by Неизвестный
I went on begging for water. Suddenly someone threw an Imperial Army– issue canteen down in front of me. It was about half full. I drained it in a single draft. The water lacked any taste.
Two bespectacled GIs came and ordered me to take off my clothes. They told me to remove my underpants, too. When I pulled them down and started to step out of them, they said, “That’s enough.” It was a strip search.
Two more soldiers came. One of them had a U.S. Army helmet filled with water. I leaped for it. He stopped me with his hand and transferred the water to the canteen they had given me. The other soldier, a thin, middle-aged man, helped as he poured, kindly holding back the little pieces of grass floating in the water.
After I took several long drafts, this older man looked at me and demanded, “What’s your name?” The sharp look in his eyes and the tone of his voice told me he must be the commanding officer.
Prisoners of war in fiction often refuse to say anything besides “I am a common soldier,” but I did not follow their example. Without the least hesitation, I gave my name, rank, and unit. It seemed easiest to simply tell the truth about such routine things.
Another soldier pulled a stack of papers from an Imperial Army haversack. They had presumably found it abandoned somewhere in the vicinity. Among other things, the papers included our company CO’s maps, organizational charts of our platoons and squads, and individual soldiers’ private papers. The Americans seemed to accept my assertion that none of the documents was of any importance.
I sucked at my canteen continually even as the interrogation progressed. I still believed they would shoot me after they were through asking me questions, so when a soldier came up and whispered something in the commander’s ear, I imagined he was bringing word that preparations had been completed for my execution. In a great hurry, I guzzled down the rest of my water. I had drunk a large American helmetful of water in less than thirty minutes.
They gave me a cigarette, but the first puff set my head spinning. I could not smoke it.
The sun had climbed high overhead. We were under the only tree in the immediate area, but it was a tree with scant leaves clinging like a crown high up on its branches, casting a shade almost too pale to be called shade. I lay with my head in this shade (they permitted me to remain lying on the ground during my interrogation), periodically adjusting my position as the shade shifted.
The interrogation must have taken at least an hour. The commander repeated certain important questions several times. Trying to be sure I gave the same answer every time made me tense. The effort exhausted me.
The commander took out a Japanese soldier’s diary and told me to translate what it said. I welcomed this respite from the barrage of questions and set about translating the diary line by line. It was written in a childish hand, and the opening entry was from when our company had been stationed in San Jose. The author declared he had stopped keeping a diary after joining the army, but since he could not find anything else to do for diversion, he had decided that setting things down in a diary when off duty would in no way compromise the discharge of his responsibilities. Still, spending time on his diary meant he would have to devote himself more diligently to his military duties at all other times. The entry went on and on in this jejune vein—words placed there in case the diary fell into the hands of his superior officer, no doubt. That was all, however. There were no further entries.
The author had not inscribed his name, and I did not recognize the hand, but I knew it had to have belonged to one of our young reservists from the class of 1943. Though these greenhorns had all proved themselves to be utterly ignorant of anything, they were also kind and generous and worked hard to cover for the cunning and indolence of us older men. They knew nothing about pacing themselves to conserve their strength, so when they fell ill, they were quick to die.
I looked up from the diary. The commander was looking at me with eyes that seemed to hold both sympathy and familiarity. We spoke at the same moment.
“That’s all.”
“That’s enough.”
This brought my interrogation to an end.
The commander turned sideways and said in a low murmur, “We’ll get you something to eat now. Someday you’ll be able to go home.” I lay there vacantly, my spirit too tired to respond.
One of the soldiers returned the papers to the haversack. The owner’s name stitched into the flap flashed before my eyes.
It had belonged to K, the rakugo critic’s son, the fellow who had protested, “Aren’t we going together?” when we were preparing to evacuate the squad hut and I decided I would get a head start. My shock was immense. I turned my face away and screamed, “Kill me! Shoot me now! How can I alone go on living when all my buddies have died?”
“Be glad to,” I heard someone say. I turned toward the voice to find a man leveling his automatic rifle at me.
“Go ahead,” I said, spreading my chest, but my face twisted into a frown when I saw the playful gleam in his eye.
The commander walked away as though he had never even heard my cries.
A package of cookies fell on my chest. I looked up to see a ruddy young soldier with a dark stubble of a beard standing over me. His face was a blank. When I thanked him, he silently shifted the rifle on his shoulder and walked away.
I resumed my observation of the American troops around me. Never before had I seen men of such varied skin tones and hair color gathered together in a single place. Most of them seemed to be off duty—though a few had work to do. A man with a mobile radio unit on his back stopped near me with the entire sky spread out behind him. He adjusted something and then moved on. One group of men was taking turns peering through what looked like a surveyor’s telescope on a tripod. Far away in the direction the telescope pointed rose a range of green mountains. Somewhere among those mountains was the ridge over San Jose where our detached platoon was camped. I gazed off at the distant range, caressing each beautiful peak, each gentle mountain fold with my eyes. The platoon could be under attack even now, I thought. I mentally reviewed everything I had said during my interrogation, trying to reassure myself I had said nothing that could be harmful to them.
A burly, middle-aged soldier approached and took my picture. Coming closer, he said, “What’re you sick with?”
“Malaria,” I answered.
He felt my forehead with his hand. “Open your mouth,” he commanded. When I obeyed, he tossed in five or six yellow pills and said, “Now take a drink.” After watching me wash the pills down he explained, “I’m the doctor,” and then walked off.
Flames rose from the hut that had housed our command post as well as from the squad hut with the sick soldiers where I had first rested the day before. I had never seen columns of flame rise so high. Perhaps the huts had been doused with gasoline to help burn the corpses of the dead.
Evening approached. The American troops built fires in the holes I had thought might be graves and started preparing dinner. An amiable-looking youth brought me some food. I had no appetite. I merely nibbled at a cookie.
A young Mangyan tribesman I recognized happened by. Never before nor since have I seen a face so filled with pity—which is to say, in all my life, I have never been in a more pitiable circumstance than I was at that moment. In accord with their custom, the Mangyan youth wore his hair down to his shoulders and had a red cloth wrapped around his head. His beautiful face could easily have been mistaken for a girl’s.
Except for being awakened several times during the night to take more pills, I slept soundly.
The next morning the commander said, “Today we return to San Jose. The troops will board ship directly south of here, but you will go from Bulalacao. Can you walk?”
“I’ll do my best.”
With GIs supporting me on either side, I managed to stay on my feet all the way down the mountain. Several Filipinos carried me by stretcher from there to Bulalacao, ten kilometers away. Once they had hoisted the stretcher onto their shoulders, all I
could see from where I lay was the bright sky and the leafy treetops lining both sides of the road. Watching the beautiful green foliage flow by me on and on as the stretcher moved forward, it finally began to sink in that I had been saved—that the duration of my life now extended indefinitely into the future. It struck me, too, just how bizarre an existence I had been leading, facing death at every turn.
POETRY IN THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE
Poets were no more exempt than other writers from the pressures of the military and, at least at the beginning of the war years, a naive euphoria regarding the possibility of a Japanese victory. The works of the poets translated here reveal their various responses during this period.
TAKAMURA KŌTARŌ
Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956) wrote several poems in the 1920s and 1930s that expressed his alienation as a Japanese living abroad. Eventually, under the pressure of national mobilization for war, this alienation developed into full-blown xenophobia against the West. Three poetry collections written during the war articulate these patriotic and anti-Western feelings. Of the two poems translated here, one was written before the war, and the other was published on April Fool’s Day 1945, in the Asahi shinbun.
THE ELEPHANT’S PIGGY BANK (ZŌ NO GINKŌ, 1926)
The blank-looking elephant in the Central Park Zoo,
Picks up skillfully all the coppers and nickels that are thrown to him,
With the extraordinarily big tip of his nose,
And drops them with a clink, into the elephant’s piggy bank above.
From time to time he rolls his red eyes and thrusts out his nose,
And says to this Jap as “they” call me, gimme some nickels.
That’s what the elephant says,
Pleased at hearing him say it, I throw out some more nickels.
A blank-looking elephant, product of India,
A lonely young man, product of Japan.
The crowd “they” had better have a look-see at
Why the two of us are so friendly.
Bathed in the rays of the setting sun, I take a walk through Central Park,
And an obelisk brought from the Nile looks at me,
Ah, there’s someone else who is angry.
Returning to his attic “their” Jap lashes at his own blood.
THE FINAL BATTLE FOR THE RYŪKY Ū ISLANDS
(RYŪKYŪ KESSEN, 1945)
Ryūkyū, land of the sacred Omoro sōshi1
Will become the final great battlefield of the Greater East Asian War.
The enemy is gathering his strength for a big blow,
The lovely mountains and valleys of these island jewels,
In the green grasslands of Manzamō, the crimson of deigo flowers,2
Will be poured a cataract of violence.
Ryūkyū—in all sincerity the carotid artery of Japan,
Everything will occur here, everywhere here will coalesce.
Defend Ryūkyū, victory in Ryūkyūs.
All the Japanese in all of Japan!
Give your all for Ryūkyū!
The enemy will spare no sacrifice,
Our holy opportunity has arrived.
All the Japanese in all of Japan!
Stand up and send your blood to the Ryūkyūs!
Ah, descendants of Nabi in Onna, comrades in blood!
Crouch down in the shade of palm leaves
Avoid the bullets, put out the fires of war,
Go forth bravely and utterly destroy our evil enemy!
Translated by Leith Morton
KUSANO SHINPEI
Kusano Shinpei (1903–1988) was born in Fukushima Prefecture. In 1921 he journeyed to China, where he made friendships that endured for the rest of his life. In 1928 he wrote his first book of poetry, about frogs, and from 1940 to 1943 he worked in Canton as an adviser to the puppet government. Most of his Mount Fuji series of poems were written during this period and thus contain both patriotic and Pan-Asiatic elements. The following poems are from this first Mount Fuji series.
MOUNT FUJI (FUJI SAN, 1943)
3
From the beginning of time.
Hundreds of millions of days and black nights.
A great body sitting heavily within the vast vacuum of time.
Ah.
From confrontation after confrontation.
Though it be only a tiny gesture, I sang small songs.
And yet far far away from my praise.
Far far away
A soaring harmonic.
An inexhaustible body.
A fierce, great white spirit.
6
A piece of the heavy dark cloud moves suddenly. It mushrooms.
Mushrooming mushrooming spiraling up like an electric corkscrew
in an instant to the heavens. Cloud spirals loops the loop.
In the lonely dark dusk spiraling spearing through the thick
cloud-mass to the heavens above No. 1 mountain. [Ah. The
same old road. The same old loop the same old mess of cloud.]
Out of a violent, bitter dread. Flexing scales drenched
by the sea, it rose straight as an arrow. Bzzbzzbzzbzz that’s
the lash of its thick wiry vibrissa. Frenzied cloud colliding
disintegrating makes its torso trochilics of 6 & 8. Empty
talons tearing at the wind. Burning eyes penetrate the darkness.
Beyond turn & twist & trochilics. From a forever eternal sight.
Ecstatic thundering blows it the cloud away.
As far as the far-off horizon the sea is calm.
Inside the cave against which the tide breaks.
Silence.
In a perfectly clear orange sky.
The black massive.
Roof of Japan.
17
After thousands millions billions of years.
By the end of billions of years.
All life on earth may have died.
Trees grass birds frogs men.
Perhaps even moss & trepang.
Blue ice serrating cracking.
All will change that much.
Yet even after for a time Fuji squats stark.
O terrible beauty! Unmatched even in the age of fire.
The spirit of the Japanese people.
There gathers freezes.
White flame.
Blows from the summit.
Heaven silently descends to see this faith.
To Matsukata Saburō in the mountains
Translated by Leith Morton
OGUMA HIDEO
Oguma Hideo (1901–1940)—much admired by Nakano Shigeharu, some of whose poems are included in the previous chapter—was brought up in Hokkaido but moved to Tokyo in 1926 and joined the proletarian literary movement. In his most mature poetry, Oguma achieved, in the words of his translator, David G. Goodman, “a truly compassionate, multicultural worldview.”
LONG, LONG AUTUMN NIGHTS
(CHANGJANG CH’UY A, 1935)
Weep not, Korea!
Old women, weep not!
Weep not, sweet maidens!
The laundry block will laugh at you!
Tok-tack, tok-tack, tok-tack.
What is that sound?
It comes from the wooden mallet
You hold in your hand.
When night falls,
Every house in the village
Emits the sound:
Tok-tack, tok-tack-tok-tack.
There are no trees on the mountains of Korea.
Really? How unfortunate!
And no food in the houses.
Sad indeed!
“There, there, be a good child,
The gods see all.”
Rocking side to side
In their accustomed rhythm,
The old women are beating the white clothes
On laundry blocks
With wooden mallets.
Tok-tack, tok-tack.
“Yes, yes,
Such a nice sound!”
I can’t understand my son and my daughter,
But I know something about my father,
