by Неизвестный
The only man asleep was Corporal Kasahara, who snored hugging his sword. “Admirable,” muttered Lieutenant Kurata and chuckled. Though all knew this was the time they ought to sleep, no one could.
At early dawn the procession of ships arrived at the confluence of the Baimao and Yangzi rivers. Nearly thirty small warships had lined up there, guns trained on the right bank; just as the day broke, they opened up with a volley of fire. It was a spectacular attack. The riverbank was instantly lost in clouds of dust and sand that obliterated daylight. The enemy fought back mostly with machine guns. The bullets pinged, ricocheting off the ships’ sides. Soon a smoke screen began to spread near the bank. Stirred by the morning breeze, dense billows of pale yellow smoke settled heavily over the water.
Bows side by side, the first and second landing parties entered the smoke screen; the Kurata platoon was part of the third. Lieutenant Kurata, one knee pressed against the prow and sword planted in front of the other, kept his eyes fixed on the boat bearing the company commander, Kitajima. The company commander was a captain in the reserves, a man past forty; from early morning on, even during severe fighting, he drank the cold saké kept in his canteen and gleefully smiled. Big and slow moving, he ran a small trucking business in the countryside. Instead of shouting the order, he had merely said, still beaming his habitual smile, “Well, shall we go?”
As his boat began to advance, machine gunners crouched by the gunwale, cheeks tight against the cold stock of their weapons. The other boats, too, swung into a line and advanced.
Finally entering the cloud of smoke, Lieutenant Kurata was suddenly assailed by fear. He could see nothing in front. What if he emerged from the smoke only to collide with a large enemy troop? His unit was in the worst possible position.
Enemy bullets flew past with a sharp twang. He had not heard that sound in a while, and each shot echoed in his heart. Yet he wanted to be killed, and he chafed with impatience for the end. Prepared for death at any moment, he wished to die quickly and be done with it rather than fight on. His right hand shielding his eyes from the thick smoke, he tried to peer ahead.
The enemy bank suddenly appeared directly in front, and the boat struck against it. Jumping into the water up to their calves, the soldiers rapidly fanned out and lay flat in the riverbank grass. They met no attack. A rather sharp fight seemed to be starting to their right, but the shore facing them had already been secured several hundred yards in depth.
The expected battle never having materialized, Kitajima company began to advance south. That evening they heard that a number of divisional staff officers on the right flank had been wounded.
While cooking the rice in his mess tin over a fire on the floor of an occupied house, Second Lieutenant Kurata conscientiously recorded the day’s events in his diary. First Lieutenant Furuya of the same company laughed, nibbling on a cracker. “You do like to write, don’t you! Think you’ll have a chance to read it over?”
In fact, keeping a diary was meaningless even to Lieutenant Kurata. He did not think he would leaf through its pages again. For that reason, he wanted to write it all the more. Perhaps it was a womanish sentiment, but being unable to tell another about his final days struck him as much too lonely. The feeling was natural, and one he could not discard to attain spiritual freedom. Consequently, he was tormented by a fretful anxiety and numbly came to long for a quick death.
Near sundown, interpreter Nakahashi was wandering around a village looking for a horse some artillerymen had asked him to requisition. There were no more than five or six hundred houses in the village, and it became clear after twenty minutes of walking, not a single horse. The horse that had been pulling the cannon had fallen into a creek and broken its leg, creating a difficulty for tomorrow’s advance. The artilleryman gave up on finding a horse and instead suggested getting an ox.
“If it’s an ox you want, I see no problem. A water buffalo! You don’t mind, do you? Off the horse and onto the buffalo!” said Nakahashi, laughing. Still only nineteen, he had volunteered to be an interpreter as soon as the war had started but was rejected as too young. He quickly filed a petition and was allowed to accompany the army. Although high-spirited, he did not yet seem physically strong.
A water buffalo stood tethered in a shed by a farmhouse at the edge of the village. Deciding to take it and go, the interpreter looked in at the rear of the house. A wrinkled old woman was silently bending in front of the oven, kindling the fire.
“Hello, granny,” called Nakahashi from the doorway. “We’re Japanese soldiers, and we need your ox. Terribly sorry, but we’ll just take it and go.”
The old woman shrieked in violent opposition. “Don’t talk rubbish!” she screamed. “We finally bought that ox just last month, and how are we to farm without it?!” Furiously waving her arms, she rushed out of the earth-floored house only to see that three soldiers had already pulled the ox out of the stable and were discussing its uncertain merits, concluding it might be of use. In an awesome display of hysterical rage, the crone shoved the man holding the rein and sent him staggering, planted herself in front of the ox, and screeched at the top of her voice.
Hesitant to intervene, the soldiers looked on with wry smiles at the vehement exchange between Nakahashi and the old woman.
Suddenly interpreter Nakahashi erupted with peals of laughter
“This granny is outrageous! The ox is out of the question, she says. She’s got two sons and she doesn’t mind if we take them and put them to work, but not the ox!”
Standing around the placid water buffalo and the woman, whose temples were throbbing with indignation, the soldiers burst into loud laughter.
“Maybe we should get her sons to crawl on all fours and haul the cannon!”
But by now the sun had begun to set. The area was still dangerous after dark. The men resolved to take the animal.
“Move!” A soldier thrust the old woman aside and took hold of the rein. “Keep still or you’re dead!”
Wailing and screaming, spittle flying, the woman resisted all the more tenaciously. “The bitch!” Clicking his tongue, the interpreter grabbed her from behind by the nape and knocked her down with all his might. The woman tumbled backward and collapsed into a rice field by the side of the road. A shower of mud washed over the soldiers.
Nakahashi laughed and started to walk off.
“You may keep your life, but not the ox. We’ll send him back to you when the war is over.”
The ox began to plod along the crumbling dusty road. The soldiers felt elated. This continent teemed with boundless riches. One merely had to take them. A vista was opening up before them in which the inhabitants’ rights of ownership and private property were like wild fruits for the soldiers to pick as they chose.
The water buffalo exacted its revenge, however. At departure time the next morning when all preparations had been completed and the order to start was being awaited, the ox lumbered off straight into a rice paddy, dragging the gun carriage with it. Forced to heave the cannon out by themselves, the soldiers became coated with muck from head to foot.
On the fourteenth of November, the Nishizawa regiment met stubborn enemy resistance at a village on the approach to Zhitang-zhen. Stark, leafless willows lined the banks of a stream traversing the desolate landscape where the fight was taking place. Cotton grew over the expanse of the endlessly flat fields, white down shining in spots amid dry, rusty red stalks. Setting up a disagreeable howl, incoming trench mortar shells tore open fresh holes in the soil.
First Class Private Hirao lay in one of the holes with his rifle at the ready but feeling somehow devoid of fighting spirit. With the midday sun overhead, the battlefield was bright and warm. Whenever the sound of machine-gun fire briefly ceased, a foolish sense of tranquillity permeated him. Heads were visible moving along the enemy trench less than sixty yards away. He aimed carefully and fired at each one.
Crawling through cotton stalks, First Class Private Fukuyama drew near and rolled into the crater. T
aciturn and stolid, the man had been a factory worker.
“Give me a cigarette, will you?”
Hirao handed him one. Neither one of them had a match. Cigarette in his mouth, Fukuyama clicked his tongue.
“Well, guess I’ll go get a light,” he muttered to himself and cautiously raised his head for a look. In the field some five yards ahead, four soldiers clustered by a ridge, firing.
Hirao plucked a white strand of cotton, stretched it out and, twirling it between his fingers, began to make cotton thread. Suddenly Fukuyama jumped out of the crater and sprinted forward. But before reaching the ridge, he dropped flat, tried to rise propping himself on his arms, and fell again. This time he remained still.
Watching from the rim of the crater, First Class Private Hirao quietly continued twining the thread. It seems as though countless thoughts were rushing through his brain, or possibly none at all. He appeared serene as much as gripped by violent turmoil.
All of a sudden rapid-fire cannons commenced to bang away furiously from the rear, throwing the enemy trench into a plainly visible chaos. With that as a signal came the order to charge.
Hirao sprang up, rifle and bayonet at the ready, and bolted forward ahead of everyone. Some hundred yards to the right, old Kitajima, the company commander, was running along a ridge brandishing his long sword. The immaculate whiteness of the rabbit fur wrapped around the commander’s neck impressed itself for an instant on the corner of Hirao’s eye. The enemy trench was less than two feet wide and a full four feet deep. Chinese soldiers in blue cotton-padded uniforms scurried like moles along this narrow ditch in their haste to escape. Hirao jumped into the trench, lay limply on the ground, and gasped for breath. “I’m alive, still alive,” he murmured. Suddenly he was seized with unbearable pity for Fukuyama. They had never been particularly close, but the placid nature of the man who had gone to get a light for a cigarette struck him now as irresistibly sad.
Covered with dirt, he clambered out of the trench, picked up his rifle, which had suddenly grown heavy, and retraced his steps to search for Fukuyama.
Fukuyama lay prone in the field, the cigarette still in his mouth. Hirao rested his rifle next to Fukuyama’s head and looked down at him. A wave of blinding anger surged up within him.
He glanced around. A number of dead Chinese soldiers lay strewn about in ditches, behind a small grave mound, and throughout the field. With the stock of his gun Hirao turned the bodies over onto their backs and searched through the pockets. The fourth had matches. Hirao returned to where Fukuyama lay, sat cross-legged beside his head, and lit the cigarette in the man’s mouth. He could not rest content until he had done so.
The cigarette feebly smoldered between the lips of the man powerless to inhale. “Fukuyama!” whispered Hirao in a choked voice, joined his hands, and closed his eyes.
The unit was swiftly receding in the distance, relentlessly attacking the fleeing enemy. He stood up and gazed at the rust red solitary sweep of vast, dead cotton fields. The dust of battle had settled, leaving not a creature in the vicinity. Far to the rear, reserves could be seen advancing. Perhaps it was the medical corps.
He lifted Fukuyama’s heavy body onto his back. Holding the rifle and knapsack with one hand he started after his comrades along an elevated footpath.
Before sundown the Nishizawa regiment had disposed of the enemy remnants and completely occupied the town of Zhitang-zhen. The Kitajima company had suffered eight soldiers killed and twenty-three wounded. The dead were reverently cremated the same night. The soldiers dug a large hole for them and lay the corpses side by side with heads to the north.1 First the company commander used scissors to clip a few strands of hair from above the ear of each dead soldier; then the platoon and squad commanders did the same, wrapping the clippings in white paper.2 Brushwood was piled atop the corpses, and while the entire company stood at the present arms, Company Commander Kitajima lit the brushwood. Next to the flames, army priest Katayama Gencho, still wearing a khaki uniform, rattled the beads and chanted a sutra.
That night horses remained saddled in preparation for an enemy attack, and the men, covering themselves with straw, slept by the side of the road with their rifles.
First Class Private Hirao sat cross-legged with about ten other soldiers near the flames and smoked all night, feeding wood to the fire and waiting for it to burn down. The night sky over the darkened city glowed red in four or five places with the chilling blaze of cremation fires.
As he sat staring into the flames, resting his cheeks in his hands, Hirao’s sensitive nerves started once again to rush out of control. This made him feel gravely imperiled, enveloping him with the horrible sensation of going insane. The unleashed nerves would scatter and smash up, he thought, leaving the brain certain to grow deranged. He must summon up his entire energy to grapple with this madness. An unspeakably painful, anxious struggle ensued.
“I was the first in my platoon today to jump into the enemy trench!” he abruptly shouted, not sure at whom. He had the hollow feeling the words were directed not so much at the soldiers seated by the fire as at those who continued to burn inside the hole. And yet he knew he could not bear to cut short the bragging.
“The enemy were tossing hand grenades all over. I dodged through and leaped into that slit of a trench. They came at me, but I stuck the gun right up against their noses and shot them. First, second, third—I blew a hole through each one. The one in front dropped dead, spouting blood out of the side of his nose. . . . Fukuyama got hit. He’s lying down there now, the fourth man over. ‘Give me a cigarette,’ he says, so I give him one. ‘Got a match? No. Too bad. . . . Well, guess I’ll go get a light.’ He says it so damned casually, and just when he bolts ahead . . . I’d plucked some cotton and was making thread inside the hole. I worked it very carefully and got about five inches of even thickness. I kept twining it and watching. . . . He still had the unlit cigarette in his mouth, the son of a bitch.”
Hirao suddenly rose and moved away from the cremation fire into the roadside darkness. The sky’s expanse shone white with the light of innumerable stars. He stood with his legs apart and urinated while tears trickled down his face. As the threat of nervous disintegration abated, his emotions seemed gradually to grow calmer. Utterly worn out, he paced aimlessly about.
ŌOKA SHŌHEI
Like so many of his contemporaries, Ōoka Shohei (1909–1988) developed an early interest in French literature, particularly in the work of Stendhal, some of whose fiction he translated into Japanese. But Ōoka’s scholarly and artistic life vastly changed when he was drafted and sent to the Philippines during World War II. He wrote two books of extraordinary intensity about his war experiences, Fires on the Plain (Nobi), published in 1952, and an autobiographical account of his experiences as a war prisoner, Taken Captive (Furyoki), published in 1948, the first chapter of which follows.
TAKEN CAPTIVE (FURYOKI)
Translated by Wayne P. Lammers
Chapter 1: My Capture
It is not from goodness of heart that you do not kill.
—Tannishō (a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist treaty)
On January 25, 1945, I was captured by American forces in the mountains of southern Mindoro in the Philippines.
The island of Mindoro, situated to the southwest of Luzon, is about half the size of our Shikoku. It had no military facilities to speak of, and the forces deployed there comprised but two companies of infantry nominally occupying and patrolling six strategic points along the coastline.
My unit had been assigned to patrol the southern and western portions of the island in August 1944, and my own platoon was stationed together with the company command at San Jose in the far southwest. Two other platoons were stationed, respectively, at Bulalacao in the southeast and Paluan in the northwest. The western coastline between San Jose and Paluan—which is to say, virtually the entire hundred-mile length of the island—remained open, and local guerrilla forces could freely obtain supplies from American submarin
es. Fortunately, they did not attack our San Jose post.
On December 15, 1944, an American task force of some sixty ships had landed near San Jose. We immediately retreated into the hills and cut across the island through the southern mountains to join up three days later with the Bulalacao platoon, now bivouacked on a ridge overlooking that town. American forces had not come ashore there, but the platoon had heard the roar of the bombardment at San Jose and had taken refuge preemptively, bringing with them their food stores and radio gear. The food supply was quite ample— sufficient to last more than three months even after our numbers swelled to nearly two hundred with the arrival of some survivors from a seaplane base near San Jose, a group of marooned shipping engineers, and a number of noncombatants. This expanded company remained encamped at that location for some forty days, until an attack by American forces on January 24 sent us scattering in every direction.
U.S. warplanes flew back and forth in the skies overhead day in and day out, but the Americans were in no hurry to pursue us.
“Those bastards are obviously too lazy to come after us all the way out here,” one of the noncoms said, as he supervised the construction of the crude huts that were to become our barracks. “And if they’re not coming after us, why should we go out looking for trouble? The war’ll probably be over pretty soon, anyway.”
His remark put in plain words the hope that many of us held silently in our hearts. That is to say, since it seemed quite apparent that the enemy regarded Mindoro merely as a stepping-stone to Luzon, so long as we stayed put in the hills, there was a good chance the fighting would leapfrog right over us and leave us untouched for the duration of the war, making our position one of the so-called forgotten fronts. For a small, isolated force like ours, cut off from any possibility of further supplies or reinforcements, this was our only hope for survival.
