The Investigation (4 page)

A maze of books beckoned at me from the back of the shop. I hid in the sewers of Paris on the eve of revolution and met a woman in snowy, frigid Siberia. I ventured into the world of heroes and
gods and visited a lone island where a dethroned prince was imprisoned. Books were cities I’d never visited, filled with pillars of great thoughts and streets of phrases, mazes of abstruse
sentence structures and alleys of complicated syllables. They were stores that displayed a wide range of things, punctuation twinkling like the crest of a venerable family, sentences breathing
peacefully, words whispering. I returned to reality when the roof of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion shimmered from far away and the sky turned orange. As darkness descended, Mother closed the
doors. The world of sentences sank into the night, the heroes and kings and ladies mourning lost love falling asleep. On our way home Mother looked lonely; I would make endless conversation, asking
about the books that had been sold that day, who bought them and what they were about. I was always pleasantly surprised when Mother gave me detailed answers about what she’d read long ago,
or books she’d wanted to read but hadn’t got round to. Mother sometimes laughed, although her laughter was always hollow. I knew I couldn’t take on her loneliness or her
exhaustion; I could almost smell Father’s cigarettes and sweat and faint sorrow. Like a drawing in sand, Father’s face eroded with time. We didn’t receive a single letter from
him. Eventually I found myself no longer waiting for him to write, no longer pining for his return. I forgot him; I had to forget him first, so as not to be forgotten myself. I didn’t want to
waste my whole life hoping for a miracle.

Mother was lonely and I was withdrawn, but we weren’t unhappy. That fortress of books was our refuge. I discovered this only a long time later, but it was also the price of my
father’s life, what he’d given us when he walked into the war zone in Manchuria. I might have been a little less sad if I’d never known that. But the timing of everything is
always off. Man is in pain because he finds love too early, because he hasn’t seen someone for too long and because he discovers the truth too late.

The next morning, Maeda greeted me in his office with a smile. He poured me a cup of tea. ‘What have you discovered?’

My voice as hard as a log, I answered that I didn’t have anything special to report.

He fiddled with the brim of his cap. ‘No, it won’t be easy for a young student-soldier like you. But make it your business and see it to the end.’

I took out the piece of paper from my inner pocket and unfolded it. ‘I discovered this note in the dead guard’s pocket. There’s a mysterious verse written on one side of
it.’

Maeda looked at me, then at the note I placed on his desk. He laughed. ‘Of course. You can’t get rid of your habits that easily. He couldn’t help himself.’

My curiosity was piqued.

‘Sugiyama Dozan was a bookworm, but he was like a lost dog among the sentences.’ Maeda smiled slyly. ‘He was also the censor of Ward Three.’

The role of censor sounded important, but I knew that all he had to do was sit in a back room. When I was in Ward Four the censor there was an old guard. It was a position given to him out of
respect because he found it difficult to manage the prisoners. He sat in his small office and dozed all day, reading letters. How could a top-notch guard like Sugiyama have been the censor?

‘Ward Three is a separate entity within the prison,’ Maeda explained, noting my surprise. ‘The most evil criminals are kept there. Compared to these Koreans, the prisoners
you’re used to in Ward Four are gentlemen. To inspect their correspondence, the censor has to be just as vicious and unmerciful. Sugiyama was not just an excellent guard, he was also the best
censor in the prison.’

‘But he seemed not to care for words . . .’ I said, unbelieving.

‘Quite. Since he was new to reading and writing, he could be an excellent censor.’

‘How?’

The water boiling on the stove melded with his voice. Maeda cleared his throat. ‘When those Koreans poured into Ward Three, we found that we needed a different censorship method, because
they think differently from us Japanese. First we banned all correspondence not written in Japanese. So, to inspect their Japanese, we wanted someone new to literacy. A novice would read and write
the language the same way as Koreans who aren’t used to Japanese. So he would be able to pinpoint suspicious expressions.’

‘So Sugiyama was the perfect man.’

‘He’d never even crossed the threshold of an elementary school, but his capabilities of comprehension and learning were amazing. Instead of reading like a normal person, he
instinctively zeroed in on forbidden words and expressions. His eyes caught every expression with an ambiguous meaning.’ Maeda shook his head in awe.

I knew that censorship was essential. After we bombed Pearl Harbor, the war had intensified and daily life had grown more chaotic. Thugs and subversives, armed with knives and petrol, roamed the
streets. All anti-Japanese Koreans were arrested, but subversive activities continued. The delusion of independence floated hazily over the streets and universities of Tokyo, infecting other
Koreans. Every time a Korean political offender was arrested, all their writings, books and documents, including personal promissory notes, were confiscated to disarm them of vicious ideas. Upon
sentencing, the boxes of confiscated documents and a list of their contents accompanied the prisoners into prison.

Maeda explained that Sugiyama was given special orders to act as censor for Ward Three; consequently he had to learn to read and write. Sugiyama protested at first; he despised literacy. To him,
writing was merely a tool with which to corrupt the world, applying various -isms to set fire to the hearts of the weak and prey upon them. But in the end he was a soldier; orders weren’t for
him to understand, they were to be followed. He began his education by writing down words he didn’t know on a sheet of paper. The inspection office was a makeshift structure at one end of
Ward Three and was once used as an interrogation and execution room until a large-scale execution area was built, complete with gallows and a place for fusillades. Sugiyama spent all day in that
office, studying diligently like a silkworm gnawing through green mulberry leaves. That office was his solitary battlefield, his enemy the Korean prisoners – Communists hell-bent on
destruction, terrorists eager to assassinate high-ranking officials, anarchists trying to overthrow the government, thieves, robbers and swindlers. Sugiyama pawed through papers, ferreting out
seditious meanings from each phrase and sniffing out forbidden expressions. No suspicious phrase ever got past his prying eyes. He sorted boxes of confiscated material, assigned them unique
numbers, organized them in the storage area and incinerated them. His red pen slashed the page. He paid no heed to the use of a word, the length of a sentence, the strength or weakness of an
expression; if it didn’t fit his strict standards, he marked it with his red stamp:
To Be Incinerated
.

Sugiyama had come home alive from the war zone. For seven years and three months he’d experienced trench warfare in the rain, gun battles in snow-covered fields, sieges and bayonet fights
in the heavy darkness. But according to Maeda, Sugiyama considered this silent war in his quiet office the most valuable of them all. Books and records marched forward like enemy soldiers, and
within them he found the enemy that gnawed through our healthy empire like a swarm of moths. He would look up when he noticed the setting sun dyeing the small westward window red, only to leap back
into the world of paper and ink. When he raised his eyes again, it would be dawn. Only then would he rest. When day broke he moved the seditious books and letters he had uncovered to the new
incinerator that had been built in the empty lot next to the inspection office. Watching the flames quietly swallow the forbidden documents, Sugiyama would feel relief, as though he were burning a
rebel village or executing a traitor.

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:

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.