‘What was Sugiyama like then?’ I asked, trying to appease her. Truly, I did want to know about Sugiyama Dozan’s life. I knew she wouldn’t know the whole story, either. But I wanted to know about the aspects of his life that Choi didn’t tell me. The sunset was dissolving now, giving way to crisp darkness that settled beyond the windows.
She looked out. ‘Sugiyama Dozan was a sensitive man. He knew music, appreciated poetry and loved life.’
What killed the gentle Sugiyama was this insane era, these times that demanded ever more blood, ever more hate, ever more death. Incarcerated in his uniform, he died in his own solitary hell.
One snowy winter morning two years ago, as a nurse in the newly established Kyushu Imperial University Medical School infirmary at Fukuoka Prison, Midori stepped onto the prison grounds. Specialists spent all day in the laboratories studying English medical texts, their eyes glued to microscopes, concentrating on significant research. If, thanks to these efforts, they could advance medical knowledge and develop groundbreaking new medications, they would be able to save thousands — even tens of thousands — of lives. Midori was proud to be a member of a team responsible for safeguarding life during this era of slaughter. Nursing was difficult work; she was assigned to double shifts every day.
She heard the name Sugiyama about a fortnight after she began working there.
‘Sugiyama, that son-of-a-bitch. He’s a butcher!’ hollered a worked-up Japanese prisoner with a head injury. ‘He clubs anything that moves. If he didn’t have anyone else to beat up, he’d probably bust his own head open.’
A few days later, a guard came in clutching a swollen finger. Midori secured his finger with a splint and asked how he had injured it. He looked down at his bandaged finger and snapped, ‘The Koreans got into a fight. Sugiyama clubbed one of them over the head and didn’t stop. I ran over to pull him off, but he slapped me away, completely enraged. Eventually he did step back, but if it weren’t for me, that Korean would be dead.’
Sugiyama again. What happened to the Korean who had been beaten like a dog? Was he in solitary, writhing in agony and cradling his broken bones? She realized she had never seen a Korean prisoner in the infirmary. She learned that the prison had a firm policy of disallowing unnecessary medical care for Korean prisoners. Unless there was a special circumstance, the guards sent injured Koreans to solitary confinement instead of the infirmary.
‘I should actually thank him,’ the guard was saying, grinning smarmily. ‘I got to meet a pretty young thing like you.’
Sugiyama’s name continued to come up frequently after that. A prisoner whose shoulder was shattered and a guard who got a fat lip both referred to him resentfully. The gashes and broken bones were enough to paint in her mind’s eye a portrait of a cruel, merciless man who didn’t care a whit about anyone else and forced his rage onto the world. Like a virus, rage spread its roots even into the hearts of good people; it eventually infected her, too. Tending to the cuts and broken bones, she grew hostile towards him. Sugiyama was evil. People like that should be behind bars.
Then, finally, she met Sugiyama in person. Every Monday morning at assembly 200 or so guards and sixty-odd doctors and nurses stood in rows in the auditorium; they acted as one, praising the Empire and the Emperor. The assembly began with a chorus of the ‘Kimigayo’, the national anthem, and ended with three rounds of ‘Long Live the Emperor!’ Midori chafed at its required reverence, but she stood in front and performed dutifully, to be near the piano.
One day, after assembly, she went up to the piano and opened the lid. She wiped the dust off each key with the tip of her finger, wondering whether it still played. She cautiously pressed a key. A low G grasped the ankles of those who had turned to leave. She pressed another key. A silvery F tapped their shoulders. Murmuring, the others waited for the next note. Midori set her hands on the keys and caressed and pounded them in turn. Music spooled out, like silk unravelling from a silkworm’s cocoon.
A young nurse hesitantly sang along. ‘’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam. ’
The melody spread slowly. People’s collective longing was expressed through song. They remembered each of their homes — the guard who’d left his wife behind in far-away Hokkaido, the conscripted guard who thought of his elderly mother in the mountains of Niigata and the intern who missed the meals around his family’s dinner table in Tokyo.
‘Home! Home! Sweet, sweet home! There’s no place like home!’
Everyone lingered after the song was over. Only a long time later did the guards return to the cells, the doctors to the laboratories and the nurses to the infirmary.
Maeda came up behind Midori, furious. ‘What are you doing? How could you play “Home! Sweet Home!” when you are to sing the “Kimigayo” with the resolve to sacrifice your own life for our country?’
It was only then that she realized what she’d done — she’d led the prison in singing an American song.
Warden Hasegawa approached with energetic, powerful steps. ‘Glorious! Good thing we didn’t get rid of this piano. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of listening to this wonderful performance.’ He twisted his neat moustache and asked her who she was.
Director Morioka came up, his thick wavy hair neatly combed back, clad in a white coat and gold neck tie. ‘This is Miss Iwanami Midori, a nurse in the infirmary. She studied the piano from before she entered primary school. She was a promising piano prodigy who won in the Kyushyu piano contest. When her father, a war-department executive, died in the Sino-Japanese War she was forced to give up playing, but — as you can see — she is still very talented.’
Hasegawa let out a delighted exclamation. Everything Morioka described contained all that he desired for himself, but had to satisfy through mimicry: the ability to purchase an expensive musical instrument, a sensibility to appreciate music, a sophisticated character.
The piano had come to the prison more than ten years earlier, before the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, when Fukuoka was a peaceful city known for hosting a large contingent of foreign businessmen on leisure trips. Stevenson, an American importer and a music lover, wanted music to flow through the utilitarian prison. The day the piano arrived, Stevenson held a small performance by an amateur choir that he led. Since then, the piano had languished in a corner of the dark auditorium, covered in dust. Disinterest, humidity, dust, bugs and mice had all attacked it. The strings lost their innate sounds and the frame warped. Many suggested that the eyesore be tossed, or hacked apart to donate the steel strings to the war effort.
‘Awful sound,’ said a rough, creaky voice behind Hasegawa. Everyone turned to look at the guard with wide, sturdy shoulders and a long scar down his cheek. He was looking down at the keys disapprovingly.
Midori closed the lid and stood up. ‘I’m sorry if you didn’t like my playing.’
‘No need to be sorry. Your playing isn’t what’s awful. I don’t have the ability or the desire to judge how you play.’
Hasegawa tensed his small, hard body. ‘Sugiyama!’ he shouted. ‘How can you say something like that? You don’t know a thing about music!’
Midori shivered. It was that menacing butcher, the monster who broke countless bones and ripped flesh.
Sugiyama replied tersely, ‘I don’t know much about music, but I do know about sounds.’
‘What? What could you possibly know about sounds?’
Instead of answering, he approached the piano and put a hand on the keys. Hasegawa watched him in surprise. Sugiyama pressed two keys at the same time. He pressed five keys down. A heavy, powerful noise filled the auditorium. He closed his eyes, gauging the resonance and power of each note. ‘This piano has lost its sound.’