A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (17 page)

Yuko leaned against the door. ‘And you believed the letter you received back?'

‘Why would I not? The feelings were so heartfelt. Your mother left no room for doubt. I believed you hated me.'

She sighed. ‘What if I'd seen your letter? Would we be here today, like this?'

He stared off into space. ‘It's too late to ask these questions.'

Yuko said he sounded sad but angry too. What more could he expect? What more could either of them expect? Eight years is nothing to the world but something to the human heart.

‘Where did you go, Jomei? Where did you learn to speak English? Abroad?' He shook his head, looked to the ground as if wrestling with some moment of confession. ‘Maybe I'll tell you one day, Yuko, but not tonight, not now.' She had one more question to ask then no more. ‘I loved you, Jomei. I learned not to over the years; at least, I thought I had. When I never heard from you, I decided Mother was right, I meant nothing to you. You never loved me. Is that true?'

Sato shook his head and took her chin in his hand, tender with the truth. ‘Yuko, how can you say that? I've never loved anyone but you.'

Not my letter, not their forced separation, not marriage, not even the war could stop what happened next.

‘We kissed on that doorstep, with caution and care. No more words were spoken. We had found one another again. I took his hand and led him through the house to my bedroom. Of course I thought of Shige but I stilled my mind long enough to see only Jomei in front of me. I could not resist him, I never could. He is my drug, my opium. Chinatown and Iō
j
ima seem foreign countries. We are no longer those people. We are new and different. I am grateful for his return. The dawn is rising and Jomei has just left. We did not talk of love when we parted. We will not speak of love when we meet again. There is no need. He is the secret I stitch into my heart.'

Satori: In the Buddhist philosophy, spiritual enlightenment constitutes attainment of transcendental wisdom by intuitive insight. According to Zen sects, it is the realisation of Buddhahood inherent in human beings. They believe that the attainment of this wisdom will lead one to the state of freedom from karma and suffering (bonno), or to the state of nirvana (nehan), which is the ultimate goal of Buddhism.

I knew from Sato's letters that he learned to speak English in China. No wonder he did not tell Yuko where he had gone after he left Nagasaki. His silence just proved the moral coward he was. Confessions to a dead woman are meaningless. In 1937, he and Natsu had moved back to his home town of Kumamoto, a few hours east of Nagasaki. His father-in-law had found him a position at a hospital, where he specialised in immunology, specifically in organ transplantation. Four years passed before the war caught up with him and he was dispatched to Shanxi in the north of China. He was part of a medical team preparing doctors on their way to the front line. Some of the medics had never seen a bullet wound or had never had to treat mass cases of dysentery, typhoid or tuberculosis. Sato was expected to help make them battle-ready.

On my first day in the operating theatre my superior, Masaru Hayashi, told me we would run through some basic surgeries, while a group of ten doctors observed. He would lead and I would assist. Two guards brought a Chinese prisoner to the room. He was young, in farmer's clothes. The nurse told him to lie on the table and she administered anaesthesia to his spine. ‘Can you feel your legs?' she asked but he did not reply. Next she tried to give him chloroform and maybe then he realised what was about to happen. He began to struggle and some of the men held him down until he became still. Then we began our procedures, first with the removal of his appendix, next a leg and finally we lacerated his bowel and tried to repair it. When he was dead we let the men practise dissections. My hands were shaking as I scrubbed down. Hayashi noticed and this embarrassed me. As he left for the canteen, he said, ‘It gets easier, don't worry.' Yuko, he was right.

This might have been his war had it not been for a visitor to the hospital at the start of 1942 who went by the name of General Shiro Ishii. Sato had shown the general around the facilities and, a month later, a letter came and, as instructed, he took a train to Harbin city. The stench of manure in the streets from the horse carts was overpowering as he walked to the bus station past opulent carved facades and shining domes built during the time of the Russian tsars. The trip to the village of Pingfang, past fields of red sorghum, took an hour. Inside an innocuous-looking building of yellow stone with a red-tiled roof a professor from Osaka led him through
his induction: division one researched the bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid and tuberculosis; division two developed warfare and field experiments; division three was the factory that produced biological agents in artillery shells; division four made other agents; division five looked after training; the last divisions were responsible for equipment.

The professor told Sato he would be placed in division one. He opened a filing cabinet thick with files and explained how their patients came marked for special deportation as ‘die-hard anti-Japanese' or ‘incorrigible'. Most were Chinese civilians but sometimes enemy soldiers were used. He said the locals had been told the site was a water plant or a lumber facility. The professor rapped the metal cabinet with his knuckles. ‘These are our little logs.' Sato had ended up at what was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. He and his colleagues called it Unit 731. Here his knowledge of immunology and transplantation was tested to its limits. If Shanxi had been the descent into hell, Pingfang was the final destination.

At first he only worked on animals. He administered shots of cyanide, nitric acid and strychnine nitrate to rabbits and made notes on their seizures. But a month after he arrived he was given a security pass to two buildings inside an inner court, separated from the rest of the complex by an iron gate. Here he found bacteriological scholars from prestigious universities who showed him their studies, explained what they had learned, what hypothesis they hoped to test next. He watched
researchers culture bacteria or breed fleas. He helped technicians, naked apart from white gowns, flash red lights in black rooms to coax the fleas into the dark of a waiting cylinder. The parasites would then be released in cages among rats infected with the bubonic plague. Later the prisoners would be selected. Every night he took baths in disinfectant, his skin stinking and bleached, but his mind could not be so easily sterilised.

I told myself this was science, the advances made would benefit all humanity. Breakthroughs in medicine take extraordinary measures. I tried to see the prisoners used as one might those lab rats. But I could not escape the question, how to live with all the suffering we inflicted? How to face the memory of those shouts of ‘Japanese devils' from the prisoners when we came for them? The screams followed by silence. How to live with all that knowledge we acquired? I promised myself one day this would be over. I would take what I had learned and leave. And I did but I could never forget. What would you have said had I told you who I truly was that night on your doorstep? You could not have loved the man I was and so I hid the devil from Pingfang from you. But I cannot undo these deeds. The monster is me.

On days off, he would take the bus to a place where he could forget the work he did for his country. Customers chose their women from photographs displayed on a wooden veranda. They all had flower names: Peony, Chrysanthemum, Lotus, Plum Blossom. They even had a Western woman at the pleasure palace, Rose. He found
her lying on a filthy futon, coiled up, foetal. She flinched when he knocked and entered, drew her knees higher. Her soles were bare, black with the journey she had taken. Her calves were thick and stained with dirt. He could not see her face but her hair was worn loose, dirty brown, knotted down her back. He imagined lice laying eggs in those unwashed follicles. He moved to the window and began to smoke. The tobacco roused her and slowly she turned around. He could not determine her age but he learned later she was thirty-four. She had two children, alive somewhere, she hoped. Her cheeks had the hollow mark of malnutrition, her mouth stretched in a mock smile, the grimace of starvation. Her nose was long and thin. Her forehead and eyes were too large for her head, like a fly, but her body was solid despite her hunger.

‘Cigarette,' she said in English and then she repeated the word in Japanese.

‘You speak Japanese?'

She held out a palm and he moved toward her and gave her the one in his mouth. ‘A little.'

‘Your name is Rose?'

She considered the word for a moment and shook her head. She pointed at his pocket and he handed her another cigarette. She took it, moved from her bed and placed her prize on the windowsill, where she perched looking out through the shreds of an orange curtain.

‘My name is Alva.'

They smoked in silence and when she had finished her cigarette she undid the buttons of her dress, once patterned with pink rose buds long turned grey. She stood up and pulled the fabric over her head. Bruises were
patterned yellow and green and purple and black over her breasts and hips. Teeth marks were pressed into her back. She took his hand and led him to the squalor of her bed. He would never forget the smell of sweat and blood and other men. She took his hand and pressed his fingers between her legs, until she was wet enough to be ready for him. When he was done, she walked to a bucket of water, wrang out a cloth and wiped herself down. ‘Next time, bring me a packet of cigarettes.'

Sato worried about diseases carried by the other men but he couldn't resist the foreignness of her. He did not want to be reminded of home. He bought her cigarettes and medicine and once a new dress he found at a street stall. Alva never wore it. She told him she would do so when she left the comfort palace. She wanted to look pretty when she met her children again, if she ever did. He never found out. Sato left Pingfang halfway through 1943, first to Tokyo for a time, and finally he arrived back in Nagasaki at the start of 1945. But he carried China with him. The cries of the prisoners, the staff sheathed in white safety suits, that iron gate to the inner complex: they haunted him.

Rumours of the dark acts committed there had surfaced in the years after the war and Sato expected for many years to be prosecuted for his work. But the authorities never came for him, nor many of the others. They knew too much, their knowledge of bacteriological warfare was too important. Many returned from China to senior posts at hospitals, universities and research laboratories, both in Japan and America. Others were not so fortunate. In 1946 he read of Hayashi's imprisonment for war crimes.
He looked at the picture of an innocuous man in round metal glasses and a neat moustache and thought, ‘Why you, Masaru? Why not me?' I began to understand why Sato had hidden away at the orphanage for five years after the war. Not for fear of exposure, but guilt. Those children and his studies, perhaps Hideo most of all, were his attempt at atonement, but could they ever make up for all those lost logs at the lumber factory? He waited until 1968 to publish his research on the effect of the atomic bomb on child victims. He wanted his case studies to have turned twenty-one years of age so that the work would be definitive, thorough, indisputable. If the book was another bid for redemption, he seemed strangely unmoved by its poor reception. He reasoned he could not force people to face what he had concluded from the wards and X-rays and medical samples. Experts lined up to dismiss the data he had collated in the orphanage and Nagasaki. They argued his case studies, those two marked toddlers in particular, would have developed their conditions regardless of August 9, 1945. A few voices backed him up but their support was muted. He understood the negative reaction.
‘Yes, we
mourn our dead, and we campaign for proper health care and compen
sation for the survivors of pikadon, but we seem more resistant when it comes to accepting how that day carried forward in our bones and in our offspring. Is it not safer to contain the horror to one day? How could we parade these children, now adults, to the world, and say, look, this is the legacy? And who was I to do this?'

In 1970 he had just turned seventy-five when he began to suffer from night sweats, fevers and aching muscles. Natsu forced him to go for tests and the results came back: leukaemia.

Of course, I wonder if I have always carried these sickly cells since that first August 9. Maybe this ending was always my fate. So many other survivors have had multiple cancers, I'm surprised I haven't fallen ill sooner. Natsu and Hideo want me to treat the disease aggressively. I go through the motions of chemotherapy and other treatments for them but I do not much care for the fight. My illness has had one side effect, however, perhaps not so unexpected. Last week I found Natsu searching for the adoption papers we filed twenty years ago. It did not take much of an interrogation to find out why. Hideo did not want to upset me so he had gone to her with new questions about his biological family. I am not offended. I understand the motivation. She asked me, ‘Could we have done more when he was still young? What if he has living relatives out there somewhere in the world? We've kept him from them.' Too many decades have passed, I assured her. The search would likely end in failure. Best not to give him false hope.

But here is the truth I will tell only to you. Yes, of course I could have looked for Kenzo and Amaterasu with more determination after the war. I could have tracked down mutual acquaintances, written to newspapers or A-bomb organisations or contacted migration authorities here and abroad. I did none of those things, gladly. I fulfilled the cursory official obligations for the adoption process and then I stopped. And this is why: I was punishing your mother. I was keeping Hideo from her, deliberately. She had kept you from me; I would keep her from her grandson.

I thought when Hideo started to become known for
his peace work, she would hear of him and come looking. We never hid his family name. How could she stay away? I am glad for all our sakes she never turned up. Her opinion would have been definitive, as it had been on all matters. She would have claimed him as her own or refused to believe he was her grandson. I had to shield him from both possibilities. I had to protect him from her.