact he taunted us all so much with it that in time the Koreans picked up the habit, too, but what did you say in reply?’
‘I admitted the disgrace, if he wished to call it that,’ Lawrence replied. ‘But said that in our view disgrace, like danger, was something which also had to be bravely borne and lived through, and not run away from by a cowardly taking of one’s own life. This was so novel and unexpected a point of view to him that he was tempted to dismiss it as false and made himself say: “No! no! no! it is fear of dying that stops you all.” He spat disdainfully on the floor and then tapping on his chest with great emphasis added: “I am already dead. I, Hara, died many years ago.”
‘And then it came out, of course. The night before he left home to join the army at the age of seventeen, that is after nine months in the womb and sixteen years and three months on earth, he had gone to a little shrine in the hills nearby to say good-bye to life, to tell the spirits of his ancestors that he was dying that day in his heart and spirit for his country so that when death came to claim him in battle it would be a mere technicality, so that far from being surprised he would greet it either like a bosom friend, long expected and overdue, or merely accept it as formal confirmation of a state which had long existed. To hear him one would have thought that this bow-legged boy, with his blue-shaven head, yellow face and shuffling walk, had gone to report to his ancestors his decision to enter one of the grimmer monastic orders like the Grande Chartreuse, rather than to announce his banal intention of joining a regiment of infantry. But you see what I mean, when I say the end too had been foreseen?’
I nodded silently, too interested to want to speak, and Lawrence went steadily on. Even that evening in prison Lawrence was conscious of a content, a sort of extra-territorial meaning to the moment that did not properly belong to it. It was as if Hara’s end was drinking his wine with him, as if far down at some inexpressible depth in their minds the ultimate sentence was already pronounced. Looking back now, he found it most significant that, towards the end of the evening, Hara began to try his hand at composing verses in that tight, brief and extremely formal convention in which the popular hero of the past in Japan inevitably said farewell to the world before taking his own life. He remembered Hara’s final effort welclass="underline" roughly translated it ran:
‘When I was seventeen looking over the pines at Kurashiyama, I saw on the full yellow moon, the shadow of wild-geese flying South. There is no shadow of wild-geese returning on the moon rising over Kurashiyama tonight.’
‘Poor deviclass="underline" as I watched and listened to him trying to break into verse, suddenly I saw our roles reversed. I saw as if by a flash of lightning in the darkness of my own mind that I was really the free man and Hara, my gaoler, the prisoner. I had once in my youth in those ample, unexacting days before the war when the coining of an epigram had looked so convincingly like a discovery of wisdom, defined individual freedom to myself as freedom to choose one’s own cage in life. Hara had never known even that limited freedom. He was born in a cage, a prisoner in an oubliette of mythology, chained to bars welded by a great blacksmith of the ancient gods themselves. And I felt an immense pity for him. And now four years later, Hara was our kind of prisoner as well and in the dock for the last time, with sentence of death irrevocably pronounced.’