The Investigation (15 page)

Sorrow was something better than a well-beloved. Sugiyama understood that instinctively. A man’s will for life could be broken, but he would stand firm again; his desires could extinguish,
but burn bright once more. A man’s acceptance of a lacklustre reality would make him even stronger. He leaned against the hard back of his chair.

Another page caught his eye: ‘These Are the Labours’. He looked back at the postcard he had finished censoring. This was the right one. ‘These are the labours of man that are
great.’ Sugiyama felt triumphant. He’d caught Hiranuma red-handed; the fool had put in a secret code, probably a seditious one. The child would read Jammes’s poems and discover
the hidden meaning. Could it be that this postcard wasn’t meant for his son at all, but for some nefarious element? Sugiyama could guess at the rebellious meaning of this poem –
something to the effect of giving your life to liberate your country, or inciting others to disregard their comfortable lives and resist the Japanese:

He was stunned. No matter how carefully he read the poem, there was nothing seditious about it. There was no hidden code or concealed plot. The poem merely praised leading a peaceful life, at
one with nature, a humble existence in the countryside. It celebrated waking to the crow of the rooster and working hard, before falling asleep to the sound of crickets. Sugiyama’s gaze
dulled. He didn’t believe in happiness – it existed only in the chatter of weak romantics. He worked hard to dismiss the small peace inherent in the everyday, because he’d never
been happy. Could it be that he’d ignored contentment, thinking it a desperate dream?

After a very long time he stamped the postcard with a bang, marking it with the blue
Censorship Completed
stamp. He was a failure; he hadn’t discovered any banned communications.
The postcard would fly to a young boy waiting for his father in a shabby shack in the alleys near Kobe harbour. The boy would read Francis Jammes. The postcard would deliver him the grit to deal
with the weight and pain of life during wartime.

After that, unfamiliar names and phrases began appearing in outgoing post, including stanzas cited in ways appropriate for each recipient’s age and situation. Hiranuma
seemed to have in his head a huge catalogue of poems perfect for any situation. One prisoner sent a postcard to his wife containing the entirety of ‘Prayer to Have a Simple Wife’. A man
sending a postcard to his girlfriend included a love-poem by Goethe. Sugiyama scoured the library to look for the writers and works cited in each of the postcards. He didn’t miss a single
name or book. When he spotted Tolstoy’s name, he read all of Tolstoy’s books. Night after night he wandered amid the suspicious phrases. He couldn’t find anything to censor, but
that didn’t lower his wariness.

The prisoners changed, too. Smiles replaced their curses. A single phrase pushed men who didn’t think past that evening to start counting the days until their release. Men who fought
incessantly became calm; the brawls that occurred on a daily basis decreased. Sugiyama watched the men hold replies from their loved ones, wiping away tears with their sleeves. Every change seemed
to stem from the postcards. He began to wonder; one sentence seemed to change a man, and the world seemed to change, one man at a time.

As summer deepened, Sugiyama spent one entire night reviewing a postcard from a prisoner to his son. It was a reply to the son’s complaints of being teased because of the family name they
had chosen to acquire. Kaneyama was painfully obviously Korean – it was simply the Japanese pronunciation of the Korean surname Kim, plus the Japanese suffix ‘yama’. The postcard
consoled the son, telling him that dealing with insults was the stepping stone to living a proud life:

Sugiyama found a reference to the play in the log of confiscated documents and rushed to the library. He found it in box 486. Discovering that Shakespeare was British, Sugiyama let out a yelp of
joy. It would be easy to find this undesirable; after all, this writer was from an enemy country. He cautiously opened the dangerous book. It turned out to be a love-story. Romeo, a son of the
Montagues; Juliet, a daughter of the Capulets; a ball; a romance that couldn’t be consummated because of the feuding families. He flipped faster through the pages. A duel between Mercutio and
Tybalt, death, exile, Juliet asleep after taking the potion from Friar Lawrence. Romeo drinking poison. Juliet stabbing herself in the heart.

He sat back, haunted by the beautiful scenes in Verona, the conversations between Romeo and Juliet and the afterglow of doomed love. Sugiyama shook his head to clear his thoughts.
Romeo and
Juliet
was clearly problematic. Not only was it by a writer of an enemy country, but it was also all about a decadent love, and the death-filled conclusion stank of pessimism. But he
couldn’t pick up his red stamp. Had his censorship criteria turned too compassionate? He didn’t want to be rash and stop the postcard’s transit. Otherwise, who would console the
child? He finally thought of a compromise. If he questioned Hiranuma, he could obtain a more accurate interpretation.

The sunlight seared the prison yard. The thick brick walls radiated heat and the workroom boiled as if they were the inside of a pot. During their free time prisoners rushed to
the shade provided by the walls as though they were escaping hell. They sat around and talked urgently, hungrily. One man would speak passionately for a while, then another man would start. They
took turns, like actors onstage.

Sugiyama shook his head. As he crossed the yard, hot air snaked around his calves under his gaiters. He walked the way he typically did, his upper body swaying from side to side and his legs
spread apart, taking big steps. Prisoners shrank away from his arrogant, militaristic gait. They didn’t know it was the only way he could stand the pain from a gunshot wound in his thigh. He
headed to the hill, the site of the execution range and the cemetery. Three tall poplar trees stood side-by-side, but their sparse branches didn’t create any shade. The prisoners murmured
about ghosts wandering here, nooses still hanging around their necks; the guards, too, disliked patrolling the area at night.

Hiranuma was sitting against a tree. Sugiyama could hear him whistling.

‘645! Whistling, are we? Feeling good then?’

Hiranuma didn’t answer. His eyes were cool and empty.

‘Hiranuma Tochu!’ Sugiyama shouted. ‘Answer me! Will you bark only if I beat you like a dog?’ He used his club to push the prisoner’s chin up.

Hiranuma looked down. ‘My name isn’t 645 or Hiranuma Tochu. My name is Yun. Dong. Ju.’

Sugiyama tensed. Was this a trap? Did he toss in that bit about Shakespeare, about names and existence, to pull Sugiyama into this long-standing controversy over Koreans being forced to take
Japanese names? Even better. Then they wouldn’t need to talk around the subject.

Sugiyama smiled and plucked a blade of grass to chew on; its bitterness filled his mouth.

‘Yun Dong-ju or Hiranuma, who cares? You’re you, whatever you may be called.’ Sugiyama recalled Juliet’s words, which he’d read the previous night:

‘A rose by any other name still smells the same,’ Sugiyama continued stiffly. ‘A name means nothing. What’s important is your essence. Whether you’re Yun Dong-ju or
Hiranuma Tochu, you’re a cheeky, stubborn Korean.’

‘A name is the symbol of one’s very being,’ Hiranuma protested in a low voice. ‘It represents not only someone’s face and body, but also his memories, dreams, past,
present and future. Just as a single word can contain various feelings, one sentence can espouse a variety of meanings.’

One sentence can espouse a variety of meanings? Then it surely meant that the arsehole had used Shakespeare’s words to convey multiple thoughts. A rose by any other name was still
fragrant, but it was no longer a rose if it wasn’t called a rose. Even the most fragrant rose will lose its scent and fade as time passes, but its name will live on, and the utterance of the
word ‘rose’ will recall its beauty and scent. The rose may disappear, but the name never would.

Hiranuma pushed on, ignoring Sugiyama’s mounting confusion. ‘Juliet’s soliloquy is a paradoxical expression of the fact that a presence is defined by a name.’

‘Paradoxical?’

Hiranuma explained that it was a way to emphasize how something was said by not saying it, and to assert that it was true by saying that it wasn’t. Something clanged in Sugiyama’s
head. A sentence could be interpreted the opposite way, depending on who read it? Then was Juliet’s request to discard the name really a clarification of the fact that names defined
everything? Romeo and Juliet despaired because of their families, because of who they were. Their love became a tragedy. If they cast away their names, nothing would have stopped the consummation
of their love. But in the end they couldn’t discard them; their names defined their existence, and that made their love ever more star-crossed.

‘My name is Yun Dong-ju,’ Hiranuma said, his voice steely and dignified.

Sugiyama glared at him. ‘That’s not your name. Don’t you know that Korean is banned?’

‘Without the name Yun Dong-ju, I’m nothing. Hiranuma is a mask that the Japanese force me to wear.’

His words were pedantic and ridiculous. Or were they? Working in his small cell, this degenerate had slipped books into postcards to seduce and brainwash Sugiyama.

Sugiyama swatted his sweat-soaked hat on his thigh. ‘Shut up! Nothing’s changed.’

‘No, you’ve changed.’

Hiranuma was right. If he hadn’t read
Romeo and Juliet
he wouldn’t be engaged in a silly argument about roses and names. He had to keep his guard up. Sugiyama balled his
fists, but they trembled as it dawned on him that he couldn’t return to who he’d been before. He was afraid of what he’d become; a person who could be transformed by a book.

As the summer wore on, Sugiyama wandered the maze of neatly lined bookcases every night. His censorship duties had exploded, but he wasn’t resentful; he found himself looking forward to
the postcards. Then, one day, he put down his red pen for good. He wasn’t reading the postcards to censor them any longer. Instead he was heartened by the neat handwriting, warm exclamations,
delicate adjectives and familiar nouns. He followed the trail of codes hidden in the postcards. He read his way through Dostoyevsky, Valéry, Baudelaire, Gide, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and
Cervantes. He was changing, willingly. He became addicted to the printed word. He grew anxious if he didn’t read something – anything. Had he been brainwashed? He couldn’t do
anything about it, if it were so.

The rainy season arrived at the prison and falling water undulated like a sheet being drawn through the air; everything beyond it was hazy, undefined, unmoored. By the time the rain stopped, one
season would have passed and another would be dawning. Sugiyama knew that the August sun would cool and the September wind would begin to blow. He stayed up late one night, looking at the long
shadow cast by the tall watchtower in the yard. He’d read a postcard the previous night with a poem written on it – ‘Day in Autumn’ by Rainer Maria Rilke – and he
couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Dong-ju had sent him an autumn greeting hidden in a romantic, introspective prayer.