The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  I hope…this is not too much information?

  At any rate, you must remember that as soldiers we’d been indoctrinated to believe in the superiority of the Yamato race over Caucasians. And if a man resisted, the increasing pain he experienced was his own responsibility. In some ways, the thinking was, by starting with his thumbs, you were giving him a chance to end the pain early by talking. If he insisted on refusing to talk, well, things escalated and he got what was coming to him.

  So while I had seen a fair amount of prisoners come in with the marks of interrogation, Gray stood out as one who’d undergone a particularly painful and protracted visit with the Kempeitai. I didn’t pity him, you must understand. The chief problem was that he had surrendered in the first place. That was not something that Japanese soldiers did. You died nobly on the battlefield. And as such, you wouldn’t subject yourself to such indignities that prisoners endure, nor would you risk giving away vital information, even in the smallest amount, regarding your country’s war effort. The extent of this poor Yankee’s wounds suggested he’d tried to outlast his interrogators. No one outlasted the Kempeitai. The only way out was to die.

  So, the way I looked at it, that clawed hand, the bruises, the broken bones were due to Gray’s own stupidity and cowardice.

  Again, I want to make sure that you understand I am telling this as truthfully as I can from the perspective I had at the time—of an eighteen-year-old drunk on Emperor Shōwa’s edicts, devoid of compassion for anyone not of Yamato blood. Eighteen-year-olds are perfect soldiers that way—if you surround them with enough other eighteen-year-olds, and tell them to shut off their hearts, they can do it. It’s the perfect little time, if you think about it: an eighteen-year-old, even a twenty-two-year-old, has too much testosterone and not enough wisdom. If you take the romance out of it, look at it physiologically, see Homo sapiens as creatures created long before there were these artificial constructs of civilization, these peak physical years—eighteen, twenty-two—they were for the majority of human history only designed for two things—hunting and procreating. That’s why the battlefield has always been men-only (and still mostly is, isn’t it?). It’s a shrewd move to deprive these men of women; suddenly, all those sexual impulses get channeled into the single remaining pursuit—the hunt, or war. In a way, it doubles down on the aggression, for the sexual outlet is no longer there. Of course, this is a broad generalization, but mostly true. There was some sexual outlet between guards, but it was mostly unheard of. And myself, as a monk, would humbly and personally assert that the human being is hardwired for a third pursuit—meditation—but I only saw that clearly many years after I was a young man.

  This is all relevant because Gray Allen, I suppose you could say, is how I found Buddhism.

  It all goes back to those mysterious sessions Gray apparently suffered at the hands of the Kempeitai. The torture and interrogation he’d endured.

  The other guards and I wondered how it was that a man who had taken so much abuse, for so long, had survived. It was not just the willpower it must have taken to endure such sessions, but even more so, why the Kempeitai had let him live afterward. It tended to be that the longer the sessions went on, the more the likelihood they’d end in death, for the obvious reason that a body and mind can only take so much. Also, as the interrogations stretched on, the Kempeitai increasingly realized that their victim either no longer had any relevant information to extract, or was so incapacitated by the torture that they’d no longer be effective laborers in the prison camps, and as such, would be a drain on the limited foodstuffs and resources allotted to such efforts. It was better to kill them at that stage, or, as tended to be the case, let them slowly die on their own from the mental and physical damages they’d sustained.

  Yet here was Gray Allen. This hollow-eyed, broken, bruised wreck of a man. At first, we guards laughed at him. We took to calling him the bōrei, a Japanese term for ghost, though that doesn’t quite put a fine enough point on it. If I’m not mistaken, in English there’s maybe a handful of words for ghost, but in Japanese there are dozens, each with its own connotation. A bōrei, you see, means a ruined ghost, one that’s been so traumatically torn up or smashed by the events that led up to its death that in some ways it carries a deeper suffering in death than it did in life. Death, then, for a bōrei, is not a release, but a window to a whole new level of infinite suffering. And sometimes, because the trauma has been so intense, the bōrei forgets the events of its death—perhaps in the way a baby forgets the events of its birth because of the associated trauma—and fails to recognize where his mortal life ended and his pained afterlife began. They are sometimes seen as fools this way, because they are the only ones that don’t know they’re dead. So it was with Gray. He seemed in a sort of unblinking, staggering haze. He didn’t speak. He seemed bewildered. We laughed at this: not only were the Yankees idiots to surrender and subject themselves to the enemy’s whim, they didn’t even know when to drop dead, even when it was for their own good!

  He was a horrible sight. One that most people would look away from if they saw it on the streets. But war inures you to such things—you see the body degraded in so many different ways, you’re no longer repelled by it. And he was functional, to a degree. Though the tunnels the prisoners worked in were so hot and dangerous that Japanese miners had long ago refused to go into such places, he toiled relentlessly with pick and headlamp, weak-kneed, weak-limbed, but with that slow, dead-eyed perseverance. And the heat, one could argue, was not the worst part: the water that seeped from the ceiling contained enough acidic contaminant that it burned exposed flesh if it made contact, which forced the men, despite the heat, to wear heavy clothing, if they could find it. Two or three every day would die of dehydration, which itself is an abhorrent thing to behold—those final throes of thirst and oncoming rictus—but we guards didn’t have to bother with it too much: either his colleagues could somehow resuscitate him, which was not likely, or his body would quickly go stiff with death and we’d have our verdict. If they were particularly slow about dying, and in the process blocking the workspace, we’d hasten them along with our kogatana knife. But, you must understand, this whole determination process never took more than ninety seconds, maybe two minutes. They were either going to live, or they were going to die, but they were not going to impede the mining effort. We were trained for that above all else—to keep the mine yielding coal. The Imperial effort depended on it.

  I think I should elaborate a little more on myself and my fellow guards and who we were at the time. Everything I have told you is true—we did laugh, we did mock Gray for being an oblivious bōrei—and it was in part because we were young men desensitized by the culture of war. But we were also scared, even if we didn’t know it. Once you spend enough time up in a place like this, for decades probing the mind and heart in silence with only the fog as company, you’re struck by how we as a species are built upon fear. It’s the backbone of our psyche, the most primordial thing in us. My guess is that if the first trait an organism develops isn’t fear, it isn’t going to be around long. Certainly not long enough to have a lasting procreation cycle and to succeed as a species. Now, this is a monk’s uninformed opinion, but it seems logical.

  The problem for humans is we have work-arounds for being scared. I don’t think any other animals do. A lion can’t make jokes to distract himself from his fear. A hawk can’t swallow a bottle of sake. We, however, can suppress fear. But we can’t make it go away. It will be there, deep in our psyche, potent, gathering strength, an unseen inner typhoon awaiting opportunity. Animals get it out of their system. People suppress it, and invariably it comes out when, and in a way, they don’t want it to. By sidestepping our fears, we feed them.

  What was our fear? What were we laughing our way past when we beheld that tragic bōrei? We laughed, I realize now, not because we were cold and without compassion, but because we actually did empathize with him, even if we didn’t know it at the time. What we saw in him was so hor
rid a fate that we subconsciously felt it, subconsciously inhabited it ourselves. That is what aversion is: seeing something so heinous that we want to avert our gaze, because on the surface it feels so other. So we avert our gaze, we pull our imaginary self back from such a fate. But we are not in the end looking away from the poor victim. We are looking away from ourselves in that same predicament.

  At any rate, the other guys and I, we made jokes. Because jokes distracted us. Because jokes made it into a kind of a game. But beneath it now I know I was afraid. I knew that I would kill myself, though dying was the last thing I wanted to do, before getting stuck in a predicament like Gray and his fellow prisoners found themselves in. It was honestly the stuff of nightmares. I couldn’t imagine being trapped, enslaved, tortured, with no control over my life. Can you imagine every minute of your day living in fear of what would come next? Of what they might do to you? No, I’d rather have died than surrendered myself to a nightmare, to give the enemy keys to my life, make him god of my future. After all, I’d seen what the Kempeitai had done!

  And that was still something that I didn’t understand: why the Kempeitai would allow Gray to live. It meant something. I didn’t know what.

  I started to get an idea some days later when one of the Kempeitai officers showed up in the mines. His name was Morio. He was particularly tall, and had the sort of face that alone probably qualified him for the Kempeitai: deeply pockmarked—not the kind you get from acne, but from genuine pox or the such. All sorts of craters there, like a miniature battlefield stretched across his features. Combine that with the eyes—dark, shark-like, where you couldn’t discern between the pupil and iris—and you can only imagine that the commanding officer, seeing him on the first day as a prospective candidate, tabbed him to be an interrogator on those looks alone. He really was something. And you have to understand, it was a big deal to have a Kempeitai officer show up in the mines. For the mines, conditions as they were, were a place you’d only expect to find prisoners or low-level second-class soldiers like myself. To see a Kempeitai show up, a junshikan as Morio was, a warrant officer, with his cavalry uniform and high black leather boots, the black chevron on one arm, the imperial chrysanthemum badge on the other…it was as if a one-man parade had shown up. A very intimidating one-man parade!

  No one dared look at him directly. In some ways, we were as scared of him as the prisoners were. For the secret police didn’t just busy themselves with Allied prisoners, but with internal Imperial Army matters as well—men suspected of affronts to the Emperor, which were many then. Sometimes all it took was the rumor that a soldier had used the Emperor’s name in the same conversation he’d mentioned defecating or fornicating to bring the Kempeitai down on him.

  One thing was for sure, we second-class soldiers long ago had learned that we were never to address the Kempeitai unless spoken to. So we went about our work, pretending not to be the intimidated soldiers we actually were in that moment. Even if you had a clear conscience, as I did, you nevertheless feared that somewhere along the way, you’d unknowingly crossed another soldier, one who had thus secretly held a grudge against you, and had concocted some sort of lie about you that he’d told the Kempeitai. I’d seen it happen, men dragged away protesting their innocence, claiming that someone had unfairly accused them of a treachery they hadn’t committed. So, a paranoia always crept in like a cloud when the Kempeitai arrived.

  Morio engaged no one when he arrived. The lateral we were on at that time was perhaps two hundred feet under the earth, but he carried himself as if the visit was purely happenstance, as if he were just passing through en route to another, more pressing, destination. Some of the guards—and I suspect I was guilty of this as well—pressed and goaded the prisoners even harder in Morio’s presence. We’d take the bamboo shinai to the back of their necks and implore them onward. Maybe we were trying to win favor or were acting out of fear of some perceived rumor that might have been spread about us. Trying to preempt and alter a Kempeitai’s opinion about us before he had a chance to confront us. That’s how paranoid we were: we were atoning in advance for sins we’d not yet committed!

  Anyhow, Morio, if he did notice any of our efforts, didn’t show it. He moved past us, his chin up a bit, head tilted, those dark eyes open a fraction wider, as if he was merely observing, with simple curiosity, the goings-on of the mine. He clasped two fingers of one gloved hand behind his back with the other. I watched him pass, moving my eyes but not my head, which I’m sure everyone else was doing as well. Without context, I suppose it’s a bit comical: a bunch of men acting like nervous little boys, uncertain whether they’ve been naughty or not, watching a schoolmaster pass through the corner of their eyes. Or maybe better put, a neighborhood bully. Sometimes authority is like that—it makes you feel like you’ve done something wrong.

  It turned out that I was in a better position than most to see what Morio was up to.

  He was subtle about it, but he was watching Gray.

  And I, just as subtle, watched him. Watched as he paralleled Gray through the mines at a remove. Watched as he quietly monitored Gray through the tangle of machinery and men that filled the shaft. There was something almost voyeuristic about it, as if he didn’t want to be discovered but was nevertheless fascinated by the man, wanted to absorb everything that he did.

  Gray at that stage had been tasked with explosion security. It was not a good position; no prisoners wanted it, and certainly no Japanese wanted it. You see, in those days, there was a real problem with coal-dust explosions. Coal-dust explosions are about the worst thing that can happen to you underground in a mine, not only because of the explosion itself, but because of the huge amounts of carbon monoxide released in the explosion, which will quickly suffocate everyone in the mine. There’s always going to be a certain amount of coal dust in the air, given the amount of coal that is being extracted. So we’d learn mitigation efforts; we’d basically keep the dust out of the air by continuously sprinkling the area with water as well as rock dust, which is incombustible, and can be mixed with the coal dust to prevent the chain reaction that leads to coal-dust explosions in the first place. What this meant was that the explosion security team tended to have to go into the most at-risk tunnels and laterals, and suppress the coal dust with these methods. As such, they were the front line for anything that could go wrong. If there was too much coal dust in the air—which is impossible to determine with one’s eyes in the dim light down there—and one accidentally brushed the hasp of his watch against his belt buckle—just enough to create what would otherwise be an indiscernible spark above ground—that man would be the first to be incinerated. This term “canary in a coal mine”: these men who worked explosion security were very close cousins of these canaries!

  The bigger problem for Gray was that the explosion security detail in the mine had been greatly reduced so that more prisoners might be placed on the production lines. The Imperial cause was desperate at this point. What was needed was coal. And since it was primarily Allied prisoners down in those laterals, mixed with some Chinese prisoners and privates like me—all three of those groups largely expendable to the Emperor—the executive decision was to compromise safety in favor of elevated production. They, in fact, reduced the detail down to one: Gray!

  He was tasked with first wetting down the floors with a fire hose, then spreading rock dust atop it, neither of which were easy tasks. The water mains were along a fixed shaft at one end of the mine, which meant he had to drag the fire hose, thick with water, ever farther into the shaft as he went along. You have to understand, this thing was six inches thick and hundreds of feet long by the time he was done. I can’t imagine where he got the strength and will to continue. He’d balance it atop the ore cart that held his rock dust as he moved from station to station, but hefting it on and off that cart, holding it aloft to spray down the dust, and repeating this process for twelve hours at a time, it was truly an impressive feat, to say nothing of having to move the cart—heavy with rock d
ust—along by hand.

  I wondered what Morio was looking for, what he expected or hoped to see in Gray’s actions. For this definitely wasn’t a social call; an officer like Morio didn’t come down to the mine, let alone to the most condemned of the laterals, unless there was a reason for it.

  I was utterly absorbed. Everything for the low-level soldier in the Imperial Army was speculation and innuendo. We were told little, so we were constantly trying to piece together what might really be going on. And it was probably of no help that I was hooked on Edogawa Ranpo books before I’d entered the army. Edogawa used to write the most wonderful mysteries. The detective was always Kogoro Akechi, but it was really his sidekick, the boy Kobayashi, that I identified with. Were it not for the War, I’d likely have been a detective, which I suppose would have meant that I would not have ended up being the monk you see before you today. Anyhow, once conscripted, we weren’t allowed any luxuries like Kogoro books, so I quite welcomed this little mystery—if it was one—unfolding before me. It was all so immediate, with such unique characters like Morio and Gray, that I was as engrossed as I’d have been were I sitting back at my home in Kyoto reading one of Kogoro’s books. No doubt I was also simply a bored young soldier, trying to spin the monotony of the day into something worth being interested in.