‘It would be easier to ask your fellow guards about his life. Why are you asking me, of all people?’ Hiranuma seemed anxious to leave as soon as possible.
‘Because you’re the one person who really knew him.’
He studied me carefully. After a long time he replied in a calm voice, ‘He was a poet. He was the most wonderful poet I’ve ever met.’
Sugiyama Dozan was a poet. But not at first. At the beginning he was quite different. He despised literature and looked down on those, like Hiranuma, who believed they could make something out of words.
Hiranuma came to Fukuoka Prison in the spring of 1944. With fourteen other men he stepped behind walls that aged him instantly. Exhaustion and fear grew like liver spots on his face, his bones protruded, the heels of his sockless feet cracked and the back of his frost-bitten hands chapped. With dim eyes he gazed at his reality — the barbed wire, the bars and the thick steel doors that blocked his vision. He was puzzled as to why he was here, dragged in by a few lines and a couple of documents — his banned Korean poems, police reports, the prosecutor’s indictment and the judge’s ruling. At Fukuoka he moved slowly, passing through the shadows of the tall watchtower and the cold brick walls. He went into the disinfection room and was doused in white powder. He was given an old prisoner uniform. He wondered whether the person who’d worn it before him had left this place alive. He walked along the long corridor into the musty unknown, his own feet crushing his consciousness. Cell 28, Ward Three. That first night he hunched in a corner like a crumpled piece of paper as despair soaked into his marrow.
The Korean prisoners were clustered together at the sunny spot below the wall, when they heard a thin, smooth, wind-like whistling. Sugiyama slid the club out of his belt and looked for the source. It was Prisoner 645, standing at the foot of the bare hill. Sugiyama’s steps instinctively quickened into a run.
‘645! What are you doing here, all alone?’ Sugiyama’s voice, out of breath, was on edge. He aimed his club at the young man’s neck, ready to break his shoulder.
645 stopped whistling. ‘Is it a crime to whistle?’ he asked gravely, his voice sinking like sediment.
This young man was everything Sugiyama derided: a recalcitrant Korean political prisoner who violated the Maintenance of Public Order Act, and an intellectual on top of that. With the tip of his blood-crusted club, Sugiyama pushed the young man’s chin up. ‘Listen carefully. This is Fukuoka Prison and I’m Sugiyama Dozan. You’re behind bars. You can’t whistle. And you certainly can’t write.’
‘So what can I do?’
‘It would be easier to ask what you can’t do.’
‘Then what can’t I do?’
‘You can’t do whatever it is you’re trying to do right now!’ Sugiyama’s teeth were set on edge. A flock of black crows flew up noisily into the ashy sky.
‘One’s heart can’t be incarcerated or taken away.’ 645’s voice rustled like a leaf in the wind, lustreless, tired and trembling.
Sugiyama despised the educated. They were arrogant, and clueless. With their puny words they sucked off someone else’s sweat and tears, mumbling nonsensical poems and reciting unintelligible phrases. ‘No lies and exaggerations and sweet talk allowed here. This is Fukuoka Prison, and I’m watching your every move.’ Sugiyama swung, and his club landed heavily on 645’s shoulder; the young man fell to the ground, his shoulder dislocated.
He looked up at Sugiyama, his face contorted in pain. Sugiyama was struck by the look in the prisoner’s eyes — they were filled with pity, not resentment.
Back in his office, Sugiyama flipped through the log of confiscated items. 645. Hiranuma Tochu. The log showed that he had an unpublished poetry collection, The Sky, the Wind, the Stars and Poetry, thirty additional poems and a total of twenty-eight books. Sugiyama headed to the library. Boxes were lined up on the shelves. Sugiyama opened Hiranuma’s box. He saw faded titles on dirty, well-worn covers; books by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, André Gide, Francis Jammes, Rainer Maria Rilke and some Korean writers. He spotted a bundle of paper shoved into one corner.
The Sky, the Wind, the Stars and Poetry.
Cautiously, as if he were searching an enemy camp, Sugiyama turned the first page. And with stern eyes he glared at the neat strokes:
PROLOGUE
— The Sky, the Wind, the Stars and Poetry
Let me look up to the heavens
Without a speck of shame
Until the day I die.
I was in agony
Even from the wind rustling among leaves
I shall love every dying being
Singing of the stars
And I shall walk
On the path given to me.
Tonight too the stars brush against the wind.
These average, nondescript sentences pummelled Sugiyama’s temples. How could ten lines make him breathless and dazed? He didn’t realize that reading a single poem was equivalent to getting to know the world inhabited by the writer, expanding his senses beyond the usual five. He stuffed the manuscript back in the box. He wanted to flee — from this man, his writings, this poem. Sugiyama was firm in his belief that writing was a contaminant; it ruined people, concealed weak spirits and unmoored pity, ridiculous optimism and foolish dreams. Writers led an idle life in the name of romance, dazzled by clever lines, infected by anarchism. Poets believed they could change people and the world. Sugiyama straightened his guard cap. He would banish this absurd poem that flickered its evil tongue. He banged the square, long-handled stamp onto the manuscript:
To Be Incinerated.
He dipped his dry pen into the inkwell and filled out the incineration log:
Prologue (The Sky, the Wind, the Stars and Poetry) –
Author: Hiranuma Tochu
His hand, holding the pen, trembled. His office felt unusually cold. He put his pen down; the young man’s pale face loomed in his memory. Sugiyama hesitated for a moment. There was no need for this to be incinerated right away. He should first interrogate and punish the prisoner who wrote this seditious poem.
War dragged on. Prisoner 645 was curled up on the floor of his cell. Last summer his life had ended in a single instant, and nightmares had slammed him against the cold floor. He was no longer a university student, a young man agonizing about the times; he wasn’t spending every waking moment reading or taking long walks. Now he was ‘an element of the Korean Independence Movement’ implicated in the ‘Kyoto Korean Student Nationalist Group Incident’.
On the morning of 14 July 1943 a handful of burly men rushed into Takeda Boarding House. They were Special Higher Police detectives from Shimogamo Police Station in Kyoto. They grabbed Hiranuma’s arms as he was about to step out of the house. The detectives threw him into a holding cell at the station, but did nothing more for two days, as though they enjoyed watching someone go mad behind bars. On the third day Hiranuma was called into the narrow box of an interrogation room. Across from him sat Detective Koroki, who opened the thick file on the desk containing a police surveillance log detailing Hiranuma’s every movement during the preceding year: how many people drank how many bottles of what kind of liquor in which bar on which day, what they discussed and what time he returned home and switched off the lights.
According to Koroki, Hiranuma’s cousin, Song Mong-gyu, had been arrested with other conspirators four days earlier. Song was the alleged leader of a seditious organization, and Korean students who didn’t even know each other were linked through him. Song had made the police blacklist for his past enrolment in a Chinese officer school. The exact account of the incident, accomplices, the charge and prison term were arranged in a perfect script. The incident, later known as the Kyoto Korean Student Nationalist Group Incident, occurred when Song and Hiranuma allegedly gathered Korean students in Kyoto and plotted to fight for Korean independence and support Korean culture. The Special Higher Police detectives simply took issue with anything to do with Korea, and Hiranuma happened to be Korean. Koroki tossed a bundle of papers on the desk. Hiranuma recognized the scent wafting from his manuscript of poems — that of a warm tatami room, accidentally spilled ink, dreams that vanished into the ether — and looked down at the bundle before him.