I reached out to touch her tail, but she whipped it away from my hand. Then, still naked, she jumped up onto one of the tables. Into my extended palm fell a drop of blood from the ceiling. It was the same intense red as Malta Kano's vinyl hat.
Creta Kano's baby's name is Corsica, Mr. Okada, said Malta Kano from atop her table, her tail twitching sharply.
Corsica?
No man is an island. That Corsica, piped up the black dog, Ushikawa, from somewhere.
Kano's baby? I woke up, soaked in sweat.
It had been a very long time since I last had a dream so long and vivid and unified. And strange. My heart went on pounding audibly for a while after I woke up. I took a hot shower and changed into fresh pajamas. The time was something after one in the morning, but I no longer felt sleepy. To calm myself, I took an old bottle of brandy from the back of the kitchen cabinet, poured a glass, and drank it down.
Then I went to the bedroom to look for Mackerel. The cat was curled up under the quilt, sound asleep. I peeled back the quilt and took the cats tail in my hand to study its shape. I ran my fingers over it, trying to recall the exact angle of the bent tip, when the cat gave an annoyed stretch and went back to sleep. I could no longer say for sure that this was the same exact tail the cat had had when it was called Noboru Wataya. Somehow, the tail on Malta Kano's bottom seemed far more like the real Noboru Wataya cats tail. I could still vividly recall its shape and color in the dream.
Kano's baby's name is Corsica, Malta Kano had said in my dream.
I did not stray far from the house the next day. In the morning, I stocked up on food at the supermarket by the station and made myself lunch. I fed the cat some large fresh sardines. In the afternoon, I took a long-delayed swim in the ward pool. Not many people were there. They were probably busy with New Years preparations. The ceiling speakers were playing Christmas music. I had swum a leisurely thousand meters, when I got a cramp in my instep and decided to quit. The wall over the pool had a large Christmas ornament.
At home, I was surprised to find a letter in the mailbox-a thick one. I knew who had sent it without having to look at the return address. The only person who wrote to me in such a fine hand with an old-fashioned writing brush was Lieutenant Mamiya.
His letter opened with profuse apologies for his having allowed so much time to go by since his last letter. He expressed himself with such extreme politeness that I almost felt I was the one who ought to apologize.
I have been wanting to tell you another part of my story and have thought for months about writing to you, but many things have come up to prevent me from sitting at my desk and taking pen in hand. Now, almost before I realized it, the year has nearly run its course. I am growing old, however, and could die at any moment. I cant postpone the task indefinitely. This letter might be a long one- not too long for you, I hope, Mr. Okada.
When I delivered Mr. Hondo's memento to you last summer, I told you a long story about my time in Mongolia, but in fact there is even more to tell- a sequel, as it were. There were several reasons for my not having included this part when I told you my story last year. First of all, it would have made the tale too long if I had related it in its entirety. You may recall that I had some pressing business, and there simply wasn't time for me to tell you everything. Perhaps more important, I was still not emotionally prepared then to tell the rest of my story to anyone, to relate it fully and honestly.
After I left you, however, I realized that I should not have allowed practical matters to stand in the way. I should have told you everything to the very end without concealment.
I took a machine gun bullet during the fierce battle of August 13, 1945, on the outskirts of Hailar, and as I lay on the ground I lost my left hand under the treads of a Soviet T34 tank. They transferred me, unconscious, to the Soviet military hospital in Chita, where the surgeons managed to save my life. As I mentioned before, I had been attached to the Military Survey Corps of the Kwantung Army General Staff in Hsinching, which had been slated to withdraw to the rear as soon as the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Determined to die, however, I had had myself transferred to the Hailar unit, near the border, where I offered myself up as a human bullet, attacking a Soviet tank with a land mine in my arms. As Mr. Honda had prophesied on the banks of the Khalkha River, though, I was not able to die so easily. I lost only my hand, not my life. All the men under my command, I believe, were killed, however. We may have been acting under orders, but it was a stupid, suicidal attack. Our little portable mines couldn't have done a thing to a huge T34.
The only reason the Soviet Army took such good care of me was that, as I lay delirious, I said something in Russian. Or so they told me afterward. I had studied basic Russian, as I have mentioned to you, and my post in the Hsinching General Staff Office gave me so much spare time, I used it to polish what I knew. I worked hard, so that by the time the war was winding down, I could carry on a fluent conversation in Russian. Many White Russians lived in Hsinching, and I knew a few Russian waitresses, so I was never at a loss for people to practice on. My Russian seems to have slipped out quite naturally while I was unconscious.
The Soviet Army was planning from the outset to send to Siberia any Japanese prisoners of war they took in occupying Manchuria, to use them as forced laborers as they had done with German soldiers after the fighting ended in Europe. The Soviets may have been on the winning side, but their economy was in a critical state after the long war, and the shortage of workers was a problem everywhere. Securing an adult male workforce in the form of prisoners of war was one of their top priorities. For this, they would need interpreters, and the number of these was severely limited. When they saw that I seemed to be able to speak Russian, they shipped me to the hospital in Chita instead of letting me die. If I hadn't babbled something in Russian, I would have been left out there to die on the banks of the Hailar, and that would have been that. I would have been buried in an unmarked grave. Fate is such a mysterious thing!
After that, I was subjected to a grueling investigation and given several months of ideological training before being sent to a Siberian coal mine to serve as an interpreter. I will omit the details of that period, but let me say this about my ideological training. As a student before the war, I had read several banned Marxist books, taking care to hide them from the police, and I was not entirely unsympathetic to the communist line, but I had seen too much to swallow it whole. Thanks to my work with intelligence, I knew very well the bloody history of oppression in Mongolia carried out by Stalin and his puppet dictators. Ever since the Revolution, they had sent tens of thousands of Lamaist priests and landowners and other forces of opposition to concentration camps, where they were cruelly liquidated. And the same kind of thing had happened in the Soviet Union itself. Even if I could have believed in the communist ideology, I could no longer believe in the people or the system that was responsible for putting that ideology and those principles into practice. I felt the same way about what we Japanese had done in Manchuria. I'm sure you cant imagine the number of Chinese laborers killed in the course of constructing the secret base at Hailar- killed purposely so as to shut them up, to protect the secrecy of the bases construction plans.
Besides, I had witnessed that hellish skinning carried out by the Russian officer and his Mongolian subordinates. I had been thrown into a Mongolian well, and in that strange, intense light I had lost any passion for living. How could someone like me believe in ideology and politics? As an interpreter, I worked as a liaison between Japanese prisoners of war in the mine and their Soviet captors. I don't know what it was like in the other Siberian concentration camps, but in the mine where I worked, streams of people were dying every day. Not that there was any dearth of causes: malnutrition, overwork, cave-ins, floods, unsanitary conditions that gave rise to epidemics, winter cold of unbelievable harshness, violent guards, the brutal suppression of the mildest resistance. There were cases, too, of lynchings of Japanese by their fellow Japanese. What people felt for each other under such circumstances was hatred and doubt and fear and despair.