Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  Did Lyn actually recall playing in the gutters as a dirty little girl in Stanley Camp? She had certainly read about the urchins who’d frolicked there after the slaughter, back when the stench of decaying corpses, rotting food, and human excrement hung over the camp like a poisonous fog. The Japanese had left the dead wherever they fell. On the far side of the barbed wire that penned in the internees lay the remains of an English soldier whose sister was in the camp. Each day, she got as close as could be to her brother, while slowly his face became unrecognizable under a mask of flies, his khaki uniform turned green from mold, and putrefying flesh oozed off his bones.

  Damn the flies, the bedbugs, and the lice!

  They could drive you mad!

  Did Lyn actually recall choking down the inedible food? The diet consisted of rice, rice, rice. A bowl a day, undulating with worms and weevils. For color, the POWs concocted “green horror soup,” a mix of weeds and garbage scraps—potato peelings, carrot tops, buttercups, and the like—foraged from the guards and eaten out of tin cans salvaged from the dump. If a slice of bread was smuggled through the wire by a former servant, the lucky recipient would use a ruler to make sure that everyone in the room got an equal morsel.

  “This’d be a good place for some fat dame who wants to get thin. Look at me, Harry.”

  “Hey, Sid, see that little girl over there?”

  “Aye.”

  “If the Japs stop our rations, we eat her first.”

  Was that conversation something Lyn had read somewhere or now remembered?

  Sunken eyes and a ghastly pallor were the norm as the gaunt, slovenly wretches shrank from within. So inadequate was the food that it spawned medieval diseases, ones that slowly stripped away the lining of the brain. Tapeworms and other intestinal parasites ran rife, but the ugly agonies were beriberi and pellagra.

  Beriberi struck in wet and dry versions. Wet beriberi left its mark on bloated bodies. Push a finger into the spongy flesh of the leg, and that dent would still be there the following day. Dry beriberi was known as “electric feet.” It felt as if a blowtorch had scorched your knobby legs. The only relief was to sit for hours with both feet submerged in a bucket of water.

  “Cemetery.”

  “What’s that, Mom?”

  “That’s where they make love.”

  “Who?”

  “Behind the headstones. And in freshly dug graves.”

  “Who?” Lyn repeated.

  “Lovers in Stanley Camp. The cemetery’s the only place free from prying eyes.”

  That seminal conversation had taken place just a few months ago, once Viv began a regimen of powerful palliative drugs. It was the first time she had broached the topic of war with Japan on her own, and Lyn had tried to gently lift the veil on her Hong Kong memories.

  “Where was I conceived, Mom? Your daughter? Lyn?”

  “St. Stephen’s,” murmured Viv.

  “When?”

  “Christmas morning. Before the attack.”

  “Where?”

  “In a closet. Away from prying eyes.”

  “Who’s my dad?”

  “Captain Richard Walker.”

  All those years and that was the first time Lyn had heard his name. No doubt Viv’s tongue was loosened by the psychotropic drugs, but perhaps she also welcomed the unburdening that often comes at the end of life. For too long, she had suppressed her wartime trauma, dissolving into sobbing fits if Lyn’s dad ever got mentioned. But now her secrets spilled out like the evils released from Pandora’s box.

  “What became of Captain Walker, Mom?”

  “He was killed while defending St. Stephen’s.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “The Jap who raped me.”

  So there it was! The origin of all their mental strife. Viv’s because she had to live with the aftermath of rape. And Lyn’s because she’d had to endure both her mother’s depression and physical abuse in the foster home that had taken her in while Viv was getting treatment at Essondale.

  “How did Captain Walker die?”

  “Your dad was speared in the gut while trying to protect me from rape. He hung on the blade of a bayonet so the Jap could watch him die. Then I was caged in a room and hauled out again and again to get raped. The Jap said he won me in a card game. ‘You mine.’ ‘You mine.’ That’s what he said. No one else could rape me. Just him. Just him! Just him! He refused to kill me like they did the other nurses. I was still alive when Hong Kong surrendered.”

  Tears streamed down Viv’s cheeks as her heart poured out the emotions she’d repressed since the war.

  “The Jap?” said Lyn. “Do you know his name?”

  “I heard it once.”

  “Where?”

  “In Stanley Camp.”

  The day began like any other day in Stanley Camp. The breezeless hellhole was hot, muggy, and thick with mosquitoes and flies. Water was in scarce supply, with drought on the horizon. The Hong Kong News, the English-language propaganda sheet, informed the prisoners that a tiger had been seen digging in trash near the fence. They got a rare laugh from that bunk, until a shot rang out and a dead tiger was carried off hanging by its paws from a pole. It turned out that the cat had escaped from a circus during the invasion.

  “Who knows what to believe?” said the matron who was sewing alongside Viv. The curlers styling her hair were fashioned from odd bits of telephone wire.

  The window framing both women looked out on a yard where a pair of scrawny prisoners threw a baseball back and forth. All clothing in the camp was made by hand. Tea towels and rice sacks were turned into shorts and shirts. Buttons were carved from bamboo, and old rubber tires were cut into sandals. When someone died, his rags would be on somebody else the next day.

  “Don’t believe that,” Viv scoffed, jabbing her sewing needle into a News story beside the tiger report.

  “Why?” queried the Englishwoman. “Couldn’t Japanese bombers have wiped out the bridge between Vancouver and Vancouver Island?”

  “What bridge?” Viv said dryly.

  And that’s when the two Japanese soldiers had come around the corner of the housing block. Neither had been to the camp before, and Viv was suddenly tense. Both were dressed in uniform, and both carried swords. They strode across the yard as if it were their private domain, and Viv knew they were from the Kempeitai.

  The Japanese gestapo.

  “I throw the ball,” said the gunso, the Kempeitai sergeant.

  The baseball players glanced at each other, and one began to shake with the DTs. Not for nothing was the rampart the Japanese had overrun in early December dubbed the Gin Drinkers’ Line. Some of the Brits were bottle-a-day men, and the fall of Hong Kong had deprived them of their gin.

  “The ball,” repeated the gunso. “I know how to play.”

  “Oh God!” said the matron beside Viv. “He must be the Kamloops Kid!”

  The women of Stanley Camp lived in fear of the guards. The ugly shadow of the conquest atrocities hung over them, and there was drunkenness among the Japanese guards. Prowling around the camp at night, they would peer into windows. During the day, they would sneak up behind women in their rubber-soled boots and startle them. At bedtime, it was Viv’s practice to wedge the door.

  But a far worse threat lurked across the harbor in Kowloon, at Shamshuipo Camp, where military prisoners of war were confined. There, the danger took the form of a grinning young man with a clipboard.

  “You’re Canadians, eh?” he said, greeting one group of new arrivals. “Is anyone here from Kamloops?”

  “I am,” a POW replied.

  As hard as he could, the interpreter punched the POW in the face. As the Canadian crumpled to his knees, he was smashed across the cheek with the clipboard in Slap Happy’s hand.

  “My name is Sergeant Inouye,” the translator told those lined up at the gate. “I was born and raised in Kamloops, British Columbia, so I hate your goddamn guts. When I was ten years old, I was barred from my friend’s birth
day party because his mother didn’t want ‘a Jap face’ in her snapshots. I couldn’t get into the public swimming pool because the sign on the wall said, ‘No Coloreds, Japs, or Chinese.’ In Canada, they called me a ‘little yellow bastard.’ So now I have you, and you bastards are going to suffer.”

  Slap Happy—the Kamloops Kid—made good on his threat.

  According to the rumors that reached Stanley Camp, his signature punishment was to have two soldiers hold down a prisoner while he personally punched and kicked him. He locked men away in solitary confinement and starved them past the point of begging for mercy. To squeeze information out of a hard case, Inouye would drive the man through the jostling streets of Kowloon until they reached a military police station. Along the way, he would read from the Kempeitai’s training manual: “‘Torture can include kicking, beating, and anything else connected with physical suffering.’ We Kempeitai are good torturers, my friend. You’ll find we’ve taken the phrase ‘anything else’ and made it an art form.”

  The POW would come back broken.

  Or not come back at all.

  “They say the Kamloops Kid went to Tokyo in 1938,” the matron whispered to Viv. “He enlisted in the army as a translator and is now the official mouthpiece of Commandant Tokunaga. He’s the most sadistic of the Japs at Shamshuipo. I hate to think what brings the Kamloops Kid to us.”

  “The ball,” said the Kamloops Kid for the third time, still grinning like the Cheshire cat.

  The second of the two prisoners, a toilet-tissue cigarette dangling from his lip, shrugged and tossed him a pitch.

  Back came the ball.

  Harder.

  “Again,” said the gunso.

  The smoker’s next pitch had muscle.

  It came back even harder.

  “Again,” ordered the gunso.

  The prisoner smirked, wound up, and really let fly, putting a curve on the ball.

  The ball shot right between the splayed hands of the Kamloops Kid and struck him in the face.

  His nose began to bleed.

  From the moment the two men had rounded the corner of the building, Viv’s eyes had been fixed on the other Japanese soldier. Now she watched in horror as the corporal drew his samurai sword and, with a two-handed sweep worthy of those ancient warriors, sliced the pitcher’s head from his bony shoulders.

  The Kamloops Kid swaggered over and picked up the head.

  Holding it out before him, he slowly turned so all the spectators could see.

  “You’ll be counted off in groups of ten,” said Inouye. “Should one of your ten try to escape over this barbed wire”—he passed the head to the swordsman, the same man who had raped Viv and gutted her lover during the fall of Hong Kong—“Corporal Tokuda will return to Stanley Camp with Kamikaze—that’s his sword—and do this to the other nine.”

  So here sat Lyn Barrow, keeping vigil beside her mom’s deathbed, holding Viv’s arthritic hand in her own, and watching the sheet rise and fall a little less with each labored breath. She thought of all the suffering wrought by that one man—to her mother and herself—and she soon felt overwhelmed by the injustice of it all.

  “Mom, it’s Lyn. Your daughter.”

  Viv’s death rattle marked the beginning of the end.

  “This, I promise you. I’m going to hunt Tokuda. Then I’m going to kill him.”

  It might have been a spasm, but Lyn thought otherwise.

  Viv squeezed her hand.

  Then she died.

  Nine O’Clock Gun

  Vancouver was still laboring under gloomy, low-level clouds, but a gap had opened on the inland horizon, and there a fat, orange harvest moon glared at the Pacific. Like an island in the ocean, Stanley Park formed a barricade between English Bay and the sheltered harbor of Burrard Inlet.

  The watch on Kamikaze’s wrist ticked toward nine o’clock as his car left behind the canyons of glittering downtown towers for the shadowed darkness of the urban forest. He drove between the moon-dappled waters of Lost Lagoon and Coal Harbour, then began his counter-clockwise prowl around the park’s shoreline. Ahead, at Hallelujah Point, was the Nine O’Clock Gun, a century-old cannon encased in a wire-and-granite cupola. Originally, the gun was fired so that seamen in port could synchronize their ship chronometers with the tide. It had been fired every night since 1894, except during the Second World War, when its blast would have been alarming to Vancouverites.

  And it would be fired this evening.

  Kamikaze had checked.

  Instead of continuing around the park on the seawall road, the car turned inland, toward the aquarium. Parking just beyond that watery animal jail, which had once known better days, the would-be yakuza, dressed all in ninja black, headed for the path that would lead him to his fate. He stalked along it until he came to a sandstone column crowned by a marble lantern with what had turned out to be a not-so-eternal flame.

  The Japanese-Canadian War Memorial.

  No need to read the plaque.

  He knew it by heart.

  For as long as he could remember, going all the way back—perhaps—to his early life in that internment camp, Kamikaze had no clear grasp of who he was. It was as if his internal self-image was pathologically out of focus—as if the light within his soul had been snuffed. So that’s why he felt as if this monument stood for him, too, even though he had no link to its actual history.

  Often, he had come here to sit in the dark and brood.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, he would find out who he was.

  Or he would die.

  To be a Japanese issei—an immigrant—on the West Coast was to inherit a history of racial hatred. Back in the 1880s, men had sailed from Japan to follow a dream of riches, and here they had fished, farmed, and mined, or worked in lumber camps and on the railroad. But when it came, the backlash was fierce and angry. The issei were denied the vote and citizenship. In 1907, white supremacists rampaged toward “Japtown.” They were met by a hail of rocks, and that led to limits being set on future immigration.

  The only way to prove themselves loyal to Canada was to fight in the First World War, so 195 issei and one nisei—a Japanese descendant born here—volunteered. Of them, 54 were killed and 92 wounded, so in 1920, on the third anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, this cenotaph was raised in Stanley Park. To the lasting memory of those who had laid down their lives, the lantern was lit.

  Ha! thought Kamikaze.

  You proud fools.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor had fanned the flames of hate, and less than ten days later, on December 16, 1941, the lantern was extinguished.

  Every Japanese person on the West Coast was forced to register as an enemy alien, and all twenty-one thousand, Canadian citizens included, were driven inland to internment camps. Their property was seized and sold off to whites. Suspected spies and protesters were shipped east to prisoner-of-war compounds. No Japanese were allowed within a hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean.

  Later, after the war, the mass deportations began. Internees by the thousands were expelled to Japan.

  For the next four decades, the lantern atop this cenotaph remained dark. Kamikaze could barely recall the day he was set free from his internment camp, but he knew that whatever had happened to him within its barbed-wire fence had left horrific scars on his subconscious. The first time he had glimpsed this snuffed-out lantern, sometime back in his vague childhood, he had understood intuitively that that’s what he had suffered in the concentration camp.

  Extinction of his “I’m me” light.

  Then had come the August 1985 day when, as if to finally mark the integration of the nikkei—the new term for Japanese Canadians—into this racist amalgam, the lantern of the Stanley Park memorial was relit. The guest of honor, seated beneath the shirotae and yoshino cherry trees (so colorful in the springtime, but barren of leaves and blossoms tonight), had been Sergeant Masumi Mitsui. Then ninety-eight years old, he had led the charge up Vimy Ridge, only to spend the next
war in the Greenwood Internment Camp with his family. Watching from the crowd, Kamikaze had seen the sense of self light up that old man’s eyes, and he had hoped—how he had hoped!—that a sense of self would also ignite in him.

  But that was not to be his fate, it seemed, for he was neither nikkei nor Caucasian.

  Instead, he was caged physiologically in a no man’s land between the trenches of the Pacific War.

  A misfit, he belonged to neither side.

  Hated by one camp during and after the war.

  Shunned by the other for being genetically unclean.

  And so he had resigned himself to his ignoble fate, wandering aimlessly through purgatory, denied entrance to both heaven and hell.

  But then ...

  Was it possible?

  Could it actually be?

  Kamikaze had chanced across his blood link to Genjo Tokuda, the wealthiest and deadliest of Tokyo’s yakuza.

  Kamikaze had taken his code name from Genjo Tokuda’s sword.

  The old-school yakuza flatly denied that they were descended from the ronin, the marauding samurai who had terrorized Japan in the 1600s. Instead, they carried on the traditions of the machi-yokku, the “servants of the town,” courageous folk heroes who had stood up to the ronin. In doing so, the ancients had protected the poor and the defenseless. That’s why the yakuza have a romantic stature in Japanese films. And that’s why Kamikaze, in a fantasy born from researching Tokuda, likened himself to Robin Hood.

  Would that not be a life with meaning?

  To know who you are?

  But even more alluring to him was the structure of the yakuza. It, like the Mafia, was organized into a pyramid, with a hierarchy based not on bloodline but on adoption. At the top was the gang’s godfather—the kumicho—Genjo Tokuda. Beneath him were descending levels of underlings, and each underling was bound to his immediate boss by a centuries-old code. The oyabun played the “father role,” and like any good father, he provided protection and advice to his initiated children. In return, the father had a right to expect unquestioning loyalty and obedient service from the kobun, playing the “child role.” A kobun had to be willing to take a bullet for, and be a bullet for, his oyabun.