by Martin Booth
Mishima’s eyes followed the next log that was being brought to them by the four prisoners on lumber roster. They were staggering under its weight, and having difficulty lifting it on to the saw bench.
‘He is dead.’
There was no sign of emotion on his face except for one tear that glistened on his cheek. His eyes saw little that was near at hand.
Sandingham could say nothing.
‘Like Mr Hoshigima’s son. He went to fly an airplane. A bomb airplane. The kamikaze. Two days ago…’
‘Christ! Mishima…’
‘It is done, that is all. No use crying over spilt milk, as you would say.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ answered Sandingham. ‘I wouldn’t say that. I’d say what the fucking hell was it for?’
He felt the anger rising in him like bile. He wanted to hit someone, something. He picked up a spanner and smashed it against the electric motor casing. The tool clanged loudly and dented it badly but the hancho did not hear over the din of the working machines.
‘It was for Japan,’ Mishima reminded him. ‘For the Emperor.’
He did not appear at all bitter, just beaten down by the death of his son.
‘Death is the greatest defeat,’ he added. ‘Life is the greatest victory.’
The next day, Sandingham showed his faded photo of Bob to Mishima.
* * *
‘When the war is over, you must come to England, Mishima. Try out your English on the real article.’
The reptilian hiss of the hydraulic rams on the plywood machine punctuated their conversation.
‘I should like that. And you must come back to Japan, even though your memories of it are not so good now. There are many wonderful parts of Japan. Nikko and the Shinto shrines at Ise, Todaiji temple that has the biggest bronze statue of the Lord Buddha in the world: Lake Ashi and Mount Fuji are most beautiful in the spring.’
The inner look of distant thoughts must have reflected itself on Sandingham’s face, for Mishima stopped speaking. He, too, then let his mind drift to more peaceful places.
‘You’re right,’ said Sandingham at length. ‘We shall both forget the horrors of this life and relive only the good things. And those we shall share.’
‘Maybe, after the war is long ended, you could come to the temple at Todaiji with me. Or to Kofukuji Temple. We can burn incense together. It won’t matter if the Buddha is your master or not. All our heavenly masters are one.’
Sandingham watched the adhesive and sap oozing from the wood.
‘You’d make a good priest, Mishima,’ he said. ‘You’d do well here – plenty of potential converts. A captive audience.’
For a moment, Mishima looked hurt but the smirk on Sandingham’s face betrayed his teasing and he, too, smiled.
The sheet of plywood in the press was processed and Sandingham tugged at one corner, Mishima at the other, sliding it off the platen on to the pile of finished squares.
‘The island of Shikoku is one hundred miles away,’ Mishima informed him erroneously. It was only thirty miles away at the nearest point. Sandingham had ascertained that fact in a moment of rash, escapist dreaming. ‘On the island, not far from Takamatsu, is the Kotohira shrine. Japanese people call this “Kompirasan”. It is a place where sailors and travellers have worshipped for many hundreds of years. We should go there together, too.’
‘How shall we stay in touch?’
Mishima considered this obstacle while they laminated the next sheet. The odour of the glue stung their nostrils.
‘Not too hard,’ he said. ‘But quite difficult. I will give you my address in characters – you can copy them on to a letter if you write. If you come to visit me … Japanese cities have no street names. But you can discover my house easily. If you go into the city on the main road from the east, from Kure or Saijo, you come to a temple on the right-hand side of the road. At a junction. Opposite is a shop that repairs bicycles. Turn left here and my house is eighteen doors down on the left.’
The following day, in the midday break, Mishima slipped Sandingham on oblong sheet of paper. On one side was the address and on the other a crude map with characters upon it, showing signs to watch out for on the way to the house.
* * *
Sandingham woke with a start. He could not tell what it was that had shaken him from a deep and dreamless sleep born of exhaustion, but something had.
He lay still and listened to the buzz of insects outside the barracks. A cricket in the roof beams was grinding its rasping song in counterpoint to another in the yard. From the pond outside the camp wire he heard a bullfrog blorting.
The windows and shutters closed upon them, but these were ill-fitting and, as his eyes readied to the night, he could make out a pencil of bleak moonlight ovalled on the paper panes like a torch beam played upon a frosted screen.
With great care, for he appreciated only too well the value of sleep to his comrades, he slipped off his tatame and wove his way through the hut to the shutter with the crack in it. He opened the inner window – an act which was strictly against the rules issued by the guards – and pressed his eye to the chink of light.
The camp was oddly cold in the moonlight, which seemed to detach it from reality. Whatever was illuminated was grey and the shadows were not black, only greyer. Even where there were low wattage lights switched on around the perimeter, the moon seemed to nullify their effect. It reminded him of the pen-wash paintings with which Victorian ladies decorated their diaries and, like those illustrations, was somehow hard and soft at the same time. The absence of colour was unworldly.
Yet the peace and calm in the scene was captivating. He wedged his elbows on to the narrow wooden sills and rested his chin in his hands so that his eye remained at the thin shaft of light.
The moon was not far off full, brilliant and alive. Small cumulus clouds scudded across the night sky which was devoid of stars until near to the horizon, so bright was the moonlight. The air was clear and pure.
A jab of colour showed itself to Sandingham. From the shadows of one of the low-built watch-towers a red spot glowed, swelled and faded. Watching its place, he saw it return and then a faint wisp of greyness lofted out into the moonbeams cast by the lattice-work of the structure. A guard was having a crafty smoke. Sandingham smiled to himself: the universal soldier skiving when the officer was away.
From the very far distance a vague, barely discernable howl commenced. At first he thought it was a love-sick dog in a fishing village on the inlet, baying at the moon. Unlike a dog, it did not change pitch.
The guard stubbed out his cigarette and climbed the short ladder to his lookout.
Air raid, guessed Sandingham.
The lights on the perimeter poles dimmed further and were extinguished, proving his hunch correct. The officer of the watch marched into sight and spoke in low, incomprehensible tones to the guard in the tower.
There had been a number of air raids in recent weeks, most of them very distant and not one had occurred within earshot of the camp.
When it came, it sounded like thunder. Not the bass thunder of a storm close at hand or echoing in the hills, which could shake things and set the nerves on edge. It was more like the gentle thunder that is generated by heat lightning at sea or off a tropical coast. It was a summer thunder made from sheet lightning and not the terrible thunder formed by the anger of forked lightning.
The cumulus clouds to the south-east grew pink-tinged in the moonlight, and it was this new, gradual hue that convinced Sandingham that the summer thunder was a massive raid upon the naval yards at Kure.
He watched for over an hour, held by a morbid curiosity. Under the delicate clouds, the dockyards and wharves and houses and streets of Kure were being flattened. People were dying. Oil storage tanks were exploding and ships were blazing. High above, pilots in the cockpits of USAAC B29s were listening to the gabble of their observers on the intercoms, pressing their buttons and heaving in on their joysticks, banking away and up as the loads o
f explosives fell free. Sandingham strained his eyes to try to see the aircraft, but they were hidden by the camouflage of the moonlight. He made efforts to hear the bombers, but all he could pick out in the night, above the weak thrill of the thunder, was the raucous zizzing of the crickets, the scuff of the guard’s tabi on the dry soil – he was back under his tower now, and had lit up another cigarette – and the peculiar, strangled whistle of a night bird.
* * *
‘There was a big bombing in Kure the night before last,’ Mishima told him, confirming his own assumptions and verifying the rumours that had run rife in the camp the day before.
‘How bad?’
‘Very heavy. Much damage was done. To houses. To the dockyards. Some warships were sunk. I heard this from a friend of mine who works for the railway. He could not drive his train into Kure yesterday morning.’
They carried on working together without speaking. The hancho was in a foul mood and stomped about the timber yard shouting at all and sundry in Japanese. He made no concessions to the prisoners and bellowed at them with no attempt to make himself understood. They had to guess what he wanted or rely upon their shaky knowledge of Japanese commands. Those who were fluent quickly interpolated a translation where they could.
With the arrival of three trucks loaded with logs the hancho left the building to supervise the unloading, and this afforded Sandingham an opportunity to communicate with Mishima once more.
He was about to question him about the Kure raid when Mishima spoke first.
‘What worries me,’ he confided, ‘is that, in Hiroshima, we have not been bombed. The city is untouched.’
Sandingham asked him why he thought this was so.
‘I can’t say. Some people tell me it is because many of the citizens have relatives in America – there are many Japanese in California. Others say it is good fortune. A teacher who used to be with me in my school, Mr Sasaki, told me he thinks it is because the Americans want to use it as a main base when they invade. Maybe they will even land in this area.’
He appeared reticent, though. It was as if he were not sure any of these motives was credible, and Sandingham could feel him holding back.
‘Come on, Mishima. I know you well enough now. You have your own reason worked out.’
He shrugged.
‘I think there is another reason. Perhaps it is … I cannot … Perhaps I should not mention this to you, Sandingham, because you are – but that is ridiculous: how can I call you “enemy”? – but Hiroshima is a military base and industrial centre. Your fellow prisoners who work in metal factories and places like that – they are making materials for Mitsubishi shipyard where they build warships, and there is another Mitsubishi factory that manufactures tools and machinery. And there is Yoshikima Army airfield. And the Army has a big ammunition and gun store there as well as several soldiers’ stores for equipment. And there is the headquarters of the Japanese Army ship communications regiment and the central command of the Second General Army. This we all know.’
He glanced with puzzlement at Sandingham who returned his look with equal bewilderment. Hiroshima sounded like a prime target for air attack.
‘So why is it not attacked? I think it is because of something I do not comprehend.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘Yes,’ Sandingham assured him. ‘“Comprehend” is right.’
‘Some people in my street talk of bukimi. In English, that word means “grim” or “awesome” or “weird” or “unearthly” or “ghastly”, I looked it up in my Japanese/English dictionary. They think Hiroshima is waiting for a terrible thing to happen.’
‘But what could that be?’ Sandingham answered.
‘I do not know. No one knows. Maybe something bigger than an air raid. It is not in our knowledge to say. It is just a – think to see – premonition.’
* * *
‘How long do you think the weather will hold like this?’ he was asked as he washed himself in the ablutions. The water was cold and welcome as he rinsed the sweat and gluey covering off his skin in preparation for a new layer of the former that would start to sheen on him as soon as he stepped out into the late evening air.
‘I’ve no idea. One can’t tell. It’s not like England where you can hazard a fairly safe guess. Red sky at night means nothing here.’
‘It’s getting as hot as Hades down in the docks. Smudger was near fainting in the godown and that was by mid-morning. This afternoon we were put to unloading a cargo of ore of some sort. The dust rose from the hatches and just hung in the air. What breeze there was only shifted it to and fro. One of the Nips gagged on it. Then the hancho gets uppity and starts bellyaching about something or other. Nip that threw up gets a slap for his efforts.’
The soldier wasn’t actually talking to Sandingham, but simply addressing the wall before him, letting whoever was there accept his news and views. When he was finished with sluicing himself down he left, muttering to himself as he crossed the compound.
‘It’s getting pretty grim in the timber yard,’ observed another voice from one of the doorless ‘crappers’. There was no privacy in the latrines.
‘It is,’ Sandingham replied. ‘But at least the sap from the wood is pleasant compared to dust.’
‘Might be for you. As for me, I never want to smell a pine tree again, even if it’s on the estate of Balmoral.’
‘Better than the farts you’re dropping at present,’ a third voice butted in. ‘You got lucky and ate beans?’
A half-hearty laugh rattled in the long hut.
A wizened man entered through the door halfway down the wall behind Sandingham. He was an Australian merchant seaman, not over five feet high and with scrubby ginger hair all over his head and chin; his blue eyes were watery and diluted in their orbits. His hands were stringy but strong.
‘Hello, Stoker Blue, me old chum!’ welcomed one of the men.
The wizened head nodded. The corded hands dipped a wooden bowl into the water tub and carefully poured several pints into a metal basin on a stand. No one wasted water: it had to be carried too far to make it other than precious.
‘Tell you something,’ the small seaman said as he rubbed his wet hands over his stubbly crown. ‘The Japs have about had it.’
‘How do you reckon that, SB?’ questioned a Canadian accent from the latrines.
‘Easy, Seattle. Our truck had a puncture today. Right in the city. Right by the side of the road. Guards get batey and we get herded on to the pavement and made to sit cross-legged while the driver and his mate jack up the rear axle and bolt the spare on.
‘Chanced we were stopped by a small street-market. Couple of shops and stalls. Nothing special. ’Cept that there was bugger-all in them. The rice shop had no rice, only millet, and that looked none too sharp. The butcher’s had only a few scraggy cuts and that looked like it was cat meat it was so small. The greengrocer’s stalls had very little on them. Daikon, some greens, but nothing much else. No fruit in sight.’
‘Hey, Ozzie! You were too late. Maybe you got there after the sale,’ shouted one of the wits, facetiously mimicking him.
Stoker Blue from Adelaide ignored this wisecrack.
‘Billy, who understands Nippo, travels in our truck to the plating works, told me he heard one of the shopkeepers say he was clean out of something he couldn’t quite make out and he wasn’t sure when or if he’d get a new supply.’
‘Think they’ll pack it in?’
‘Who knows?’
‘Anyway, who gives a brass farthing if the bastards are hungry or not? Let ’em bloody starve. Taste of their own sodding medicine. If they got any.’
This irony was greeted with hoots of derisory guffaws and slow hand-clapping. The friendly mockery quickly petered out as soon as a guard appeared approaching across the yard.
* * *
A week later the weather broke. Great clouds gathered on the horizon in the middle of the day and, by evening, the sky was covered with a dull blanket. The r
ain was a dismal drizzle at first but it gradually increased until it was a torrential downpour. Water spouted off the roofs and cascaded into the dirt. The guttering could not cope and the latrine sumps filled to overflowing. The honey-carters did not call and the prisoners were obliged to dig a pit at the edge of the compound in which to pour the effluent of their community.
Digging the pit in the pelting rain was back-breaking work. The wind had risen as well to make matters more difficult. Sandingham took his turn at the shovels, lifting the cloying mud out of the quagmire to be slapped and paddled into a wall around the rim. In this way, they hoped, the dug earth might act as a dam and deepen the volume of the cesspit. By the time it was completed it was twenty feet long by ten wide and ten deep. Before they commenced using it it was a foot deep in greyish-brown water. The remainder of the rest day was spent filling the pit from the latrine with a bucket chain.
When the rain abated and they returned to the timber yard the prisoners were faced with a panorama of semi-dereliction. The wind had lifted part of the corrugated-iron roof and twisted it back on itself. The wing of metal sheeting sticking up had acted as a funnel and guided two inches of rainwater into the sawing shed. The damage and chaos were considerable.
‘Look at it,’ remarked CPO Bairstowe. ‘Like the deck after a mess night. Only no broken bottles or smashed pianos.’
The machines were damp, the electric motors shorted out with the water. The stock of planking was dripping wet and the plywood, soaked through, had warped and buckled to uselessness.
‘No wuk!’ bawled the hancho. His next sentence translated approximately into, ‘Let’s get this bloody shambles tidied up.’
It took more than that day, amidst squally showers, to get the roof battened down and the shed cleared and dried out. The wet timber and plywood was stacked in the farthest corner of the yard and ignited with a can of diesel fuel and used gearbox oil, for which act the hancho got a resounding telling-off from the touring foreman late in the afternoon. Vehicular fuel was scarce enough and the oil could have been better used for heating in the winter.
