The Investigation (18 page)

Maeda looked uncertain. ‘You’re not bad at deciphering poems.’

‘I just need one day. I’ll select the poems to be incinerated and report back.’

Maeda waved his hands. ‘No, there’s no point. Just burn them all now!’

‘But don’t you agree that these two are just lyric poems?’

‘Well, that’s the problem. They’re more dangerous because they’re not seditious. Whining about love when the entire citizenry has tightened its belt and is fighting
against American and British aggressors? Decadent poems like these weaken the do-or-die pledge.’

‘But after the war, they’ll be able to heal people’s hearts,’ Sugiyama insisted, not noticing that his voice was rising.

Maeda snapped, ‘You don’t need to concern yourself about that. We will be victorious at the war’s end. The Great Japanese Imperial Military will chase the aggressors to the end
of the world and exterminate them.’

‘After the war our people might need these poems. It wouldn’t aid the Empire to burn all of this.’

‘I appreciate these aren’t ordinary poems, especially seeing how confused they made you. That’s why we need to get rid of them. They’re dangerous.’

Thoughts he couldn’t utter echoed in Sugiyama’s mind. He slowly yanked the rusted steel door to the incinerator. It screeched open. The air choked with the smell of smoke as dust and
ash billowed up. Maeda gave Sugiyama an impatient nod. The manuscript trembled in front of the flames lungeing to swallow it – it contained one young man’s lost dreams and agonized
repentance. Sugiyama’s hands were shaking.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Maeda urged. ‘The arsehole got you to let down your guard. And all the while he wrote all these banned poems. He fooled you. I won’t question
your judgement. I know these types always target good guards like you.’

Sugiyama ripped out the first page of the manuscript. The flame from his lighter licked the edge of the crumpled paper, swallowed Dong-ju’s neat handwriting and ignited the banned
sentences. One word at a time, one line at a time, one page at a time, Sugiyama ripped apart the manuscript and tossed it into the fire.

‘Self-Portrait’, ‘Night Looking Back’, ‘A Dear Memory’.

He glanced at the piece of paper in his hands, the shadow of the fire looming over the words:

Dong-ju had written this a year ago, as a lonely student in Tokyo. The world had been cold and grey, filled with the smell of gunpowder. Sugiyama threw the poem into the fire. What Dong-ju had
looked for in a small station vanished in the flames. Nobody would ever know that this poem had existed. Sugiyama closed his eyes. He didn’t want to witness his actions as he murdered the
young man’s soul. He found himself wishing that time would pass quickly, that all the poems would disappear without a trace. He wanted to sweep the remnants, bury them and scrub his dirty
hands until everything disappeared – the trace of ash on his fingertips, the smell of flame threaded into his clothes, the memory of the dead poems. But his guilt would remain, caked on like
soot. Sugiyama opened his eyes and glared into the incinerator.
It was your fault, Dong-ju. You did something you shouldn’t have. I won’t forgive you for making me do something so
terrible.

‘Good! That’s taken care of then.’ The flames danced on Maeda’s face. ‘After all that time in solitary, the arsehole won’t think about writing a poem
again.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Sugiyama realized then that his throat had closed up and his eyes were wet.

Two weeks later, the poet limped out of solitary. Sugiyama was relieved to see Dong-ju walk out on his own, although he did so on shaking legs. His soul had been forever
altered. Though weak, he became aggressive, skulking around gloomily. He picked fights with everyone and threw sloppy punches, even though he couldn’t actually beat anyone up. He limped
towards solitary again, covered in blood.

A week later, he crawled out and became ghost-like. His blank gaze was fixed on the horizon, and he looked lost in time. The blue kite that had floated hopefully outside the prison walls every
afternoon stopped appearing. Dong-ju’s depression tugged the entire ward into a deep slump. Sugiyama missed the young man with a ready smile. He remembered one of Dong-ju’s poems that
he’d read in front of the incinerator before turning it into smoke that snaked up to the sky:

It was a desperate confession. What had he lost? Sugiyama knew Dong-ju had lost everything – his country, his language, his name. Had he known long ago that he would be imprisoned, that he
would be incarcerated on the other side of the wall?

Every night Sugiyama sat at his desk in his office, unable to sleep. He wanted to force the frail young man to write poems again. He wanted Dong-ju’s poems to survive
these terrible times. Even if only a single person were to survive this war, he wanted the poems to be able to provide relief. It was all he thought about. He looked down at his desk, at the rough
paper in his hands, his palms studded with calluses, his bent fingers, his broken nails. An old pen lay on the desk. An urge to write something came over him. He didn’t want to be a poet; he
just wanted to write. He wanted to express on paper what was roiling inside him. He’d understood the world by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. He’d seen bloodied
corpses, heard deafening explosions and screams, touched the upturned earth and dust, smelled the smokiness of gunpowder and tasted blood. But his eyes no longer saw, his ears no longer heard.
He’d started to decipher the world around him, appreciating the human side of the prisoners through the postcards given to him to censor and obtaining war news from the dailies. The world now
existed for him through letters. He’d obtained a sixth sense.

He recalled what Dong-ju had told him: ‘The most important is the first sentence. If you write the first sentence properly, you can write all the way to the last one.’ Sugiyama
cautiously picked up the pen as though he were handling a sea creature with dangerous tentacles. He dipped the nib in black ink, but couldn’t get started. He couldn’t even place it on
the paper. The blank page in front of him was as bleak as the prison yard. What was he doing? He couldn’t write. He was a torturer who knew only how to beat people. He was a half-literate
censor who burned the writings of others. He shook his head, but he couldn’t put the pen down.

The wind rattled the thin tin roof. The words in his head glinted like pieces of broken china in the dark. He picked up the dictionary and sped his way through unfamiliar nouns, adjectives,
verbs. He took the glistening words and carefully strung them together, then revised them. He couldn’t tell what his endeavour would become.

Ten days passed. Or was it fifteen? Each night he stared into the darkness. He could hear the waves, the restless sea tossing and turning. He couldn’t fall asleep. Dawn neared. A gloomy
foghorn sounded from the navy ship in far-away Hakata Bay. Sugiyama folded the piece of paper and slid it into his breast pocket.

Dong-ju was sitting dejectedly at the top of the hill, his arms around his knees. His soul seemed to have burrowed deep inside the shell of his body, and his dark eyes brimmed
with despair and resentment.

Sugiyama approached him with the kite and spool he’d made. ‘Yun Dong-ju!’ he called. ‘How long are you going to remain like this? Enough! Get up! Do you want a
beating?’

He tried to push away the guilt he felt from knowing that he was the cause of the young poet’s sorry state. With his club he prodded Dong-ju to check that he was all right; his forehead
was gashed, his eyes were swollen and his lips were badly cut.

Sugiyama’s gaze wavered. He felt short of breath. His fingers trembled. This silent communication was the most truthful conversation he could offer, more sincere than an overwrought
apology.

‘I knew you would walk out of solitary alive,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘Now that you’re out, you need to write.’ He wanted to read Dong-ju’s words once again. He wasn’t alone; all the prisoners – even the guards – hoped to hear him whistle, fly his kite and write their postcards again.

‘How cruel of you,’ Dong-ju finally replied, in a voice as arid as though he’d been buried alive. ‘What right do you have to tell me to write poems? To risk my
life?’

‘I don’t. That’s true. You can say I have no shame. That’s true, too. But don’t stop writing poems. You have to stop destroying yourself.’ Sugiyama was caught
off-guard by the sound of his own desperate voice.

‘Why?’ Dong-ju spat back harshly. ‘Why shouldn’t I destroy myself, when the whole world is going insane?’

Sugiyama was stumped. That angered him. He couldn’t use his club to force Dong-ju to write poetry; nothing could do that. ‘Fuck!’ Sugiyama spat out. ‘Do whatever you
want.’ He raged silently at the cruel god who bestowed on Dong-ju the talent for refined language while taking away his mother tongue. Dong-ju’s gift wasn’t a blessing, it was a
curse.

Sugiyama knew he should do something about this state of affairs, instead of just hating it. He should try to repair this vulnerable soul he’d wrecked. He rummaged around in his inner
pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. ‘Look! Look at this. It’s a poem.’

The words pulled Dong-ju’s gaze like bait. Sugiyama wasn’t quite sure if what he’d written was a poem. But if Dong-ju was right, if the truth could be poetry, then perhaps his
scribbling could be a poem, too. His were a few unspectacular lines, but they weren’t a lie. He hadn’t been a guard or a censor when he wrote them; he had been true to himself. ‘I
can’t believe it either, but I picked up a pen and wrote this. Do you know why?’ He spoke urgently. ‘I wanted to show that someone like me could write poems. What’s your
excuse?’

Dong-ju smiled, fatigued, as though he’d just returned from a long journey. He shook his head sorrowfully, with the grief of a poet who could no longer write, the anguish of a singer who
could no longer sing.

Sugiyama realized he was breathing raggedly and tried to calm himself. ‘Why do you refuse to write?’

‘Because we Koreans are only allowed to write in Japanese,’ Dong-ju explained heavily.

Sugiyama felt his head splicing in two. So language wasn’t simply a tool to convey meaning. It was the charter of a human being that contained a nation’s history; Dong-ju’s had
shattered, been dumped on the bloodied floor of the interrogation room. And it was Sugiyama who’d done that to him.

‘It doesn’t matter whether your poems are in Korean or Japanese,’ Sugiyama insisted. ‘Because, in their essence, they’re your own.’

‘Why should I bother writing poems that nobody will read?’

Sugiyama’s eye twitched imperceptibly. ‘I’m going to read them. So write!’ He grabbed Dong-ju’s collar. ‘You’re a poet. You have to write. Poetry is the
only proof that you’re alive. If your poems die, so do you.’

Dong-ju clenched his teeth. ‘I’m not dying. I’m walking out of this place on 30 November next year, on my own two feet.’

‘If you’re lucky, you might survive, but you can’t count on luck,’ Sugiyama urged. ‘Prisoners are continuing to die. If you can’t walk out of here, the poems
in your head will be shut in forever.’

Dong-ju gazed up impassively at the sky. He no longer seemed interested in Sugiyama. The blue sky was reflected in his eyes.

Sugiyama offered the kite and the spool to Dong-ju. ‘Fine. If you don’t want to write, at least fly this kite. You liked doing that.’

Dong-ju’s eyes sparkled in momentary joy before he was again overtaken by resignation.

‘Everyone’s been waiting for you to come out of solitary and fly your kite.’ Sugiyama lifted his chin towards the yard where the prisoners were gathered around, talking
excitedly.

He pressed the spool into Dong-ju’s hands. The prisoners looked at him expectantly. With the spool in hand, Dong-ju closed his eyes and gauged the force and direction of the wind. Sugiyama
walked a few paces away, holding the kite. The wind picked up and Dong-ju began to run. Sugiyama gently let go of the kite. The spool spun, as though it had been waiting. The kite soared.

The following week the familiar blue kite flew up over the prison walls as the prisoners watched with bated breath. The blue kite circled, jostling for a fight. Dong-ju quickly
reeled his kite in.

‘Why are you avoiding it?’ Sugiyama glared at the fragile young man, who resembled the kite made of thin paper and bamboo. ‘Fight till the end!’

Dong-ju thought for a moment before unspooling the kite line. His kite rocketed up. The blue kite followed, its tail swaying. The blue kite changed direction and approached. Dong-ju gripped the
spool. The thin kite lines cut into his palms. The blue kite blocked the wind and came close, and Dong-ju’s kite stumbled. The spectators let out a groan. The wind billowed again.
Dong-ju’s kite swooped and circled the blue kite a few times. Now, even if the lines were cut, the two kites would fall, bound together. Suddenly, with a tug, the taut kite line sagged; the
blue kite had clipped the white one’s line. Dong-ju’s kite flew on for quite a while before sinking slowly, the blue kite descending along with it. Dong-ju quietly wound in the line.
The men murmured in the yard; there was a smattering of cheering and applause.