The Investigation (10 page)

She played another tune, low and sorrowful. I stole a glance at the neat parting in her hair. The sunset caressed her rhythmically moving shoulders.

‘This is “Gute Nacht”, the first lied in
Die Winterreise
.’ She spoke without turning around.

That was when it came to me. ‘Good Night.’ It was the mysterious poem I had found in Sugiyama’s pocket. I recited it aloud. ‘As a stranger I arrived, as a stranger again
I leave . . . Now the world is bleak, the path covered by snow.’

She froze like a salt pillar. Fear pooled in her eyes. Why was she so frightened? She must know something.

My face betrayed no emotions. I told her, ‘I found that poem in the dead guard’s pocket. He was a violent guard they called the “Angel of Death”.’

She curled her white fingers into a fist. ‘Don’t talk about him like that,’ she said warily, shooting me a hostile glance. ‘You don’t know anything about
him.’

My mouth went dry. ‘What do
you
know about him?’ I asked, and turned around to hide my upset expression.

I heard the piano then, as mournful and majestic as a large collapsing building. I looked back. She had stood up, slamming both hands on the keyboard. Through her tangled hair that cascaded in
front of her face I could see her wet eyelashes and the tip of her reddening nose.

‘He wasn’t violent!’

The heavy notes reverberated in my head. I thought about my promise to Choi that I would record the truth about Sugiyama’s death. He had confessed everything, but I still didn’t feel
that I knew the truth. Really, I didn’t know a thing.

‘What was Sugiyama like then?’ I asked, trying to appease her. Truly, I did want to know about Sugiyama Dozan’s life. I knew she wouldn’t know the whole story, either.
But I wanted to know about the aspects of his life that Choi didn’t tell me. The sunset was dissolving now, giving way to crisp darkness that settled beyond the windows.

She looked out. ‘Sugiyama Dozan was a sensitive man. He knew music, appreciated poetry and loved life.’

What killed the gentle Sugiyama was this insane era, these times that demanded ever more blood, ever more hate, ever more death. Incarcerated in his uniform, he died in his own
solitary hell.

One snowy winter morning two years ago, as a nurse in the newly established Kyushu Imperial University Medical School infirmary at Fukuoka Prison, Midori stepped onto the prison grounds.
Specialists spent all day in the laboratories studying English medical texts, their eyes glued to microscopes, concentrating on significant research. If, thanks to these efforts, they could advance
medical knowledge and develop groundbreaking new medications, they would be able to save thousands – even tens of thousands – of lives. Midori was proud to be a member of a team
responsible for safeguarding life during this era of slaughter. Nursing was difficult work; she was assigned to double shifts every day.

She heard the name Sugiyama about a fortnight after she began working there.

‘Sugiyama, that son-of-a-bitch. He’s a butcher!’ hollered a worked-up Japanese prisoner with a head injury. ‘He clubs anything that moves. If he didn’t have anyone
else to beat up, he’d probably bust his own head open.’

A few days later, a guard came in clutching a swollen finger. Midori secured his finger with a splint and asked how he had injured it. He looked down at his bandaged finger and snapped,
‘The Koreans got into a fight. Sugiyama clubbed one of them over the head and didn’t stop. I ran over to pull him off, but he slapped me away, completely enraged. Eventually he did step
back, but if it weren’t for me, that Korean would be dead.’

Sugiyama again. What happened to the Korean who had been beaten like a dog? Was he in solitary, writhing in agony and cradling his broken bones? She realized she had never seen a Korean prisoner
in the infirmary. She learned that the prison had a firm policy of disallowing unnecessary medical care for Korean prisoners. Unless there was a special circumstance, the guards sent injured
Koreans to solitary confinement instead of the infirmary.

‘I should actually thank him,’ the guard was saying, grinning smarmily. ‘I got to meet a pretty young thing like you.’

Sugiyama’s name continued to come up frequently after that. A prisoner whose shoulder was shattered and a guard who got a fat lip both referred to him resentfully. The gashes and broken
bones were enough to paint in her mind’s eye a portrait of a cruel, merciless man who didn’t care a whit about anyone else and forced his rage onto the world. Like a virus, rage spread
its roots even into the hearts of good people; it eventually infected her, too. Tending to the cuts and broken bones, she grew hostile towards him. Sugiyama was evil. People like that should be
behind bars.

Then, finally, she met Sugiyama in person. Every Monday morning at assembly 200 or so guards and sixty-odd doctors and nurses stood in rows in the auditorium; they acted as
one, praising the Empire and the Emperor. The assembly began with a chorus of the ‘Kimigayo’, the national anthem, and ended with three rounds of ‘Long Live the Emperor!’
Midori chafed at its required reverence, but she stood in front and performed dutifully, to be near the piano.

One day, after assembly, she went up to the piano and opened the lid. She wiped the dust off each key with the tip of her finger, wondering whether it still played. She cautiously pressed a key.
A low G grasped the ankles of those who had turned to leave. She pressed another key. A silvery F tapped their shoulders. Murmuring, the others waited for the next note. Midori set her hands on the
keys and caressed and pounded them in turn. Music spooled out, like silk unravelling from a silkworm’s cocoon.

A young nurse hesitantly sang along. ‘’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam . . .’

The melody spread slowly. People’s collective longing was expressed through song. They remembered each of their homes – the guard who’d left his wife behind in far-away
Hokkaido, the conscripted guard who thought of his elderly mother in the mountains of Niigata and the intern who missed the meals around his family’s dinner table in Tokyo.

‘Home! Home! Sweet, sweet home! There’s no place like home!’

Everyone lingered after the song was over. Only a long time later did the guards return to the cells, the doctors to the laboratories and the nurses to the infirmary.

Maeda came up behind Midori, furious. ‘What are you doing? How could you play “Home! Sweet Home!” when you are to sing the “Kimigayo” with the resolve to sacrifice
your own life for our country?’

It was only then that she realized what she’d done – she’d led the prison in singing an American song.

Warden Hasegawa approached with energetic, powerful steps. ‘Glorious! Good thing we didn’t get rid of this piano. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of listening to
this wonderful performance.’ He twisted his neat moustache and asked her who she was.

Director Morioka came up, his thick wavy hair neatly combed back, clad in a white coat and gold neck tie. ‘This is Miss Iwanami Midori, a nurse in the infirmary. She studied the piano from
before she entered primary school. She was a promising piano prodigy who won in the Kyushyu piano contest. When her father, a war-department executive, died in the Sino-Japanese War she was forced
to give up playing, but – as you can see – she is still very talented.’

Hasegawa let out a delighted exclamation. Everything Morioka described contained all that he desired for himself, but had to satisfy through mimicry: the ability to purchase an expensive musical
instrument, a sensibility to appreciate music, a sophisticated character.

The piano had come to the prison more than ten years earlier, before the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, when Fukuoka was a peaceful city known for hosting a large contingent of foreign
businessmen on leisure trips. Stevenson, an American importer and a music lover, wanted music to flow through the utilitarian prison. The day the piano arrived, Stevenson held a small performance
by an amateur choir that he led. Since then, the piano had languished in a corner of the dark auditorium, covered in dust. Disinterest, humidity, dust, bugs and mice had all attacked it. The
strings lost their innate sounds and the frame warped. Many suggested that the eyesore be tossed, or hacked apart to donate the steel strings to the war effort.

‘Awful sound,’ said a rough, creaky voice behind Hasegawa. Everyone turned to look at the guard with wide, sturdy shoulders and a long scar down his cheek. He was looking down at the
keys disapprovingly.

Midori closed the lid and stood up. ‘I’m sorry if you didn’t like my playing.’

‘No need to be sorry. Your playing isn’t what’s awful. I don’t have the ability or the desire to judge how you play.’

Hasegawa tensed his small, hard body. ‘Sugiyama!’ he shouted. ‘How can you say something like that? You don’t know a thing about music!’

Midori shivered. It was that menacing butcher, the monster who broke countless bones and ripped flesh.

Sugiyama replied tersely, ‘I don’t know much about music, but I do know about sounds.’

‘What? What could you possibly know about sounds?’

Instead of answering, he approached the piano and put a hand on the keys. Hasegawa watched him in surprise. Sugiyama pressed two keys at the same time. He pressed five keys down. A heavy,
powerful noise filled the auditorium. He closed his eyes, gauging the resonance and power of each note. ‘This piano has lost its sound.’

Hasegawa’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Nonsense! Nobody has even touched this piano in the last ten years!’

‘Not playing a piano is worse than pounding on it. Because of the humidity in the wood, the notes can’t stretch out. The strings lose their bounce, become warped and are unable to
let out a precise note. A piano that can’t make a proper sound is no better than a dead one.’

Hasegawa smirked. ‘Sugiyama, don’t you dare think about getting rid of a perfectly fine piano by treating it like a broken piece of rubbish. It was abandoned for ten years, but today
it finally met a proper player.’ He turned to look at Midori with a gentle expression.

Midori pressed one key with her right thumb and another with her little finger. The low and high G notes stretched out in parallel lines. ‘These are exactly one octave apart, sir. But the
G I pressed is a black key. It’s G#, not G. G is a half-note lower. Its resonance is also shaky. The notes are slightly off and the vibrato is not quite right.’

Hasegawa turned to Sugiyama with displeasure. ‘How did you know about the condition of this piano?’

‘Before I enlisted I worked at a piano shop and learned a little, over the tuner’s shoulder.’

‘Then fix it!’

That evening Sugiyama crouched on the auditorium floor and opened a leather bag filled with a variety of metal tools, tongs, wrenches and pieces of leather. He caressed the
piano as he would a beloved pet. He opened the lid; he was surrounded by the faint forest scent of antique wood. The piano-felt was ragged.

‘G.’ His monotonous voice was brittle.

Midori pressed the key confidently. The silence was broken by Sugiyama’s voice, followed by the piano. He wound a piece of leather around the bolts and tightened the strings. His
expression reminded Midori of a doctor listening to the patient’s heart through a stethoscope, or a surgeon preparing to operate on a doomed patient. Sugiyama was holding tongs instead of a
scalpel, but he was as powerful as a surgeon who made the lame walk, the blind see and the dying live.

‘It’s improving,’ she offered. ‘The note is precise and the vibrato sounds better, too.’

He didn’t seem satisfied. ‘I gave it a basic tune-up, but I need tuning instruments and other materials to do it correctly. A hammer and tuning driver, one spring-adjustable hooked
needle, new steel strings, glue, wax for shining and a fine polishing cloth . . .’

He appeared worried that he wouldn’t be able to find what he needed in these times of shortages and rations. Pianos, once objects of envy, had become the target of rage. No one would buy
them, so they were hidden away in rooms or attics like clandestine children, covered with dust, forgotten.

‘I’m going to try the piano shop in town. I may be able to find tuning instruments.’ He started putting away his pliers, metal rods and leather ties.

Midori recognized those pliers; the patients she’d cared for had sported bloody bruises on their fingers made from those steel tips. She’d seen lash wounds on their backs the same
thickness as those leather ties. This violent guard menaced powerless prisoners, but he was also the only person who could recover this piano’s sound. Which was his true self?

‘What do you use those tools for?’ she asked cautiously.

Sugiyama’s pupils flickered like candlelight in the wind. ‘Why do you want to know? We each do our jobs. I rough people up, and you treat them. I tune the piano, and you make music
with it.’

‘What is it exactly that you do?’

‘My job is to purify the warped brains of those who believe they’re saving the world, but are really befouling society – Communists, nationalists, anarchists. So don’t
meddle.’ He tossed her a cold smile and stalked out of the auditorium, leaving her behind in the murky darkness, the metal instruments in his bag clanging with each step he took.