by Tan Twan Eng
I asked about Yun Hong around the camp, but no one had seen her. Finally Geok Yin, one of the older female prisoners said, ‘There’s a hut behind the officers’ kitchen. That’s where they’re keeping them. That’s where they’ve taken your sister. If she’s lucky she might only have to serve the officers.’
For a few seconds I could not speak or move. Then I turned away from her. She was only telling me what I had known but refused to accept from the moment Yun Hong had been taken away from me.
* * *
I asked Father Kampfer to teach me Japanese. The Dutch missionary was in his sixties, and he had previously lived in Yokohama. Once they realised I could speak simple Nihon-go, the guards started treating me better than the other prisoners. I asked them to help me improve my Japanese, and occasionally they would even slip me extra rations or cigarettes. I used the latter to barter for food – there was never enough to eat, and I was always starving. Food was the one thing that obsessed all of us. I convinced the camp administrator to assign me to work in the officers’ mess, preparing meals. I had never had to cook a meal in my life, but working in the kitchen would give me the best chance for survival, and I learned quickly. From the kitchen window I could look out to the hut where Yun Hong was held. Five times a day a line of Japanese men could be seen outside, waiting their turn.
One afternoon when I was working in the kitchen, a mine shaft collapsed. The officers rushed off from their half-eaten meals to assess the damage. Making sure that no one was watching, I slipped out of the kitchen and walked casually to the hut. The door was padlocked. I went around to the back and peered into a barred window. Through the dimness I could make out beds, partitioned by flimsy bamboo screens. A few girls were sitting on their beds chatting, some of whom I guessed were only fourteen of fifteen years old. I called out Yun Hong’s name. The girls whispered among themselves before passing on my message. Yun Hong appeared at the window a moment later, her face covered with fading bruises. From the shock in her eyes I knew I too had changed.
‘You’re so thin,’ she said. ‘Think how pleased Mother would be, if she could see you now.’ Tears slid down her cheeks and over her lips. I reached between the metal bars and gripped her hands. I would have done everything I could to trade places with her. And I should have.
* * *
Each day was unchanging, differentiated only from the one before by who had been injured, who had fallen ill, who had died. At night we slept on wooden pallets, driven mad by fleas and mosquitoes, counting the calls of the tok-tok birds. We worked eighteen hours a day in the mine, surviving on a daily diet of a piece of bread and soup with bits of rotting vegetables floating in it.
All of us suffered from a variety of illnesses: dysentery, beri-beri, malaria, pellagra; very often a combination of them. I was fortunate to work in the kitchen, but I suffered my share of disease and beatings too. The lack of food and medicine, the heavy labour and the punishments slowly culled our numbers. We gave the worst of the guards nicknames: Mad Dog, Butcher, Pus-Face, Shit-Brains, The Black Death. It made us feel, if only for the briefest instant, that we had some control over our lives.
On two or three occasions I caught glimpses of lithe, brown figures beyond the fence, sliding soundlessly between the trees. ‘Orang Asli,’ a prisoner told me. ‘The Japs leave them 250 alone. Some Jap was killed by their poisoned darts.’
Every three weeks lorries with Red Cross markings would arrive at the camp, unloading steel boxes and barrels which the prisoners had to carry into the mine. Thinking that none of the guards was paying attention to him, an Australian private peeked inside one of the boxes. Fumio had him tied to a bamboo frame on the parade ground and whipped. He was then locked inside a low, tin-roofed cage for two days, where he was unable to sit or stand upright. He went insane, and in the end they had to shoot him.
The rainy season came, but still we had to trudge to the mine every morning in the unending downpour. The Japanese guards seemed to know only one English word, and everything had to be done ‘Speedo! Speedo!’ Prisoners weakened and died, but there was always a new batch of men and women transported in to replace the dead.
Bribing the kitchen sentry with cigarettes to turn a blind eye, I sneaked away to see Yun Hong whenever an opportunity arose. I stole what little food I could for her: a piece of mouldy bread, a banana, a handful of rice. We never spoke about what the Japanese were making her do.
She would distract herself – and me – by talking about the gardens in Kyoto we had visited, describing them in detail in a dreamy voice.
‘This is how we’ll survive,’ she said once. ‘This is how we’ll walk out of here alive.’
‘You still admire their gardens after all this?’
‘Their gardens are beautiful,’ she replied.
She tried, once or twice, to talk about our parents, wondering aloud what had happened to them since we last saw them. I cut her off. I did not want to think about them; it would have driven me mad. Better to pretend that they were well and safe.
One of the girls in Yun Hong’s hut hanged herself from the rafters. I saw them bring out the body. She was fifteen years old. Captain Fumio chose a Dutch girl from my hut to replace her. It gave me an idea
‘I’ll tell Fumio that I want to take your place,’ I said to Yun Hong, when I saw her later that evening before another batch of men came to her hut.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she answered, her face pressing closer to the window bars. ‘Do you hear me, Ling?’ She crushed my hand in hers. ‘Don’t you ever dare do that!’
Looking at her, I realised it was the only thing that had kept her going all these months, the fact that I had not been made to service the Japanese in the camp. Later I found out from one of the friendlier guards that Yun Hong had tried to hang herself early on, but the officer waiting outside her cubicle, waiting for his turn with her, had stopped her before she could succeed.
Fumio had warned her, ‘Kill yourself, and your sister will take your place.’
* * *
Life in the camp became easier to endure, or perhaps I just grew used to it. The guards still slapped me for the slightest offences: not bowing deeply or quickly enough, or taking too much time over my work. And I could not fail to see the men lined up outside Yun Hong’s quarters. At least those women were given better rations than the other prisoners. A medical officer inspected them every fortnight to ensure that they were clean. Dr Kanazawa would come to the officers’ mess after every examination and sit there by himself, not saying a word to anyone.
‘Those girls are the fortunate ones,’ he said to me one day, after turning around to make sure that we were the only people in the mess hall. ‘ Jugan ianfu in the big towns serve fifty, sixty soldiers a day. Hai, hai, our girls are the lucky ones.’ I thought he said it more to convince himself than anyone else. I found out later that one of his duties included carrying out abortions.
Our Japanese masters ate well, so it was easy to pilfer scraps from the kitchen, sharing them with Yun Ling and the women in my hut. I had become such a familiar sight around the camp that no one bothered to stop and search me. I became careless.
As I was leaving the kitchen one night, Captain Fumio stepped out from the shadows and stopped me. He slid his hands under my clothes and ran his fingers over my body, his badly-cut nails scraping my nipples. I flinched, as he would have wanted me to.
‘ Soh, soh, soh,’ he whispered when his fingers grazed the pair of chicken feet I had tied with a string around my waist and concealed between my thighs.
In the interrogation hut, a guard held me down, forcing me to watch as Fumio placed the chicken feet on the table in front of me. He unsheathed his knife from his belt and, in one swift movement, cut off its claws, severing skin, flesh and bone. Another guard pinned my left hand on the tabletop and splayed my fingers. I was sobbing, begging Fumio to let me go. He brought his knife up again. I was struggling madly now. I kicked the guards, I stamped on their feet, but their grip never loosened.<
br />
‘Fucking Chinese cunt,’ Fumio said in English, before switching back to Japanese, ‘Think you’re so clever, stealing our food? Let me teach you one of our sayings: Even monkeys fall from trees.’
I screamed and screamed as he brought the blade down and chopped the two last fingers off my hand. The screaming seemed to go on and on. In the seconds before I blacked out, I found myself walking in a garden in Kyoto. And then I lost consciousness, and the pain was gone.
* * *
My injuries took a long time to heal. I was delirious and in constant agony, but Fumio sent me back to work in the kitchen before the week was out. The other prisoners did their best to look after me. Dr Kanazawa had stitched up the stumps of my two fingers. He slipped me vials of morphine from the camp’s dwindling supply, strictly reserved for the Japanese. I withdrew from the other prisoners, preferring to lose myself in my own thoughts. To distract myself I created a garden in my mind, calling it up from nothing more than memory. I did not see Yun Hong for weeks, although I asked Dr Kanazawa to tell her I was suffering from malaria. But she found out what happened anyway. Fumio told her.
‘I’ll kill him,’ she said, when I had recovered sufficiently to steal away to see her. She reached between the bars for my hands, but I kept them at my side. ‘Let me see,’ she demanded.
I lifted my maimed hand, wrapped in bandage. ‘Oh, Ling... ’ she whispered. ‘The bastard... ’
‘It’s healing.’ I told her about the garden I had found myself in, just before Fumio severed my fingers.
‘We’ll create our own garden,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a place no one can take us away from.’
Later that night, lying on my pallet, I thought again of what she had said to me before I left her. ‘If you ever get a chance to escape, Ling, I want you to take it. No, don’t argue. Promise me you’ll run. Don’t think. Don’t look back. Just run.’
I had promised her. What other choice did I have?
* * *
Malaria took Father Kampfer, and Fumio appointed me as the prisoners’ interpreter. One day, about two and a half years after I had arrived at the camp, the prisoners were ordered to build a hut. When it was completed Fumio ordered me to present myself there. He had another man with him, someone I had never seen before. From the deference Fumio showed him, I knew that he was somebody important. He was in his early forties, his hair cropped short, his face lean and narrow. He was dressed in white trousers and a white tunic with a mandarin collar. I wondered how he kept his clothes so spotless in the jungle. His name, he told me, was Tominaga Noburu, and he needed someone to translate documents in English into Japanese for him. ‘Father Kampfer used to do it for me,’ he complained.
‘He’d still be alive if your men had given him the medicine he needed,’ I replied.
Fumio’s hand pulled back in a movement that had become familiar to us all. Tominaga stopped him with a look. ‘Please leave us, Captain Fumio.’
The captain’s palm closed into a fist and then dropped back to his side. He bowed low to Tominaga and walked out of the hut. Tominaga indicated a pair of chairs to me and went to a portable stove to prepare a pot of tea. Diagrams and documents and maps covered his desk in the corner, and a portrait of Hirohito in military uniform gazed down from one wall. Pinned to another wall was a framed charcoal sketch.
‘A kore-sansui garden,’ I said, recalling what Yun Hong had once told me, another lifetime ago.
‘A dry rock garden, yes,’ Tominaga said, looking at me, the teapot in his hand forgotten for the moment.
‘Where is it?’
He glanced at my hand, still wrapped in a stained dressing, although the injuries were healing. ‘You know something about our gardens?’
‘There was a Japanese gardener living in Malaya, in Cameron Highlands,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if he’s still here.’ I thought for a few seconds. ‘Nakamura... something or other. That was his name.’
‘You mean Nakamura Aritomo? He was one of the Emperor’s gardeners.’
‘You’ve met him?’ I grasped this thread from the life I had once known.
‘Nakamura-sensei is a highly respected gardener,’ Tominaga replied, sitting down in the rattan chair across from me. ‘How is it that you know of him?’
I hesitated for just a fraction of a second. ‘The Art of Setting Stones has always fascinated me.’
‘What happened?’ He pointed to the stumps on my hand. A weight pressed into his face when I did not reply. ‘Fumio,’ he said.
I lifted the cup to my nose. I had not tasted any tea since entering the camp. I had forgotten what it smelled like. Closing my eyes, I lost myself in its fragrance.
* * *
Tominaga realised very quickly that the standard of my Japanese was not as good as Father Kampfer’s, but he did not dismiss me as I had feared he would. ‘But you are a subject of Japan now,’ he said, ‘and you should have a Japanese name.’ He insisted that I should be called Kumomori. I thought it wiser not to object to it, and in fact I think it was good for me in some ways: it was easier to pretend that the things I did were being carried out by a different person, a woman who did not have my name.
He loved to talk about gardening with me and I discovered that, in his spare time, he designed gardens for his friends. He studied his maps constantly, making copious notes. He inspected the mine five, six times a day. I had to follow him down the tunnels, interpreting his instructions to the prisoners. The guards sounded a warning to the prisoners whenever he was approaching. Everyone – even the guards – had to bow and look at the ground. I had not been inside the mine since I started working in the officers’ mess. I was astonished by the extent to which it had been enlarged, how deep it now spread beneath the earth. Metal shelves had been riveted into the cave walls and packed full of steel boxes.
The months passed. The monsoons came and left. I envied their freedom. Each time I spoke to Yun Hong, I would ask her to tell me more about Japanese gardens so I could use the knowledge whenever I talked to Tominaga. I asked Tominaga to release Yun Hong, but he refused. ‘I cannot free one and leave the others. It is not right.’
‘But it’s quite alright to let her be raped again and again? I don’t care what’s right or wrong, Tominaga-san,’ I pressed on when he said nothing. ‘All I want is for my sister not to suffer.’ I wondered if he had also forced himself on her. Even though I knew my sister would never forgive me, I said, ‘I’ll take her place. Just get her out of that hut.’
‘You are too useful to me, Kumomori,’ Tominaga said.
* * *
Rumours that Japan was losing the war began to spread through the camp. The guards, sensing the change in the prisoners’ attitudes, beat them with increased savagery. No, not ‘them’, but ‘us’. Us. There were times when I forgot that, however kindly Tominaga treated me, however much I was exempted from the guards’ cruelty because of my friendship with him, I was still a prisoner, a slave of the Japanese. When I told Yun Hong about the impending defeat of the Japanese, she fell silent.
‘They’ll have to release us very soon,’ I said, wondering why she did not share my jubilation. ‘We’ll be free to go home.’
‘And what will people say about me?’
‘No one will know what happened here. I promise you.’
‘It’ll come out eventually. Someone will talk.’ She looked away from me. ‘And you know.’
‘We’ll never talk about this again when we get out of this place. No one will ever know,’
I repeated.
‘Even if we never talk about it, it’ll be there in your eyes, every time I look at you.’
Coarse laughter and men’s voices came from the front. ‘You better go.’ She stepped away from the window, the gloom closing behind her.
At this stage, boxes were now being brought in every week. By now the number of prisoners in the camp had fallen below a hundred. The last batch of POWs had been transported to the camp four months before, and since then no other prisoners had arr
ived. Every two weeks Tominaga would leave the camp, driving away in a Red Cross van. On his return a few days later he would be morose and distracted.
I never asked where he had gone or even what he was doing in the war. He seemed to be happiest when he was discussing his theories of garden design with me. Sometimes he would draw on the sandy ground with a stick to illustrate an idea or a concept I had difficulty grasping.
I never failed to question him about the smallest details. I was interested in what he said, but I also did it to prolong the time I spent with him, to delay my inevitable return to the realities of the camp.
‘When the war is over, you must go to see Nakamura Aritomo’s garden,’ he said to me one day.
‘Will the war be over soon?’
He glanced at me, then turned away to look at the two waterfalls high up in the mountains above the camp. He had lost so much weight that his eyes appeared elongated and misshapen, as though they were melting down his face.
* * *
Tominaga had been absent from the camp for three weeks, the longest he had been away since I met him, and I thought I would not see him again. One afternoon, a guard whispered to me that he had returned. I waited for Tominaga to summon me as he had always done, but when night fell and I still had heard nothing from him, I sneaked out from my hut and went to his quarters.
The hut was in darkness when I got there. I saw him a short distance away, walking between the trees, a paraffin lamp lighting his path. Silently I followed him towards the jugan ianfu’s hut. I hid behind a tree and watched him. The men waiting outside the hut stood to attention, bowing to him as he walked past them and went inside.
I was furious with him, but more so with myself. What had I expected from him? He was just like all of them.
He summoned me the next morning after we had sung the Kimigayo and bowed to the Emperor in Japan . The guards seemed nervous and tense as they moved about the camp. Fumio was barking orders to some of them; I hurried away to avoid him. Tominaga was pacing back and forth outside his hut. He stopped when he saw me. ‘Come with me,’ he said. I refused to look at him. He grabbed my hand and pulled me behind his hut to where his Red Cross van was parked. He removed a strip of black cotton from his pocket, stretching it out between his hands.
