Maeda paused and rifled through his pockets. He pulled out a lighter, shining in his heavy palm, and lit a cigarette. ‘This was Sugiyama’s. Take it. You’ll need it.’ He took a deep drag. ‘Without Sugiyama, there’s nobody to act as censor. There’s already a backlog. For the time being, you’re it.’ He flicked white ash from the tip of his cigarette.
I was horrified. I felt like Abraham having to kill his own son. ‘There are well-qualified guards with more experience than I. And I don’t know what censorship entails.’
‘As far as I’m aware, you’re the right man. You have skills they don’t have.’
‘What are they?’
‘I looked at your records. You were not only a liberal-arts student, but you’d won a prize in the Emperor’s national essay contest. You can find subversive ideas between the lines.’
I understood what Maeda wasn’t saying. There was a hierarchy in the world of guards; exchanges and vigilant competition, surveillance and jealousy, plots and conspiracies helped a guard rise through the ranks. Nobody wanted to sit in a back room like an old man and flip through prisoners’ letters all day. Maeda was boosting my ego to force me to do work nobody else wanted to do. But I didn’t want this, either. I tightened my grip on the lighter. ‘But I’m supposed to settle Sugiyama’s affairs and investigate his death.’
‘Nobody told you to find the murderer,’ Maeda scoffed. ‘That would be impossible. You just have to tie up any loose ends before this gets out. We can’t have detectives from the Special Higher Police poking around. But censorship is different. You can do it.’
Maeda didn’t really seem to want me to conduct a thorough investigation; he was tying me down with censorship duties so that I wouldn’t have enough time even to think about the murder. They must be trying to hush the whole thing up. Why else would the warden entrust me with this investigation?
‘The censorship rules are simple,’ Maeda explained. ‘I don’t have to tell you to burn letters not written in Japanese, right? If you’re not sure, just burn everything. Every last page. Understood? Now, get yourself to the inspection office.’
I realized I didn’t have a choice. I suddenly resented Sugiyama; if he hadn’t died, this wouldn’t be my problem.
The inspection ward was at the end of the corridor. I opened the heavy, squat door to step into Sugiyama’s isolated world. I ducked to go through; a narrow hallway was on the other side. I took a few steps into the darkness, then saw a door to the left. I unlocked the padlock and pushed it open. It was an interrogation room, fitted out with an old wooden desk and two chairs. Sugiyama must have interrogated the authors of seditious writings and the owners of banned books here. At one end was a leather-covered metal chair — a torture rack. I closed the door and locked it. Another door led to the library, filled with wartime citizen-action guides, manuals on how to increase industrial production, educational books emphasizing the duties of the Emperor’s subjects. The inspection office was at the end of the hallway. When I unlocked the big, heavy padlock and opened the door, the scent of paper and dried ink seeped out. I was suddenly overcome. I’d yearned for this musty old smell of dust hovering in the air; I’d been desperate to fall asleep over print. I walked dreamily between the narrow bookshelves. A wooden desk stained with blue ink held the tools of censorship: knife and scissors, magnifying glass and tweezers, red pens and an assortment of dictionaries — Japanese, English, Chinese characters and Korean.
I noticed a shelf lined with files marked ‘File Room Log’, ‘Prohibited Writings Log’, ‘Censor Report’, ‘Log of Documents to Incinerate’. I opened the censor report. Sugiyama had written down the details, pinpointing problematic sections in the prisoners’ writings. The titles of books that had met their deaths were listed on the log of documents to incinerate. Ivan Turgenev’s First Love and Fathers and Sons, a collection of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dante’s Inferno. Sugiyama had slashed through the titles in red ink; it looked as though the dead books were bleeding. The list was expansive, even including a Korean rice-dealer’s credit ledger, and the reason for incineration was given as ‘Infinite repetition of meaningless numbers that cannot be decoded’.
There were two mailbags next to the desk, one with outgoing and the other with incoming post. Prisoners’ postcards mostly requested various goods and necessities from loved ones. They were fated to receive unsatisfactory answers in this time of government rationing. I blacked out troublesome expressions with a thick pen and returned them to the bags. I opened the shallow desk drawer and found a stack of files — the previous year’s duty report, with the cover and steel tie removed. A thought flitted through my head. I took out Sugiyama’s ratty paper from my pocket. The back of the crumpled sheet was dated; it was from an earlier date than the files in the drawer. I flipped a page in the top file and discovered something written on the other side in blue ink:
CONFESSION
In the bronze mirror stained with blue rust
My face remains so disgraced
A relic of which dynasty?
I reduce my confession to one line —
What happiness did I wish for during my twenty-four years and one month?
Tomorrow or the day after, on some happy day
I must write another line of confession
— At that young age back then
Why did I make such a shameful one?
Night after night
With my palm, with the bottom of my foot
I polish my mirror.
In the mirror
I see the back of a sad man
Walking alone under a meteor.
I felt as though I’d been stabbed. The powerful symbolism amplified the anguish running through the poem. The poet’s introspection reminded me of Rilke; his pure, poetic language was reminiscent of Francis Jammes. My head was roiling, fearful and confused, like the ocean on a stormy night. Who wrote this? What did he have to do with Sugiyama? I knew Sugiyama wasn’t the author, from the expression ‘twenty-four years and one month’. After all, Sugiyama had learned to read and write only after his arrival at Fukuoka. Why did he copy this poem and keep it in his drawer? Did this poem have anything to do with the one I had found in his pocket? I examined it again from the beginning, but despite its perfect structure it didn’t allow for easy analysis. Whoever the poet was, he wrote it when he was twenty-four years and one month old. And he’d committed a humiliating act at that time. That was all I could glean. I looked up. The hallway beyond the bookshelves had sunken into black darkness. I rubbed my tired, dry eyes.
The next day I continued with my censor duties, culling books to make room for the next batch to be reviewed. I picked ten books and piled them into a wheelbarrow. Romeo and Juliet, a novel by Stendhal, two volumes of Communist ideology and six Korean books. The incinerator was about fifty metres from the inspection room. I compared the log of confiscated materials with Sugiyama’s list of documents to be incinerated. There was no discrepancy. The incinerator was an altar awaiting offerings. My feet dragged; I felt as reluctant as I imagined an executioner might feel as he climbed up to the gallows. I yanked the door open — the smell of paper, smoke and ash poured out, sending me into a coughing fit. I pulled out the lighter. Flame, not poison and dagger, would kill Romeo and Juliet. A small spark would fell Stendhal. And the Korean authors whose names I couldn’t read — I peered at the faded title on the cover of a Korean book; the author’s name trembled under the bluish light. How would I atone for annihilating the soul of a poet condensed on these pages? It was a good thing I didn’t know Korean; if I did, I doubt I would have been able to burn that book. I squeezed my eyes shut, ripped out the first page and lit it. I threw the whole thing into the incinerator. The flame licked the edges of the book and erupted when it reached the middle. Korean letters, round as well as hard-edged, shrivelled in the fire. Into the blaze I shoved the rest, all of which had once comforted me. All ten books disappeared; only a line of smoke and a fistful of ash remained. I reached out, my hand hovering over the ash blinking with embers. I felt the heat of the dying books. My breath came out ragged, like a whale spouting after a long-held breath; I reminded myself that incineration was a part of my duties as censor, that I’d burned seditious literature confiscated from unwholesome elements. These had to disappear from the world. Although, deep down, I wanted to keep guard over sleeping words and sentences, really I had become an executioner of literature.