The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  The hangman, they said, would set his hemp rope at the right length for a man of his height and weight in order to get the correct drop and maximum force to snap his neck as he fell. Then he would fill a sandbag to the same weight as Choi Sang-min and tie it to his hemp rope and leave it dangling overnight in order to stretch it, so that when tomorrow Choi Sang-min fell through the trapdoor there would be no bounce in the rope. With no bounce, his neck ought to snap immediately.

  He remembered a Japanese officer who had shown remarkable poise the night before he was executed. When the guards came to weigh him, he told them in broken English that he was dying for Japan, that he was not ashamed of having made the POWs work hard for the Emperor, and that as a military man, he understood he was to die simply because his country had been defeated.

  Choi Sang-min longed for such clarity and certainty. The Japanese had it—at least, he had always felt that the Japanese had it. And now he could see what he had sensed as he had tried to smash it out of the POWs with his fists and boots—that the Australians had it too. Everyone had it; everyone in the world had it. Except perhaps him.

  The gallows were behind the gallery in which Choi Sang-min and the three other men now sat waiting for their last ever lock-up. On the days of executions the CDs yet to have their date of execution confirmed waited inside this hall in silence, able to hear the condemned’s steps up the scaffold and his final words. The Japanese officer had shouted, Long live the Emperor! The trapdoor had slapped open and a dull thud followed almost immediately.

  But what good was such an attitude for him, a Korean? thought Choi Sang-min. He had not done anything for his country and his country had done nothing for him. He had no particular beliefs. He thought of his parents, imagined their anguish on hearing of his death, and he realised he could offer them not one good reason as to why he died, other than fifty yen a month.

  As they waited in this anteroom of death, a condemned guard called Kenji Mogami sang songs. They had briefly worked together in the same POW camp. They called him the Mountain Lion, but he, who had never hurt anyone, was also to die. Choi Sang-min remembered an Australian singing and how he had stopped him singing, but about Kenji Mogami’s singing he could do nothing. A Japanese officer waltzed alone. Then they were taken to their cells.

  He was unable to sleep. He felt almost painfully alive and awake and now wanted to taste and know every second of his life. To stop his mind wildly pitching between panic at not being able to escape and anger at not getting his fifty yen he tried to remember how some of the others had met their executions.

  Hurrah for the Great Korean country! cried out one Korean as he walked the fateful thirteen steps.

  What great Korean country? wondered Choi Sang-min. What about my fifty yen? I am not Korean, he thought to himself. I am not Japanese. I am a man of a colony. Where’s my fifty yen? he wanted to know. Where?

  His father, a peasant, had wanted him to have an education, but times had been hard and after three years at elementary school learning some Japanese myths and history, he left to work for a Korean family as a servant. They gave him his board, two yen a month and regular beatings. He was eight years old. At twelve he went to work for a Japanese family, who gave him board, six yen a month and an occasional thrashing. At the age of fifteen he heard the Japanese were hiring guards to work in prisoner-of-war camps elsewhere in the empire. The pay was fifty yen a month. His thirteen-year-old sister had signed up with the Japanese to go to Manchukuo to work as a comfort woman for similar pay. She told him she would be helping soldiers in hospitals and, like him, was very excited. As she could neither read nor write, he had never heard from her again, and now that he knew what comfort women did, he tried not to think about her, and when he did, he hoped for her sake that she was dead.

  Though he had many names—his Korean name, Choi Sang-min; the Japanese name he had been given and made to answer to in Pusan, Akira Sanya; his Australian name that the guards now called him, the Goanna—he realised he had no idea who he was. Some of the other condemned had strong ideas about Korea and Japan, the war, history, religion, justice. Choi Sang-min realised he had no ideas about anything. But the ideas the others had seemed no better to him than having no idea. Because they were not their ideas, but the ideas of slogans, wireless broadcasts, speeches, army manuals, the same ideas they had absorbed with the same endless beatings they too had endured in their Japanese military training. In Pusan they had slapped him because his voice was too low or his posture wrong, they had slapped him for being too Korean, they had slapped him to show how to slap others—as hard as he could. Choi Sang-min hated it. He wanted to run away, back to his home. But he knew that if he did he would be punished, and, worse, his family would be punished. They slapped him, they said, so he would be a strong Japanese soldier, but he knew that he would never be a Japanese soldier. He would be a prison guard, guarding men who were less than men—those who had chosen surrender before death.

  Sitting on death row, Choi Sang-min desperately wanted to have an idea of his own. He hoped that long night that an idea would finally come to him, open him up, an idea that would allow him to understand and at the same time to know peace. He hoped to be like the Japanese officer who believed in the Emperor, or the Korean guard who believed in Korea. Perhaps he should have asked for more than fifty yen. But no idea came, and far too quickly morning did.

  As the cell began lightening, he wanted calm, he needed that feeling he had first known as a child working for the Japanese family. The Japanese father was an engineer who had trained in Scotland. He wore tweeds and, like the British, had a pet dog that used to eat far better than Choi Sang-min, being fed all the choice bits from the Japanese family’s table. The family loved the dog, and one of Choi Sang-min’s daily tasks was to walk it. The dog had large eyes and a head that jerked when it looked at Choi Sang-min, waiting for him to throw another stick. One day the dog went with Choi Sang-min on an errand to the market. Choi Sang-min took a short cut through some back streets and stubbed his toe on an old brick that lay in his way. He picked it up in a fury, and the dog gave him its look of complete trust and affection, jerked its head side to side, and waited for Choi Sang-min to throw the brick as if it were a ball or stick. And Choi Sang-min brought the brick down hard on the dog’s head, again and again, until his hands were dark and sticky with its blood and gristle.

  He had sold the dog’s body to a butcher for ten yen and then walked back to his Japanese family. The air smelt sweet, a soft wind felt cool and good on his face, every person he passed seemed to be smiling and friendly, and he felt an enormous sense of tranquillity and fulfilment. How he longed for that feeling again, to again know that exhilarating moment of strange power and freedom that had come with the killing of another living thing. But there was nothing in his cell that he could kill to recover that feeling, and it was others who would soon take pleasure in his death, as he once had in his killing of the Japanese engineer’s dog. As his cell lit up ever more brightly—as he could see clearly first his hands and next his thighs and then his feet—he felt a sudden terror gather inside his stomach. For Choi Sang-min knew he would never again see himself in the morning light.

  He fought the guards when they came to take him to the gallows. He had seen a cockroach and wanted to kill it. There wasn’t time. After they had strapped his wrists together behind his back, a doctor was called for, and through a translator Choi Sang-min was asked if he wished for drugs to calm him. Choi Sang-min screamed. He could still see the cockroach. He was given four phenobarbital tablets to steady his nerves, but his body was too excited and he vomited the pills straight back. Before the doctor gave him an injection of morphine, he managed to crush the cockroach beneath his boot heel. Feeling nauseous and slightly dizzy, he walked the short distance out of P Hall and across to the gallows with a soldier supporting him on either side. Everything was happening very quickly now. He saw two sandbags leaning up against a wall as they entered the courtyard. There were perhaps a dozen
men, perhaps more, six on the scaffold, most below. They walked him up a ramp covered in straw matting to the top of the scaffold. He was struck by how the rope was far thicker than he had expected. It reminded him of a ship’s hawser. He sensed a joyous brutality about the large, powerful knot. I understand, he wished to say to the rope. You long for me. His thinking was calm, even vaguely pleasant, but his face was twitching. So many people and no one was talking and his face would not stop twitching. To his side, perhaps five metres away, a second trapdoor lay open, spent, and rising out of it a taut rope. He realised at its end, out of sight, dangled Kenji Mogami.

  He was asked if he wished to say anything. He looked up. A bell somewhere tolled some hour. He wanted to say he had an idea. Someone laughed quietly. He looked down at the soldiers and pressmen. He had no idea. He had been paid fifty yen, and fifty yen was not even a good deal, far less an idea. Fifty yen was nothing. On the trapdoor in front of him he saw chalk lines marking what he knew were the correct places for his feet. Fifty yen! he wanted to say. The soldiers continued to hold his arms. He could see the chalk dust as if they were white boulders. He bowed his head and a hood was dropped over it. He closed his eyes, then opened them. After months that had passed by interminably slowly, everything was now happening too fast. He could feel the canvas, and its blackness seemed somehow more frightening than the night of his own eyes, so he closed them again. The morning was already hot. It was stuffy in the hood. He felt the noose dropping over his head, and at the same time he realised his ankles were being bound together. He went to ask them to slow down, to wait, but with a hard, decisive shove he felt the noose tighten hard around his neck and the only sound he made was an involuntary gasp. He was finding it hard to breathe. His face was jumping wildly. He could not even spit on them, as he hoped Kim Lee had done when they killed him. The soldiers holding either arm frogmarched him two steps forward, and he knew he was now standing on the chalk lines on the trapdoor. His last thought was that he needed to scratch his nose as he felt the floor beneath him suddenly vanish and heard the crashing noise of the trapdoor slamming down. Stop! he went to yell. What about my fifty—

  9

  THE YEARS PASSED. He met a nurse called Ikuko Kawabata, a young woman whose parents had been killed in the firebombing of Kobe in the final months of the war. After the peace her brother had died of starvation. That city, too, was a wasteland of rubble and ruins, and Ikuko’s story was so commonplace that she, like so many others, found it better not to talk about it.

  Ikuko had lustrous skin and a large birthmark on her right cheek, both of which inexplicably moved Nakamura more than he wished to admit. She also had a lazy smile, which he found both erotic and irritating. She would seek to end any disagreement between them with it, something that was at once agreeable to him but also suggested, he sometimes felt, stupidity and weakness of character.

  Through Ikuko, Nakamura found work in a hospital, first as an orderly and then as a storeroom clerk. He was glad to leave behind his black-market work, as it was neither overly lucrative nor particularly safe, and he worried at all times about being exposed and handed over to the Americans. Even in his new work he avoided others—but then there were many doing the same, and it seemed to Nakamura that everyone seemed to understand why so many wanted no one to either know or understand them. He moved in with Ikuko, as much to preserve his solitude as for any wish for human company. She was healthy and a good housekeeper, and he was grateful to have found a woman with such virtues.

  In spite of his solitary ways, he grew into the habit of playing go with a doctor at the hospital by the name of Kameya Sato, and over several years the habit grew into a trust, and the trust in turn grew into a quiet friendship. Sato, who came from Oita, was devoted to his patients and was a quiet and humble man, and unlike other doctors had the eccentric habit of never wearing a white jacket. Sato was a far better go player than Nakamura, and one evening the ex-soldier asked the surgeon what the secret of playing go well was.

  It’s like this, Mr Kimura, said Sato. There is a pattern and structure to all things. Only we can’t see it. Our job is to discover that pattern and structure and work within it, as part of it.

  It was evident to Sato that his answer didn’t make much sense to the old soldier. And so, pushing two fingers gently into one side of Nakamura’s belly, he continued.

  If I am to remove an appendix, I will proceed in here, separate the muscles according to the pattern and structure that I was taught at Kyushu, and there be able to remove the inflamed appendix with the least danger and stress for the patient.

  This led them to talking about Kyushu, one of Japan’s great universities for training doctors. Nakamura remembered reading a story in a newspaper about some doctors who were tried and jailed for what the Americans claimed was the vivisection of live American airmen, without the use of anaesthetics. The reports and convictions had angered Nakamura at the time, and he now brought the subject up with some fury, concluding vehemently—

  American lies!

  Sato looked up from the go table, then back, placing a black stone down.

  I was there, Mr Kimura, said Sato.

  Nakamura stared at Sato, till the humble surgeon raised his eyes and stared back with strange intensity.

  I was an intern there near the war’s end, under Professor Fukujori Ishiyama. One day I was asked to fetch a US airman from a ward where he was under guard. He was so tall, with a very narrow nose and red curly hair. He had a wound from where he had been shot by a soldier who had helped capture him, but he trusted me. I showed him the gurney and he got himself on it. I had been told to take him not to the operating theatre but to a dissection room in the anatomy department.

  Nakamura was intrigued.

  And there?

  And there he trusted me again. I pointed to the dissection table. The room was crowded with several doctors, nurses and other interns, as well as some army officers. Professor Ishiyama hadn’t yet arrived. The American actually stood up and then laid himself down on the dissection table. And winked at me. You know how the Americans wink. Winked and smiled. As if I was in on a joke with him.

  And then, said Nakamura, he was anaesthetised, and Professor Ishiyama operated on his wound.

  Sato held another go stone in the palm of his hand, rubbing his thumb back and forth over its polished, lens-shaped sphere, as if massaging a blind black eye.

  No, said Sato. Two orderlies bound his limbs, torso and head to the table with leather belts. Professor Ishiyama arrived while this was going on and began addressing the others. He spoke of how the dissection of subjects before death helped obtain important scientific data that would help our soldiers in the great battles to come. Such work was not easy, but all great scientific achievement required sacrifice and commitment. In this way, as doctors and scientists, they were able to prove themselves worthy servants of the Emperor.

  Nakamura looked at the go board but his thoughts were no longer with the game.

  I remember feeling proud to be there, said Sato.

  All that Sato was saying made perfect sense to Nakamura—after all, the same argument, formulated differently for different circumstances, had determined his entire adult life, and though he did not think this, the familiar patterns and rhythms of Sato’s story reassured Nakamura that Professor Ishiyama, even if he didn’t use anaesthetic, was acting correctly and ethically.

  And still the American didn’t struggle, continued Sato. He couldn’t dream of what was about to happen to him. Before Professor Ishiyama began we all bowed towards the patient, as though it were a copyright operation. Maybe that reassured him. Professor Ishiyama first cut into his abdomen and cut away part of his liver, then sewed the wound up. Next he removed the gall bladder and a section of his stomach. The American, who looked an intelligent and vital young man at the beginning, now looked old and weak. His mouth was gagged but he was quickly beyond any screaming. Finally, Professor Ishiyama removed his heart. It was still beating. When he put it on t
he scales the weights trembled.

  Sato’s story ran over Nakamura like a rising river over a boulder outcrop. It trickled around him, then it flushed over him, and finally it covered him. But nothing in him moved. And while it meant that all that the Americans said was true, and that he, Nakamura, had been wrong, the reasons for which it had been done made such complete sense to Nakamura that he felt there was nothing remarkable about this story of a man being cut up while alive and fully conscious.

  It felt strange, but at first I didn’t think so much about it, continued Sato. It was war, after all. And then over the next few days there were other operations on other airmen—opening up the mediastinum of one, severing the facial nerve roots on another. At the last I attended they made four holes in the serviceman’s skull, then inserted a knife into the brain to see what would happen.

  They were playing go in a small garden that had been made for the staff. It was spring, and when Sato halted, Nakamura could hear early evening birdsong. There was a maple tree that turned the last long rays of sunlight into shimmering threads of dark and light.

  After the war Professor Ishiyama hanged himself in prison, Sato said. They got some others, sentenced them to death, then commuted their sentences and finally let them all go free. I thought for a time I might be tried too, but now that time is long past. The Americans want it forgotten, and so do we.

  Sato pushed the paper he had been reading across to Nakamura.

  Look at this, he said.

  He pointed to a small article accompanying a photo. It was about the charitable work of Mr Ryoichi Naito, the founder of the Japan Blood Bank, a successful company that bought and sold blood.