‘I’m not talking about death, I’m talking about life.’
Sugiyama’s eyes burned red. The young man’s calm stare and the guard’s heated gaze met in the air, tussling silently. ‘I read a poem of yours. Since you said the poem was the road to understanding your truth, I figured the quickest route would be to read it. But you lied. There was nothing to be found in your poem. It was the weak, emotional drivel of an immature girl.’
The young man’s brow furrowed.
Sugiyama felt triumphant, believing that he’d hurt Prisoner 645’s pride. But the lump of emotion he’d sensed when he read ‘Prologue’ remained steadfast. Feigning calm, he said, ‘I did think of one thing when I read your poem.’
Prisoner 645 looked up at him.
Sugiyama hesitated a moment. ‘You don’t need to believe in something like God.’
‘Why’s that?’
Because He’s already in your heart. But Sugiyama swallowed the words. He didn’t want the prisoner to know that he’d been moved by a silly poem.
His cap pressed low over his eyes, Sugiyama walked down among the narrow bookshelves. The dark quiet seeped into his body. He heard a low whisper. He stopped and listened, but the sound disappeared. Was he hearing things? As he aged, his own body was attacking itself. His eyes dimmed, his ears heard phantom sounds, his joints creaked, his skin sagged and his bones were unable to hold up his weight. That was Sugiyama’s current stage of life. He’d lived so roughly that his body was deteriorating quickly.
He found himself standing in front of the shelf holding box 645. He looked down and was startled to find his hands already holding the box. This is what happens when you get older, he thought to himself. Your body doesn’t listen to you any more. The manuscript he’d stuffed back in the box was still there. Sugiyama drew in a sharp breath, promising himself that he wouldn’t be shaken by sentimental feelings, no matter what. He collapsed into his chair and turned the thin page with his stubby fingers:
NIGHT SEEN ON MY RETURN
I return to my small room as though returning from the world and turn out the light. Leaving the light on is ever so exhausting as it is the extension of day —
Now I should open the window to air out my room, but when I look outside it is dark like the inside of the room, like the world, and the path I took through the rain is still wet.
Without any way to wash myself of the day’s pent-up anger I quietly close my eyes and a sound flows through my heart; ideology ripens on its own like a crab apple.
Sugiyama’s voice, hoarse from yelling and swearing, was reading the poem out loud reverently as though in prayer. He was afraid he would be weakened by the beauty of the words and their warm consolation, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the poem. His life had been one long wearisome struggle; he deserved some relief, even briefly. Some men went around with their pasts pinned to their chests like medals, gloating about the number of men they killed or maimed in battle; to him, the past wasn’t something to be proud of. His life had been wind-swept and precarious, like a winter river topped with thin ice. He’d been born into stench, into the dust. Soon after birth he was abandoned at a fish market on the Kobe coast. A few merchants at the market looked after him. By the time he was seven, he was cleaning fish; by the time he was twelve he was out on a boat. His hard work helped him mature physically faster than his peers and his strength soon became his sole asset. When he was fifteen a group of Kobe riff-raffs picked a fight with him. He shattered noses and cheekbones and arms. When five more thugs came after him, he sent them packing with broken teeth and shattered wrists. The merchants began to avoid him and the captains didn’t want him on their boats; the fish market spat him out. The gang had threatened the merchants and captains, forcing them to cut their ties with him out of revenge. Sugiyama had nowhere to go. He ended up joining the very gang that had been the cause of his problems. Life in the back alleys wasn’t always bad. The rules made sense to him. If you didn’t eat, you would be eaten; whatever you didn’t steal, you would lose. His fists were precise and efficient. Soon a modifier followed his name: he was Sugiyama the Dog, Sugiyama the Butcher.
One day he was pacing the garden of a high-level official’s house that he’d been assigned to guard. He heard something — a piano. Sugiyama looked up at the second-storey window, searching for the source, and saw the undulating, round shoulders of a young woman. That brief moment altered him forever. He was twenty years old. The notes of the piano coasting on the fine flow of air tugged at a heart that knew nothing of music. He knew he would worship that sound for the rest of his life. Something began to form inside him, feelings that had atrophied in the years ruled by punches. Little did he know that an eye for beauty was tucked away in his nature. The notes created a web and hung in the air. He felt at peace; the music flowed through his veins and rattled his dead heart.
A few days later he decided to learn how to tune a piano. He began working as an errand boy at a piano shop in Kobe. His touch with the piano was inborn; in a mere instant he learned skills that took most people three years. He didn’t know whether it was because of a natural artistic sense and excellent hearing or because of the young woman. Within a year he’d become a tuner, handling delicate strings with the same hands he’d used to beat people with. He caressed the piano, imagining he was touching her, and she played for him. But their happiness was as fleeting as a drop of water on the surface of glass. The year he turned twenty-four a red notice struck him across the face and he was conscripted. As a soldier, he suffered through snowstorms, sandstorms and mud, dust, exhaustion and death. Somehow, he survived. He thought of her all along. Surviving was the only way to preserve the sound of her piano; surviving was the sole blessing in his life.
Or maybe it was a curse.
HOW DO SENTENCES SAVE THE SOUL?
The warm April breeze wafted over the towering walls and scattered a subtle scent around the desolate prison; flowers opened and dusted pollen into the air, luring honeybees. Blood circulated anew in the prisoners’ faces, festering toes healed and new flesh grew on cracked hands. All Hiranuma wanted was to survive this place. If he lived, he could write poetry again. Every morning, before he got up, he erased the numbers he’d etched on the wall next to his head, bitterly resolute, counting down the days to 30 November 1945.
The prison was a melting pot of the human condition. Housed here were ideological prisoners and assassins, con men and fugitives. They shared only one trait: they all insisted on their innocence. But they were all lying. Their wrongdoings weren’t serious, sometimes not even crimes: they didn’t deserve to be thrown behind bars. A docker had chased after a woman he loved and was accused of raping her; a guard overseeing a conscript’s forced-labour unit got him in prison out of hatred; a man knocked on his boss’s door to ask for back-pay and was charged with attempted murder. Everyone talked about their heroic exploits, and each time someone spat out indifferently, ‘Hell, there’s nobody here who isn’t falsely charged!’ The prisoners launched violent attacks on one another. Hiranuma felt only pity. He thought violence was the only way for prisoners to stand up against their fate.
One day, during their daily outdoor break, an old man with short greying hair and a wily look came up to Hiranuma. ‘You’re so gentle,’ he remarked, air whistling out of the gaps in his teeth. ‘You don’t belong in here. What crime did you commit that brought you to this place?’