So in the end he told me who he was and what he was doing. He was working for Soviet intelligence to protect China and the Soviet Union from Japanese militarism. He asked me to work with him and I said I would. And so I have, giving him all the plans of the General Staff, where they have intended to move and when, months and years before it has happened.
And now more recently the most important information of all, information that may someday save Moscow from the Germans. For the Germans will surely attack the Soviet Union before long, and Japan will go to war before long, which means fighting the West, and then the Soviet Union will face the near impossibility of fighting on two fronts.
Or that is, they would have faced that possibility if we hadn’t told them otherwise. If I hadn’t been able to tell Quin that when the time comes the Japanese army will move south to seize the oil and rubber of Southeast Asia, not north into Siberia. That when the time comes, therefore, the Soviets can pull back their Far Eastern divisions to use against the Germans and not worry about the Kwangtung army in Manchuria, for although it will still be there in name, its officers and men will be fighting elsewhere and the Soviet Far East will be safe. That much we were able to tell Moscow, perhaps thereby to save it.
But although you don’t understand any of this, you mustn’t think I’m a traitor. What I’ve done has been for the good of Japan. I had to make a decision that afternoon and it was the right one. I believed what Quin believed in, I believed it then and I do now. I loved Go as a child and that’s probably how I got into the army in the first place, but what the army was doing to Japan and beginning to do to China was wrong. Wrong then, now it’s much worse.
So no matter what happens I know I made the right decision. I know it. And as for Quin, he’s been a brother to me. Whenever I had doubts or was exhausted or thought I couldn’t live through another headache, it was his courage that kept me going, his confidence in me, his will, his determination to finish what we had started, what we were doing together to help people, to help the Japanese and the Chinese by ending their horrible, futile war.
There have been terrible times, times I can’t forget. And people.
There was the morning I had to call in the gentle Western scholar who has assisted us by handling our courier system. A kindly man, a good man, a man who has taken many risks for the same cause I have. Of course he didn’t know who I really was and of course I couldn’t tell him, but I had to get him to change his behavior because it might have endangered our security.
So I insulted him. I blackmailed him. I humiliated him in the most despicable way. Humiliated him, my compatriot. Insulted the man whom I knew was one of my brother’s most treasured friends.
A small matter. Merely a case of insulting and humiliating a kindly man, a gentle human being. There were worse cases. There were cases of murder.
Once, about five years ago, I had to get to Shanghai to see Quin, to talk to him about the General Staff’s plan to invade north China. I absolutely had to get there but there was no way to leave Tokyo. My office was involved in the planning and my absence from Tokyo then, for any reason, would have been impossible to explain. I was desperate.
And then a way turned up. A disgusting, sickening way. It was ghastly.
The plan called for a man to be assassinated in Shanghai, some well-known Japanese. The assassination would appear to be the work of Chinese patriots, and naturally the repercussions would be great. It was to be the first step, the beginning. A year later the Japanese people would be more than ready for the invasion of China.
Someone on the General Staff suggested a certain Japanese monk who lived in Shanghai, a man who was loved by the Chinese and respected by the Japanese, an ideal target. What little remained of the good feelings between our people was the work of him and a few men like him.
That monk was my cousin, descended from my father’s younger brother. But no one knew this because his family had been in China since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and because they had adopted a Chinese name, and because I’d destroyed certain parts of the Kempeitai files so that no harm would come to him.
Now not only did I have to agree to the plan but suggest it was such a delicate operation it required my presence in Shanghai. Behind my back I saw them smiling at each other, whispering that the real reason I wanted to go was because I was a killer, a murderer, an executioner who liked to sniff and smell and taste the scene of an execution.
They hated me of course. They’d always hated me because I had the files of the Kempeitai behind me and knew too much about them. They’d have gotten rid of me long ago if they weren’t so jealous among themselves about trusting anyone else with my work.
So they smiled at me.
Yes, they said, an excellent idea. Perhaps you should deal with this matter personally. Nothing must go wrong, and with you there it won’t. It will be an efficient murder, that is quite certain, given your skill. Quite certain and most reassuring. An excellent suggestion, Kikuchi.
I had to let them smile at me and get up and walk out the door. I went to Shanghai and met with the agents, telling them that the monk was to be superficially wounded, one bullet in the arm and the rest in the air, nothing more. But in the end that little effort came to nothing. They lost their heads and fired indiscriminately.
Five years ago. There have been other things since then and others before then, things you can’t explain to yourself or anyone else, things that just sit there and sit there and never go away, wounds that won’t heal, wounds open to the wind, wounds that reach to the bone. Once I talked to Quin about it and he nodded to himself. He nodded to himself and said nothing, for there was nothing to say. Nothing. He knew what I was talking about.
The General released her hands. He had finished. He went over to the cupboard and took down an unopened bottle of Irish whiskey that had been left untouched for eight years, a gift from Quin at the end of that afternoon and evening on a houseboat in Shanghai. The General never drank whiskey, but tonight he poured himself a large glass and emptied it.
She watched him refill the glass. He sat down beside her and bowed his head so that she could not see his eyes, neither the one with vision nor the one without.
So tell me what you think, he said.
I think you are a brave man, she answered, and I think you’ve done what you believe in. And I feel sorry for that other woman who can’t love a man the way she wants to love him. And I feel sorry for him, for someday he may discover why.
But most of all I don’t think about them at all. I think of my love for you and that’s all I think about, when you’re with me and when you’re not.
Four months passed. Mama was preparing the special rice cakes with which to welcome the New Year. Late in the afternoon she was given the name of a caller. She bathed and dressed in her finest kimono. Lastly she looked in on her sleeping son.
It was snowing when she walked down the open corridor that crossed the garden, toward the soft light that lit the rice paper door of the room where she had played the koto for the General. She watched the snow for a moment before sliding back the door on its runners.
A haggard figure knelt in front of her, his forehead pressed to the tatami. She begged him to rise, to sit by the brazier and warm his hands, surely stiff from the harsh wind of many an unfriendly night. She poured tea and placed the cup before him.