One Man's Justice (13 page)

He crossed the street and again paused under a lamp-post, this time turning casually to look towards the Fujisaki house. He could see strands of light leaking out from the edges of the blinds covering the windows. Because of his friendship with Fujisaki at university, Takuya felt sure that as long as he made the right approach and offered his bag of rice he could get them to put him up for at least a fortnight. But
he wasn't so confident of Fujisaki's reaction if he told the full story about executing POWs and being on the run from the occupation authorities.

Memories of his time at Nemoto's house flooded back. Even with such a sincere former subordinate he had managed to last only eight days. Takuya tried hard to prepare himself first for astonishment and then for consternation at his unexpected appearance, feeling a foreboding he hadn't experienced when he'd left home for Osaka and then Shoodo-shima. At first the prospect of being tried by a victors' kangaroo court had made him determined to elude detection at any cost, but now, after a mere ten days, he was starting to flinch at the thought of relying on others. He felt preyed on by a mental weakness which would have been unthinkable in his army days.

Fighting back the anxiety, Takuya remembered the pride he had felt in being a lieutenant in the Imperial Army, and shuddered to think of the pathetic figure he cut standing there under the lamp-post. He stepped off the footpath and walked across the road to the house, stopping in front of the latticed door to the entrance before reaching to open it. Obviously it was locked from the inside, as it wouldn't budge.

He knocked lightly on the door frame. There was no reaction from within the house. When he knocked once more, a little louder, a light was switched on inside the glass door of the entrance.

‘Who's there?' came a voice which Takuya recognised straight away as Fujisaki's.

‘It's Kiyohara. Remember me from university?' said Takuya timidly.

He heard the scuffing of shoes over the concrete floor inside the entrance before the latticed door opened in front of him.

‘Kiyohara san!' said Fujisaki, astonishment coming over his bespectacled face as he stood silhouetted by the electric light behind him. Takuya felt himself wavering as to what to do next. Obviously he would be invited inside, but he knew in his heart that he must explain himself before imposing any further.

‘Can we talk out here? I want to tell you something,' said Takuya.

An incredulous look on his face, his friend stepped out beyond the latticed door and followed Takuya down the road. Takuya stopped and waited under the lamp-post for Fujisaki, who stared speechlessly at his unheralded guest. Takuya looked earnestly into Fujisaki's eyes and explained that he had fled from his own home after being cited as a war criminal, and that he had gone to Shoodo-shima but had to leave for Kobe to escape the little fishing-village's prying eyes.

‘Can you put me up for four or five days, just until I find somewhere to hide? I've got some rice so I can feed myself,' said Takuya. But deep down he wanted to say a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months.

‘You executed Americans? They'll hang you for that, won't they?' said Fujisaki with a hint of fear in his eyes.

Takuya nodded, thinking that Fujisaki must be unnerved at the idea of harbouring a fugitive.

‘Anyway, come inside,' said Fujisaki, grasping Takuya by the arm.

‘No, not yet,' he replied. ‘Even if you say it's all right, what's your family going to say? Your father, in particular, must agree.'

Fujisaki stood thinking for a moment, then nodded, let go of his friend's arm, and turned to walk back to his house. Takuya watched him push open the door and disappear inside. Glancing furtively both ways down the dark street, Takuya hid himself in the shadows to one side of the lamp-post. The streets were deserted and dead quiet. The stars in the sky above were pale specks of light.

Takuya waited, staring at the latticed door. After a while he started to visualise Fujisaki sitting in front of his father, deep in conversation.

Suddenly the door opened and the two men seemed to step straight out of Takuya's dream on to the road. Fujisaki came out first, followed by his father, who was slightly balding on top but roughly the same height and physique as his son.

Takuya took off his army cap and bowed to the older man.

Fujisaki's father walked over to the illuminated area under the lamp-post. ‘Come inside,' he said, grasping Takuya by the arm. He ushered him to the house and gestured for Takuya to step through the latticed door ahead of him. Inside the entrance, they took off their shoes and Takuya followed the other two down the narrow hall to a three-tatami-mat-sized room at the back of the house.

‘It's not very big, but you're welcome to stay here until you
decide on your next move,' said Fujisaki's father amicably before disappearing down the hall.

Takuya set his rucksack in a corner and sat down, after Fujisaki had swung out his bad leg to lower himself to the tatami floor. Takuya leant over and reached for his bag, from which he pulled out his sack of rice.

‘I want you to take this,' he said, offering it to Fujisaki.

‘You don't have to do that,' said his friend, fixing his eyes on the sack of rice.

‘Take it, please. You can't put me up otherwise,' said Takuya.

Fujisaki nodded, got to his feet in the same awkward fashion, then carried the bag of rice out of the room and down the hall.

As Takuya pulled the cords tight on his rucksack he thought that he had done the right thing in taking the rice back from Nemoto. Without the rice he could never have brought himself to ask Fujisaki for shelter. Who knows, he thought, maybe the fact that he had his own supply of food had made the difference.

For the first time in days, he felt almost relaxed. He had given Fujisaki the equivalent of almost twenty-five days of government rice rations, which could always be blended with millet and other less nourishing grains.

The next morning Fujisaki asked Takuya to come through to the living-room and meet the rest of the family. He was married, and by the look of his wife – a frail-looking, pale young woman twenty-one or twenty-two years of age – she was not far away from giving birth. Fujisaki's mother was
as friendly and welcoming as she had been when Takuya visited them as a student. She was now a little thinner, and the wrinkles on her face revealed how much she had aged over the past five or six years. Her questions about Takuya's hometown and her description of the night air raids on Kobe lacked none of the lively spirit Takuya remembered her for. As he answered her questions, it occurred to him that perhaps she had not been told the full story about his situation.

For breakfast they each had a bowl half full of rice gruel flavoured with a couple of thin slices of radish. Takuya joined the others round the table, the silence broken only by the occasional clicking of chopsticks. As he ate, Takuya looked across to Fujisaki and his young wife. There was certainly nothing out of the ordinary for a man of twenty-five, one year Takuya's junior, to be married and about to become a father, and as a couple they certainly gave the impression of being contented with their lot. Nevertheless, Takuya couldn't help being surprised that this delicate young woman, surviving on rations barely sufficient to keep herself going, was expecting a child. How much nourishment would rice gruel and radish provide for the baby? he thought. The fact that she was about to have a baby was testimony not only to her toughness but also to the strength of the family for not seeing this as anything out of the ordinary.

Takuya whiled away the hours in his room from morning till night from that day on. He borrowed a razor from Fujisaki and shaved each morning, washing himself in the cold tap water. The area behind the house was
part of the workshop grounds, and he could hear the noise of the machines from his room. Power cuts were an everyday occurrence, and if he stood up, from the little window he could see the workers taking a rest, seated on wooden boxes.

Takuya felt quite uncomfortable at mealtimes. The usual fare was a combination of barley noodles, gruel and steamed bread flavoured with the odd piece of sweet potato, but occasionally they each had a whole sweet potato to themselves. Unlike at other times, the atmosphere round the dining-room table was decidedly gloomy, with no one saying a word. Though he had handed over his bag of rice, each time he sat down for a meal Takuya felt guilty that he was depriving them of part of their rations.

There's no way I'll be able to stay here long, he thought. In a fortnight Fujisaki's family will end up thinking the same way as Nemoto's. If it was just a matter of time, he mused, he must do everything in his power at least to delay the inevitable.

He took the demobilised soldier's certificate out of his inside pocket, recalling that Shirasaka had said that if he presented this to the local authorities he'd be able to get his share of rations. The false name he had written on it meant that it doubled as the papers he needed as a fugitive, and by using it to claim rations he could lessen the debt he owed the Fujisaki family.

Handing over the rice and giving them his ration allowance should at least help convince them of his goodwill on the food front, but spending every day in the little room at the back of the house doing nothing was undoubtedly
a cause of annoyance to them. He was desperate to find a way to earn an income. But the country was overflowing with demobilised servicemen and residents returned from Japan's former empire, and with virtually all of the country's industrial and commercial sector destroyed there were very few potential employers. However much he might pound the pavements, there was little chance of finding work. Getting a job in Fujisaki's workshop would obviously be the best option by far.

That evening, Takuya asked Fujisaki if he could look at their university yearbook. Flipping through the pages, he found the name of a student from Okinawa, one year his senior, and began copying that man's name, Higa Seiichi, and Fujisaki's address, onto the demobilised soldier's card. When he had finished he called Fujisaki into his room and handed him the card, saying, ‘If you show this to the people at the ward office they'll issue you a ration book. It's a false name, but you can claim the rations and use them for your family.'

Fujisaki looked down at the card and nodded.

‘Then there's the matter of a job,' said Takuya. He explained to his friend that, if at all possible, he wanted to avoid being a freeloader, and so until he decided his next move, he wondered if there might be a job for him at Fujisaki's workshop.

Fujisaki seemed taken aback at the question, as his first reaction was to tilt his head to one side and knit his brow. But after a few moments he said, ‘That isn't something I can decide by myself, but I'll speak to my father and see what he says.' With that he awkwardly got to his feet and left the room.

By now Takuya had come to realise that Fujisaki was a very different man from when he had been a student. At university he had been lively and extroverted, offsetting the fact that he had one bad leg. He'd been a broad-minded young man, not too carried away by issues, and not at all afraid to laugh out loud on occasion. There was little sign of those traits in Fujisaki any more. Working in the family business had obviously brought about some change in him, but his reaction to Takuya's request suggested that his heart wasn't in it and that he was just going through the motions. Even more worrisome was his increasingly brusque manner toward Takuya.

There was the sound of slippered footsteps in the hall, and the door to Takuya's room slid open.

‘I've talked with my father, and he says orders are so low that we already have too many staff in the workshop. The only thing we might have for you to do would be making deliveries,' Fujisaki said, standing in the doorway.

‘That's fine,' said Takuya, ‘as long as I've got something to do.' He was a little uneasy, because it would of course take him out into the streets, but he could no longer bear the thought of doing nothing.

‘I really feel bad letting you do that sort of work,' replied Fujisaki, with an embarrassed frown.

The next morning Takuya left the house with his demobilised soldier's card in his hand. Following Fujisaki's directions through the ruins, he soon came to the building being used as temporary municipal offices.

There was a hint of doubt in his mind as to whether
the paper Shirasaka had given him would be safe to use, but the stamp of the Hakata office of the Western Region demobilisation office looked real, and the middle-aged man at the desk did not hesitate as he filled in the name ‘Higa Seiichi' on the ration book.

Relieved at having passed the first hurdle, Takuya whispered his adopted name to himself. It sounded fine, almost suited him, he thought. From now on he would lead his life as Higa Seiichi. The name Kiyohara Takuya was a relic of his previous life and must play no part in his future.

When he got back to the house he handed the new ration book to Fujisaki, who was busy doing the company accounts in the living-room.

‘I have a favour to ask of you,' Takuya said. ‘Since I'll be walking around the streets making deliveries, I want to change the way I look. I'm a bit short-sighted, so I think perhaps I should start wearing glasses. Do you know of anywhere around here I can find them?' he asked.

Fujisaki tilted his head to one side for a few moments, looking thoughtful. ‘The glasses I wore when I was in junior high school should still be in the drawer. In those days I didn't wear strong lenses, so they might actually be about right for you. I'll have a look,' he said, getting to his feet. He went up the narrow staircase across the hall.

When he handed the glasses to Takuya, he said, ‘Well, they were there all right, but one sidepiece is missing.' They were basic black-rimmed glasses, just the sort junior high school children would wear. The left sidepiece was missing and the lenses were covered in a thin layer of whitish-grey dust.