I opened the report file and sharpened my stubby pencil. ‘331! How long have you been digging that underground tunnel?’ I knew I wouldn’t get an answer. He had withstood twenty-four hours of beatings so far. I got up, shovelled some peat into the furnace and lit it. The light from the weak fire danced on his blood-soaked face.
‘It’s all over,’ 331 moaned, his voice hoarse. ‘All that’s left for me is death. I guess all I can do is confess. I might as well tell you.’
‘And why would you tell me, when you didn’t open your mouth while you were being beaten to a pulp?’
‘You figured it out. You read the solitary-wing log and found out that I’m a regular in solitary. Nobody even imagined what was going on, but you deduced what I was doing in there. I think you’ll accept my terms.’
‘What terms? I’m only a guard. If you want to negotiate, do it with the head guard or the warden.’
‘No. They just want to kill me. You — you’re interested in the stories. About me. About the prison.’
‘I don’t have the power to let you live.’
‘I don’t expect that. Just write down what I tell you. Don’t remove a single word and don’t add anything. Of course, you may not believe me. You might think I’m pulling your leg. But you can’t edit it. You have to record what I say, word for word.’
‘And why would I do that?’
‘Somebody needs to record what is going on in here. So people will know what happened, when the war ends.’
‘The regulations are to destroy documents after a certain time. No record exists forever.’
Prisoner 331 threw me a confident smile and pointed at my head. ‘At least what’s recorded in there won’t disappear. The walls of this terrible place will crumble and documents will burn, but the memories in your head will remain. So don’t you die until the war’s over!’ His eyes flashed.
I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what he wanted out of this. I doubted he’d tell me the truth. Even if he did, I was sure it would be bait for some scheme.
‘Seven years,’ he blurted out, disregarding my confusion. ‘It’s been almost seven years since I came to this hellhole.’
I picked up my pencil. The recycled paper waited hungrily to record his story.
‘From the day I got here I dreamed of escaping,’ he said. ‘I dug the tunnel to escape from death, but it turns out what I dug was the road to death.’
Choi arrived at Fukuoka Prison in July 1938 for the attempted assassination of a prominent figure and the instigation of rebellion. He had spent half his life being hounded and the other half in prison. As a teenager he was pursued by the police for setting fire to several public buildings. The year he turned twenty he crossed the Tumen River. Manchuria was an ideal place for Koreans; they weren’t oppressed by the Japanese Government-General of Korea or the vicious Special Higher Police, and they weren’t subject to the violence of Japanese merchants. He settled in a Korean neighbourhood in Mukden. He frequented gambling dens and bars, shouting and cursing. He honed his fighting skills. Soon he was earning bundles of cash from the barwoman who pleaded with him to collect overdue bar tabs on her behalf, from the rice dealer who asked him to find the employee who’d stolen from him, and from the business magnate who tasked him with killing his cheating wife’s lover.
One day he was hanging around a gambling den when a man with small rat-like eyes approached him. Choi drank with the man for a couple of hours, then packed his bags and followed him out of town. They walked for two days until they arrived at a cave in the mountains, where twenty bearded men in animal pelts were hiding, exhausted from anxiety and hunger. These men had lost everything to the Japanese. Their rice paddies and houses had been expropriated; their food, belongings and wives had been taken through allocated collection; their home towns and language obliterated. They were willing to do anything just to kill some Japs. The problem was that nobody had ever killed a single one. A man with a thick beard introduced himself as the commander of an autonomous anti-Japanese guerrilla unit; in reality, they were merely a gang of thieves who swung their fists at Korean merchants under the guise of building a war chest. The commander was a drunk and welcomed Choi’s fists and big ideas, thinking that they would help the unit grow into the most feared in Mukden, but he soon kicked himself for his stupidity — Choi was not an obedient dog, he was a wolf. Choi became the leader of a subset gang that threatened the commander’s position. The commander, unable to wrest control, leaked false information to a Japanese spy: that a man named Choi Chi-su was planning to lead an attack on the Kwantung Army’s Mukden headquarters.
The Kwantung Army marched through the hills at battalion strength. Instead of mobilizing the troops, the Japanese commander waited for the guerrillas to emerge on their own. A long confrontation ensued. The rugged geography was on the rebels’ side. The gang climbed over the cliffs and left the valley before the Kwantung Army reached the cave. Choi headed towards the Siberian Maritime Province with more than twenty men. They lived like wild creatures of the night, scaling mountains after dark and sleeping under leaves during the day. When they arrived at their destination, the gang had shrunken to fourteen; cold, hunger and beasts had reduced their ranks. Rumours about the fearsome band of thieves from Mukden preceded them to the Siberian Maritime Province, where they were organized under the command of the Russian Communists. That was where Choi encountered Marx’s ideas; Choi’s talent for fighting and dreams of destroying the Japs grew even fiercer. Six months later he’d turned into a loyal Communist. His unit attacked a Japanese ordnance corps and seized its train and assassinated a Kwantung Army general and commander; the Siberian Maritime Province soon became their territory. But it wasn’t enough for Choi; he knew he was fated for greatness. Wanting more intense battles with more enemies, he headed to Vladivostok. He sneaked into the belly of a ship, covered in the stench of disintegrating produce and fish, and disembarked in brightly lit Tokyo Bay three days later.
The Communist organization extended like a vine everywhere; in Tokyo it was centred on Korean students studying abroad, who had learned about Communism from books and didn’t know how to act on their rage. They stayed up all night memorizing manuals on fighting, but didn’t know how to apply their learning to the Japs. They agonized over their sterile ideology, debating useless theory hundreds of times. Choi blamed books for delaying revolution; in his mind, writing was a tool that allowed the powerful to oppress the weak for thousands of years. The rich incarcerated the poor using law books, loan sharks oppressed the poor with their ledgers, and officials had used the king’s directives to suck the people dry. He couldn’t wait for a book-free world. He attended a Korean student meeting in Tokyo and mocked them: ‘You so-called intellectuals have imprisoned yourselves behind letters,’ he announced. ‘You’re weak. You’re unable to take any action. That’s what the Japs want — to create bookworms who can’t act. You want to overthrow the Japs, but all you do is wriggle in the mud.’
Disgusted, Choi established his own Communist cell in the Tokyo area. Soon there was a spike in arson and attacks on officials, bankers and the heads of defence contractors. The Special Higher Police didn’t realize that they were the acts of a foreign Communist; they thought they were isolated instances of increased violence as society became unsettled. Three years after he arrived in Japan, Choi planned the best plot of his life, the one attack that would return the whole warped situation to normal. It was 29 April, the Emperor’s birthday. He would bomb the Emperor’s celebration at Ueno Park, attended by high-level army generals, the Interior Minister and others. His assistant was a Korean student named Kim Gwing-pil, who had been studying chemistry at Rikkyo University when he received his conscription notice. He’d been on the run since then. Kim, who wore round eye-glasses, looked every bit the intellectual. Choi asked if he could make a bomb. Kim assented, requesting a hideout in return. He stayed up all night, reading books about gunpowder and explosives that Choi procured for him. No matter what happened, he had to make a bomb by 28 April.