He then showed me a torn-edged chit, a tiny, triangular bit of rice paper with a scribble on one side. It was nothing, or less than nothing, not even something to be thrown away. His fellows would certainly just push and jostle for their place when the time came, chits or not. But the corporal handed the scrap to me as if it were the last ash of an ancestor, and somehow I found myself cradling it. I thought for a moment he had deceived me about his virginity and was suffering from something like an untreated syphilitic infection, but I saw nothing but the straining earnestness of his narrow, boyish face. I knew he was unsteady, but now I was quite certain his mind had descended on a most infirm path. His only tempering note was how he had described the present time as a “miserable situation,” an appraisal that seemed highly regular, if somewhat disloyal to our morale and cause, and which, no doubt, was undeniably true.
I unbuttoned the chest pocket of my shirt and deposited the bit of paper. I said nothing to the corporal, for I did not know what I could say or otherwise do except attend to his present circumstance as any decent and clear-thinking medical officer would. He was genuinely grateful and relieved, and he bowed almost wistfully before me, making me feel as though I had indeed come to his aid, that I had helped save him from whatever fate he supposed would befall him were he to visit the ones delivered for our final solace and pleasure. And I recall understanding this last notion. For although it was true the talk throughout the camp was still of the glorious brightness of our ultimate victory and its forever dawning reach, the surer truth as yet unspoken was that we were now squarely facing the dark visage of our demise.
Famous, of course, is the resolve of the Japanese soldier, the lore of his tenacity and courage and willingness to fight in the face of certain death. But I will say, too, that for every man who showed no fear or hesitance, there were three or four or five others whose mettle was as unashamedly wan and mortal as yours or mine. As the defenders of the most far-flung sector of the occupied territory, we understood there was little question of the terrible hours ahead of us, and it was a startlingly real possibility that every man in the camp, every soul one looked upon, would soon be dead. This, I know, was a constant thought of mine, enough that my dreams were wracked nightly by the burden of it. And perhaps even more than my own death, my nightmares spelled the chance of Captain Ono and the few other medical personnel all being killed, and that among the scores of the horribly wounded, I’d be the lone surviving medical officer, the last hope of the broken and dying.
Corporal Endo seemed all too beleaguered to me, and I began to guide him quickly past the commander’s hut, his gaze almost rigidly locked upon the shuttered windows. We had gone past the hut by some thirty paces when all of a sudden he grabbed me roughly by the shoulder.
“Lieutenant…”
I looked up and saw that the door was open, and that the figure of a man stood out on the open porch, his hands perched on his hips. He seemed to be surveying the darkened compound, and the corporal and I both stopped in our tracks, trying not to make a sound. From the silhouette it was clearly Colonel Ishii, with his thick torso and bowleggedness and the distinctly squared-off shape of his head. He was naked, and he was sonorously inhaling and exhaling, deeply up from the belly. From our angle we could glimpse as well inside the two-room house, but the only sight was a clothes trunk against a far wall and a few lighted candles set atop it. There was no indication of anybody else being inside, no sight of the girls or the house servant or Captain Ono, who besides being the head physician was also something of a confidant to the commander, his personal surgeon and counsel. Many evenings after supper Captain Ono could be seen on his way to the commander’s house, and when directives from central headquarters in Rangoon had come concerning preparations for the inevitable enemy offensive, the doctor was always included in the briefings.
The commander himself was someone whom these days people might call a “health nut,” as some of his ministrations were quite peculiar. For example, he would exercise vigorously in the early mornings, an intense regimen of calisthenics and stretches that would challenge a seasoned drill sergeant. Following this, sweating like a plow ox, he would allow himself to be bitten by descending swarms of mosquitoes, as a way of bleeding himself. Out behind the hut, he would cover only his face and neck and let the ravenous insects feed freely on his belly and chest and back. One would assume he’d have suffered terribly from malaria, as a large number of the men did, but he seemed perfectly fit right up to the day we received news of the Emperor’s surrender, when he committed ritual suicide. Captain Ono made it a point to describe the commander’s daily methods to me, I believe, in the hope that I would find them intimidating and remarkable, and back then I probably did consider them so. I was deeply impressionable and unassuming and full of dread, knowing little else but whatever was provided to me by professional men like the doctor, who were authoritative and born into an elite caste, and who seemed the very incarnation of our meticulously constructed way of life.
The colonel took a step down. He was a bit wobbly. I thought he had seen us, and I was ready to address him to avoid seeming as if we were trying to conceal ourselves in the darkness, but he bent down to peer beneath the floorboards of the hut, which was set up off the ground on short posts. After a moment’s inspection he stood up and began speaking down toward the crawl space, his tone eerily gentle, as if he were speaking to a niece who was misbehaving.
“There is little reason to hide anymore. It’s all done now. It’s silly to think otherwise. You will come out and join your companions.”
There was no answer.
“You must come out sometime,” Colonel Ishii went on, taking another tack. His effort seemed almost ridiculous, given that any other commander would have simply had soldiers retrieve her, or just shot her dead with his pistol, and perhaps on another evening the colonel himself would have done exactly that. “I suppose it’s more comfortable under there than out in the jungle. But you know there is food inside now. The cook has made some rice balls. The others are eating them as we speak.”
“I want to be with my sister,” a young voice replied miserably. She was speaking awkwardly in Japanese, with some Korean words mixed in. “I want to know where she is. I won’t come out until I know.”
“She’s with the camp doctor,” the colonel said. “To have her ear looked at. The doctor wanted to make sure she was all right.”
The girl obviously didn’t know the doctor was the same man who had struck down her sister. There was a pause, and the colonel simply stood there in his blunt nakedness, the strangest picture of tolerance.
The girl’s voice said, “I promised my mother we would always stay together.”
“You are good to try to keep such a promise,” the colonel said to her. “But how can you do so from down there? Your sister will be back with you tomorrow. For now you must come out, right at this moment. Right at this moment. I won’t wait any longer.”
Something must have shifted in his voice, a different note only she could hear, for she came out almost immediately, slowly scuttling forward on her hands and knees. When she reached the open air she didn’t get up, staying limply crumpled at his feet. She was naked, too. The clouds had scattered and the moon was now apparent, and in the dim violet light the captured sight of them, if you did not know the truth, was almost a thing of beauty, a scene a painter might conjure to speak to the subject of a difficult love. The colonel offered his hand and the girl took it and pulled herself up to her feet, her posture bent and tentative as though she were ill. She was crying softly. He guided her to the step of the porch, and it was there that her legs suddenly lost power and buckled under her. The colonel took hold of her wrist and barked at her to get up, the sharp report of his voice sundering the air. She didn’t respond or move, but lay there feebly, her head lolling against the step. She was sobbing wearily for her sister, whose name, I thought she was saying, was “Kkutaeh,” which meant bottom, or last.