The Investigation (3 page)

The coal in the furnace crackled. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I felt like a pilot who’d made an emergency landing in enemy territory, unsure of which direction I was
facing. But I had to do my job. I picked up the file Maeda had tossed aside. I opened its worn, glossy cover. I inhaled the scent of sweet paper, losing myself for a moment in delicious ink and
fragrant trees. The last entry was dated 22 December.

Guards usually scribbled ‘nothing out of the ordinary’ instead of a detailed record of the day or, if even that proved too difficult, they wrote: ‘N/A’. But
Sugiyama’s reports were notable for their detail. Even almost-identical events from the previous day were recorded slightly differently. On the night before he died he’d written:
‘349 prisoners sleeping in a total of 48 cells. Patrol time 2–6 a.m. 348 steps round-trip along Ward Three corridor. Many patients with colds. Slow recovery of one patient with
contusions and fractures.’ The previous day he’d written: ‘From 2 to 6 a.m. checked 346 prisoners in 48 cells through the surveillance window. More patients with colds, one
patient with fractures and contusions.’ The patient with contusions and fractures was mentioned daily; I became curious about his identity and the source of his injuries. I flipped back, page
by page. The first clue I found was in the 13 December report. ‘Prisoner 331 in Cell 28: repressed with club for refusal of orders and inappropriate actions. Moved to infirmary after
collapse, took emergency measures. Contusions all over the body including the head, suspected fracture to shoulder and ribs.’ I was a little surprised that he’d faithfully recorded the
conditions of the men he’d personally clubbed. I looked up 331’s records. Name: Choi Chi-su. Crime: study of Communism and overthrow of the government, assassination attempt of a key
government figure, rebellion plot. He was a long-term prisoner.

I stood up and adjusted my uniform. I wondered whether this man could illuminate the mystery of Sugiyama’s death. But when Sugiyama was killed, all the prisoners were in their cells. Only
guards and rats were awake and mobile. Still, 331 was the only person I could think of to question.

Later, under the faint shadow of the tall brick wall lining the yard, I studied the piece of paper I’d found in Sugiyama’s uniform. Its worn corners were
disintegrating, but it seemed to retain his body heat. I turned the paper over; it was a ledger of incoming and outgoing post for Ward Three.
27 March 1942. Incoming: 14; Outgoing: 5.
At
the bottom the sender’s name, address and the prisoner number of the recipient were written in black ink. The first hesitant stroke revealed a careful personality, while the following clumsy
but sure strokes suggested a strong sense of purpose.

I believed handwriting revealed one’s soul. The shape and position of the script announced not only a person’s character and desires, but also his mood and feelings at the time he
was writing, as did the space between the letters and lines and the speed with which he scrawled. Even a blank piece of paper tells the reader something about the person who chose not to write. As
for the content – I was well aware of the magic of consonants as they ruptured in my mouth; of the elegance of vowels as they tumbled out fluidly; and of the way they created pitch and
meaning and feeling as they mixed and crashed into each other. I recalled characters from novels I’d read long ago. The bleak prison yard became the snow-covered Siberia in Tolstoy’s
Resurrection
; if I were to love someone, I would love a woman like Katyusha. If words could explain lives, why couldn’t they illuminate death? I searched for Sugiyama’s core in
his strokes and punctuation, but I soon grew confused. I glimpsed two very different people. The exact same writing was on the shift report and the post ledger; the writer was confident and
fearless, like the Sugiyama I was familiar with. Though the poem seemed written by the same hand, the strokes seemed bashful and hesitant. Did Sugiyama write both the official reports and the poem,
too? Or did someone copy Sugiyama’s handwriting? And, most importantly, why was that piece of paper in his pocket?

Darkness began to descend over the prison walls. Every afternoon at this time I heard the same seductive piano melody playing somewhere; I hummed along automatically. A light
was on in the infirmary. Drawn by the music, I started walking towards it. I stopped at the auditorium window and looked in; a grand piano stood imposingly, as confident as a boat with expanded
sails voyaging through the red sunset. Its colonnades, curves and the fine, elaborate carvings – it created an otherworldly effect. A woman was sitting at the piano, which let out a clear,
delicate sound each time her fingers caressed the keys; I felt as though I’d seen the source of a majestic river, a small spring deep in the mountains. Her white fingers undulated like waves,
scurried like mice and flitted like curious birds. In a trance, I gazed at this forbidding world from the other side of the clear glass. Time passed ever so slowly. She was like an exotic bird
flying into the sunset, into darkness, into silence. As the air absorbed the last melodies, she straightened and looked out the window. Was she looking at me? I stared at her, bewitched; she was
indeed real. She was wearing a neat white nurse’s uniform; her slender face was as smooth as a ceramic pot; her hair glistened in the amber light of the waning sun. Her high forehead, slender
eyebrows and the corners of her almond-shaped eyes were enchanting, her cheeks were flushed, and her slightly parted lips prodded my curiosity.

I wanted to introduce myself, but my shabby appearance made me hesitate. I watched as she held a hairpin in her mouth before securing her nurse’s cap. She glanced down at her reflection on
the piano lid before taking her files and hurrying across the auditorium. With each step, her white skirt flapped at her calves. Before I realized what I was doing, I stepped into the building. I
walked down the pristine corridor to the auditorium. The doors opened silently as though they had been waiting for me. I approached the glistening piano, awed by its black-and-white keys, the
vibrant grain of the wood, its sturdy tendon-like strings. I looked down at the back of my cracked, rough hands, at my fingernails rimmed with grime. Could fingers this dirty make a melody? I
pressed a key; a clear note rang out, thawing my heart. I closed my eyes.

‘That’s soh.’ A voice twinkled like the scales of sweetfish swimming upstream. Hundreds of bells tolled in my ears.

I looked behind me. Her lips were pursed, but she didn’t seem reproachful. She held black files against her chest, creating a vivid contrast against her white uniform. Her fingers were
pale and long and delicate; her pinkish nails had a transparent lustre. How long had she been watching me?

‘It’s also called G. It’s the fifth note. For your little finger. It’s the arbiter of sound that harmonizes with all notes, a bridge that links the ponderous dark low
notes and delicate high notes.’ She looked me over.

I shrank. I was bedraggled; my uniform was covered in dirt, my skin had been pummelled by dusty winds, my lips were blistered, I hadn’t bathed in a while. She smiled slightly. Was she
jeering silently at me? Or was it compassion?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, stiffly. ‘Coming in here without permission and touching this object . . .’ I searched for a way to end the sentence. I wanted to bite my
clumsy tongue for calling this enchanting, captivating instrument an object.

She said it was fine, that it wasn’t her piano, and reached over to pick up the sheet music she’d left on the rack.

I mustered up the courage to speak to her again. ‘The piece you just played – what is it called? I think I’ve heard it before, but I don’t remember the title.’

Instead of answering, she opened the sheet music. The title was written on the top.
Die Winterreise
. ‘It’s German. Winter Journey.’

‘Winter Journey . . .’ I echoed.

‘Schubert composed these lieder for Wilhelm Müller’s poems. It’s a total of twenty-four songs published as Opus 89. The singer tells of the loneliness of life and the pain
of love, but even played with just the piano, it’s truly beautiful. The piano in
Die Winterreise
doesn’t merely accompany the singer. It sets the tone of the whole piece. I
would say it’s a duet of a pianist and a singer.’

‘It makes me wonder which singer would be able to hold his own.’

‘Professor Marui Yasujiro. He’s the foremost tenor in Japan. He teaches at Tokyo Imperial University Music School and has made several records. He’s renowned worldwide,
especially for performing Schubert. To really express the loneliness and gloom of this piece, he sang it as a baritone. His performances are some of the best interpretations of Schubert’s
work.’

I was sufficiently awed, and it must have shown on my face.

‘Professor Marui is planning to give a concert, wishing for peace in Asia, here next February,’ the nurse told me. ‘He decided not to use his usual accompanist for this
concert; he wants someone working here. He thought that was more fitting with the themes of hope and peace. That’s why I’ve been practising so hard.’ She smiled, revealing her
even teeth, which resembled the piano’s white keys. ‘I’m Iwanami Midori,’ she said. Her words rippled like water and pooled in my heart.

‘Watanabe – Yuichi . . .’ I stammered, disgusted with myself that I couldn’t utter my own name without stuttering.

She nodded before walking across the wooden floor.

‘Iwanami Midori . . .’ I murmured. Her name sounded like a melody.

It was snowing outside. The snow fell through the darkness, crackling like thin ice. The night air was heavy with ice and cold and heartlessness and conspiracies and secrets
and other unknowable things. Our barracks formed a makeshift structure on the west side of the central facilities. By the time I returned, the lights were out and the other conscripted guards were
deep in slumber. The coal stove glowed in the middle. I stumbled into my sleeping bag, which smelled of other people. It had been a long day. Sugiyama’s death, searching for clues but
learning nothing, the mysterious poem. I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes or a Special Higher Police detective. I didn’t have the skills to solve a gruesome murder, let alone the means to catch
the perpetrator.

The wind swept the snow off the galvanized iron roof above my head. The amber light, the warm air, the elegant piano, the girl in white . . . I folded my hands on my chest and felt the piece of
paper that I’d retrieved from Sugiyama’s uniform:

That violent guard wrote such poetry? It didn’t match up. Was it a clue, or a sign left by the murderer? Why would a criminal leave a mysterious poem in the victim’s pocket? I was as
puzzled as ever, but grew convinced that the poem contained the key. The song I’d heard Midori playing earlier circled in my head – the song of one man’s despair, of painful love.
Melody embraced poetry, and poetry was laid over melody. The harmony of sounds layered over the verse; the tinkling of the piano sparkled in the golden light of the furnace. Three faces hovered in
my mind – Sugiyama, Hasegawa, Midori. Poetry, melody, piano.

Before the war tore my life into pieces, my days began in a single-storey house topped with an attic in the outskirts of Kyoto, and proceeded to a small used bookshop run by my
mother. I spent hours among the old wooden bookshelves piled with dust, surrounded by paper. Walls of books protected us from the ominous news of the war. Nothing could filter in through the
hundreds of thousands of pages; not the brawling of merchants or the clomping of marching soldiers or the cold of the winter night. The books protected me from the era’s rebellions and from
my anxiety about the future. I snuggled deeper in my prison-issue sleeping bag, recalling forgotten names, their faces as vivid as a new photograph – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, André Gide,
Lord Byron, Rainer Maria Rilke.

We opened the bookshop the year I went into middle school. Three years earlier my father had applied to the Manchurian military academy, but he was too old. He was finally able to enrol after
audaciously demonstrating his sincerity with a letter written in his blood and sent to the Army Minister. Early in the morning on the day of departure, my mother and I followed him to Kyoto
Station. From behind, amid the plump flitting snowflakes, he looked like a wooden toy soldier, weighed down with gear. Thick, solid icicles clung to the dark wheels of the train that was puffing
out white steam. Father’s scratchy beard was caked with frost. His eyelashes were long, like mine.

‘Yuichi, be good to your mother.’ Father’s frozen words mixed with his white breath, the whistle of the black train and the stomping of military boots. The crying of women fell
away, buried by military song, as Father walked slowly into the black steel monster.

Mother rented a small shop front, installed bookshelves and hung up a white tin sign. A few strands of hair kept falling across her forehead. I bought her a butterfly pin as a fulfilment of
Father’s last request. At the front of the shop Mother repaired torn covers with thick paste, replaced missing covers with stiff strawboard, restitched unravelled bindings and re-created
ripped spines with silk cloth. Books ruined beyond salvation ended their lives there, becoming kindling or a sack containing warm roasted sweet potatoes on a winter night, or the paper with which
to wipe a young child’s nose. Even after the books died, their sentences lived and breathed. Plato’s wisdom printed across a sack of sweet potatoes might attract the attention of a poor
student; Dumas’s words might move the father who wiped his young son’s nose, prompting him to unfold the sticky sheet.

Our days began and ended in that small bookshop. Every day at dawn we went there, stepping through the chilly air. When we opened the locked glass door, the stale smell of books rushed at us in
greeting. After school I returned to the cradle of books. Mother was at the front counter greeting customers while at the back, among the narrow bookshelves, I stamped the inside of each book with
our shop’s seal, like a cowboy branding a calf, to welcome the books into our family. I sneezed from the dust, sliced my fingers on the sharp pages and bruised myself with the heavy corners,
but I was happy. I organized the books by field and subject and displayed popular books at the front; each and every book became a world of its own. Universes were organized on the shelves
according to my will. I exerted absolute control according to my own order and rules, putting Tolstoy’s essays on the same shelf as Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
and a
yellowed copy of
Othello
next to
King Lear
. Soon I could guess the age of a book just by its scent and understand a book’s core from a quick glance at the table of contents,
like a farmer who could tell the maturity and sweetness of a fruit from just its colour and the texture of its skin. I could conjure up people’s interests by taking in their expressions as
they entered through the glass door. Most of the time I handed them the books they asked for, but sometimes, when they sought books I wanted to keep forever, I didn’t –
The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
; a book of Van Gogh’s paintings in colour;
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
. When the customers turned away in disappointment, I felt both guilty
and secretly thrilled.