he whose weaving makes a steady sound,
when at midnight the crickets sing shrilly;
he who bakes bread, he who makes wine,
he who sows garlic and cabbages in the garden,
he who gathers warm eggs.
He was stunned. No matter how carefully he read the poem, there was nothing seditious about it. There was no hidden code or concealed plot. The poem merely praised leading a peaceful life, at one with nature, a humble existence in the countryside. It celebrated waking to the crow of the rooster and working hard, before falling asleep to the sound of crickets. Sugiyama’s gaze dulled. He didn’t believe in happiness — it existed only in the chatter of weak romantics. He worked hard to dismiss the small peace inherent in the everyday, because he’d never been happy. Could it be that he’d ignored contentment, thinking it a desperate dream?
After a very long time he stamped the postcard with a bang, marking it with the blue Censorship Completed stamp. He was a failure; he hadn’t discovered any banned communications. The postcard would fly to a young boy waiting for his father in a shabby shack in the alleys near Kobe harbour. The boy would read Francis Jammes. The postcard would deliver him the grit to deal with the weight and pain of life during wartime.
After that, unfamiliar names and phrases began appearing in outgoing post, including stanzas cited in ways appropriate for each recipient’s age and situation. Hiranuma seemed to have in his head a huge catalogue of poems perfect for any situation. One prisoner sent a postcard to his wife containing the entirety of ‘Prayer to Have a Simple Wife’. A man sending a postcard to his girlfriend included a love-poem by Goethe. Sugiyama scoured the library to look for the writers and works cited in each of the postcards. He didn’t miss a single name or book. When he spotted Tolstoy’s name, he read all of Tolstoy’s books. Night after night he wandered amid the suspicious phrases. He couldn’t find anything to censor, but that didn’t lower his wariness.
The prisoners changed, too. Smiles replaced their curses. A single phrase pushed men who didn’t think past that evening to start counting the days until their release. Men who fought incessantly became calm; the brawls that occurred on a daily basis decreased. Sugiyama watched the men hold replies from their loved ones, wiping away tears with their sleeves. Every change seemed to stem from the postcards. He began to wonder; one sentence seemed to change a man, and the world seemed to change, one man at a time.
As summer deepened, Sugiyama spent one entire night reviewing a postcard from a prisoner to his son. It was a reply to the son’s complaints of being teased because of the family name they had chosen to acquire. Kaneyama was painfully obviously Korean — it was simply the Japanese pronunciation of the Korean surname Kim, plus the Japanese suffix ‘yama’. The postcard consoled the son, telling him that dealing with insults was the stepping stone to living a proud life:
Don’t be sad about your name. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare wrote, ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.’ A name isn’t important. What’s important is having your own scent.
Sugiyama found a reference to the play in the log of confiscated documents and rushed to the library. He found it in box 486. Discovering that Shakespeare was British, Sugiyama let out a yelp of joy. It would be easy to find this undesirable; after all, this writer was from an enemy country. He cautiously opened the dangerous book. It turned out to be a love-story. Romeo, a son of the Montagues; Juliet, a daughter of the Capulets; a ball; a romance that couldn’t be consummated because of the feuding families. He flipped faster through the pages. A duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, death, exile, Juliet asleep after taking the potion from Friar Lawrence. Romeo drinking poison. Juliet stabbing herself in the heart.
He sat back, haunted by the beautiful scenes in Verona, the conversations between Romeo and Juliet and the afterglow of doomed love. Sugiyama shook his head to clear his thoughts. Romeo and Juliet was clearly problematic. Not only was it by a writer of an enemy country, but it was also all about a decadent love, and the death-filled conclusion stank of pessimism. But he couldn’t pick up his red stamp. Had his censorship criteria turned too compassionate? He didn’t want to be rash and stop the postcard’s transit. Otherwise, who would console the child? He finally thought of a compromise. If he questioned Hiranuma, he could obtain a more accurate interpretation.
The sunlight seared the prison yard. The thick brick walls radiated heat and the workroom boiled as if they were the inside of a pot. During their free time prisoners rushed to the shade provided by the walls as though they were escaping hell. They sat around and talked urgently, hungrily. One man would speak passionately for a while, then another man would start. They took turns, like actors onstage.
Sugiyama shook his head. As he crossed the yard, hot air snaked around his calves under his gaiters. He walked the way he typically did, his upper body swaying from side to side and his legs spread apart, taking big steps. Prisoners shrank away from his arrogant, militaristic gait. They didn’t know it was the only way he could stand the pain from a gunshot wound in his thigh. He headed to the hill, the site of the execution range and the cemetery. Three tall poplar trees stood side-by-side, but their sparse branches didn’t create any shade. The prisoners murmured about ghosts wandering here, nooses still hanging around their necks; the guards, too, disliked patrolling the area at night.
Hiranuma was sitting against a tree. Sugiyama could hear him whistling.
‘645! Whistling, are we? Feeling good then?’
Hiranuma didn’t answer. His eyes were cool and empty.
‘Hiranuma Tochu!’ Sugiyama shouted. ‘Answer me! Will you bark only if I beat you like a dog?’ He used his club to push the prisoner’s chin up.
Hiranuma looked down. ‘My name isn’t 645 or Hiranuma Tochu. My name is Yun. Dong. Ju.’
Sugiyama tensed. Was this a trap? Did he toss in that bit about Shakespeare, about names and existence, to pull Sugiyama into this long-standing controversy over Koreans being forced to take Japanese names? Even better. Then they wouldn’t need to talk around the subject.
Sugiyama smiled and plucked a blade of grass to chew on; its bitterness filled his mouth.
‘Yun Dong-ju or Hiranuma, who cares? You’re you, whatever you may be called.’ Sugiyama recalled Juliet’s words, which he’d read the previous night:
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy:
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
‘A rose by any other name still smells the same,’ Sugiyama continued stiffly. ‘A name means nothing. What’s important is your essence. Whether you’re Yun Dong-ju or Hiranuma Tochu, you’re a cheeky, stubborn Korean.’