The Investigation (13 page)

‘Why’s that?’

Because He’s already in your heart.
But Sugiyama swallowed the words. He didn’t want the prisoner to know that he’d been moved by a silly poem.

His cap pressed low over his eyes, Sugiyama walked down among the narrow bookshelves. The dark quiet seeped into his body. He heard a low whisper. He stopped and listened, but
the sound disappeared. Was he hearing things? As he aged, his own body was attacking itself. His eyes dimmed, his ears heard phantom sounds, his joints creaked, his skin sagged and his bones were
unable to hold up his weight. That was Sugiyama’s current stage of life. He’d lived so roughly that his body was deteriorating quickly.

He found himself standing in front of the shelf holding box 645. He looked down and was startled to find his hands already holding the box. This is what happens when you get older, he thought to
himself. Your body doesn’t listen to you any more. The manuscript he’d stuffed back in the box was still there. Sugiyama drew in a sharp breath, promising himself that he wouldn’t
be shaken by sentimental feelings, no matter what. He collapsed into his chair and turned the thin page with his stubby fingers:

Sugiyama’s voice, hoarse from yelling and swearing, was reading the poem out loud reverently as though in prayer. He was afraid he would be weakened by the beauty of the words and their
warm consolation, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the poem. His life had been one long wearisome struggle; he deserved some relief, even briefly. Some men went around with their pasts
pinned to their chests like medals, gloating about the number of men they killed or maimed in battle; to him, the past wasn’t something to be proud of. His life had been wind-swept and
precarious, like a winter river topped with thin ice. He’d been born into stench, into the dust. Soon after birth he was abandoned at a fish market on the Kobe coast. A few merchants at the
market looked after him. By the time he was seven, he was cleaning fish; by the time he was twelve he was out on a boat. His hard work helped him mature physically faster than his peers and his
strength soon became his sole asset. When he was fifteen a group of Kobe riff-raffs picked a fight with him. He shattered noses and cheekbones and arms. When five more thugs came after him, he sent
them packing with broken teeth and shattered wrists. The merchants began to avoid him and the captains didn’t want him on their boats; the fish market spat him out. The gang had threatened
the merchants and captains, forcing them to cut their ties with him out of revenge. Sugiyama had nowhere to go. He ended up joining the very gang that had been the cause of his problems. Life in
the back alleys wasn’t always bad. The rules made sense to him. If you didn’t eat, you would be eaten; whatever you didn’t steal, you would lose. His fists were precise and
efficient. Soon a modifier followed his name: he was Sugiyama the Dog, Sugiyama the Butcher.

One day he was pacing the garden of a high-level official’s house that he’d been assigned to guard. He heard something – a piano. Sugiyama looked up at the second-storey
window, searching for the source, and saw the undulating, round shoulders of a young woman. That brief moment altered him forever. He was twenty years old. The notes of the piano coasting on the
fine flow of air tugged at a heart that knew nothing of music. He knew he would worship that sound for the rest of his life. Something began to form inside him, feelings that had atrophied in the
years ruled by punches. Little did he know that an eye for beauty was tucked away in his nature. The notes created a web and hung in the air. He felt at peace; the music flowed through his veins
and rattled his dead heart.

A few days later he decided to learn how to tune a piano. He began working as an errand boy at a piano shop in Kobe. His touch with the piano was inborn; in a mere instant he learned skills that
took most people three years. He didn’t know whether it was because of a natural artistic sense and excellent hearing or because of the young woman. Within a year he’d become a tuner,
handling delicate strings with the same hands he’d used to beat people with. He caressed the piano, imagining he was touching her, and she played for him. But their happiness was as fleeting
as a drop of water on the surface of glass. The year he turned twenty-four a red notice struck him across the face and he was conscripted. As a soldier, he suffered through snowstorms, sandstorms
and mud, dust, exhaustion and death. Somehow, he survived. He thought of her all along. Surviving was the only way to preserve the sound of her piano; surviving was the sole blessing in his
life.

Or maybe it was a curse.

The warm April breeze wafted over the towering walls and scattered a subtle scent around the desolate prison; flowers opened and dusted pollen into the air, luring honeybees.
Blood circulated anew in the prisoners’ faces, festering toes healed and new flesh grew on cracked hands. All Hiranuma wanted was to survive this place. If he lived, he could write poetry
again. Every morning, before he got up, he erased the numbers he’d etched on the wall next to his head, bitterly resolute, counting down the days to 30 November 1945.

The prison was a melting pot of the human condition. Housed here were ideological prisoners and assassins, con men and fugitives. They shared only one trait: they all insisted on their
innocence. But they were all lying. Their wrongdoings weren’t serious, sometimes not even crimes: they didn’t deserve to be thrown behind bars. A docker had chased after a woman he
loved and was accused of raping her; a guard overseeing a conscript’s forced-labour unit got him in prison out of hatred; a man knocked on his boss’s door to ask for back-pay and was
charged with attempted murder. Everyone talked about their heroic exploits, and each time someone spat out indifferently, ‘Hell, there’s nobody here who isn’t falsely
charged!’ The prisoners launched violent attacks on one another. Hiranuma felt only pity. He thought violence was the only way for prisoners to stand up against their fate.

One day, during their daily outdoor break, an old man with short greying hair and a wily look came up to Hiranuma. ‘You’re so gentle,’ he remarked, air whistling out of the
gaps in his teeth. ‘You don’t belong in here. What crime did you commit that brought you to this place?’

‘Violation of the Maintenance of Public Order Act,’ Hiranuma answered curtly, digging the dead grass. He could see green sprouts under the dried roots.

‘Maintenance of public order, my arse,’ the old man grumbled. ‘They’re trying to do away with Koreans. I had a high-interest loan, but the Jap financier brought a charge
against me, saying I wasn’t paying back the interest. I’ve been here two years. Is that what happened to you?’

‘No. I wrote some poems in Korean.’

The old man clucked his tongue. This boy wasn’t just naive, he was foolish. Their world was one in which Japanese was taught in primary school and no one was allowed to utter a word in
Korean. He squinted at Hiranuma. In his mind, educated people like this boy who did useless things were what caused Korea’s demise.

A small man with beady eyes came up to them. He brushed his hand over his shaved head and blinked, looking all around him. ‘Old man, are you crazy? What are you doing? What if the Choi
gang sees you?’

Everyone knew that Choi monitored the prisoners and hand-picked those he wanted for his gang. Since Hiranuma’s arrival, this university student had been Choi’s main focus.

The old man grinned. ‘Don’t get so worked up, Man-gyo! Do you even know why Choi is anxious to get this boy in his gang?’

‘I don’t. Do you? Is he made of gold or something?’ Man-gyo snapped impatiently.

The old man turned serious. ‘I don’t know whether he’s a mound of gold or a mound of shit. But since Choi is interested, it’s clear he’s not just anyone. If we get
him first, Choi won’t be able to boss us around.’ The old man rubbed his dry palm against his beard, speaking about Hiranuma as though he weren’t standing beside him.

‘Shit! And if he’s not worth it?’

‘You don’t know the first thing about selling something, do you?’ the old man said dismissively. ‘You need a good eye to notice whether something will make you money. And
you need gumption. The more money you can possibly make, the more danger you have to risk. But you don’t know any of that. Your fate is to sell cigarettes and crackers and stick your nose up
the guards’ behinds.’

Man-gyo settled down. The old man gave him a look, prompting him to take out a dirty cigarette from a seam in his uniform and offer it to Hiranuma, who waved his hands, refusing this small
luxury.

Man-gyo shoved the cigarette back into his uniform. ‘I’m investing, so if it’s a good deal you have to split it with me!’ He moved away, looking around furtively.

The old man stroked his jagged beard. ‘You might be wondering how cigarettes are circulated in the prison. Well, you see, wherever people live there is trade. A proper merchant can buy and
sell even death. That Man-gyo, he may never be a big fish, but he’s an innate peddler. He began to bring things in from the outside six months after he got here. The guards are hungry, too.
Bribes got them to look the other way.’

Hiranuma didn’t know whether to feel hopeful that his fellow man had a persistent will to live or to despair at the tenacity of human greed.

The old man read his hesitation. ‘If you have to bet on something, I suggest you choose hope. If you go with despair, what’s left over is even greater despair. In my experience,
believing that the sale will be a success leaves more profit.’ He blinked his crusty eyes and asked, ‘What will you sell?’

Hiranuma shook his head. He had nothing. If he had books he could sell a few to a used bookshop, but they were useless now.
Sentences
,
Criticism of the Humanities
,
Poetry
and Opinion
– they’d been confiscated and were either mouldering in the inspection office or had been burned.

‘Everyone has something to sell. If you don’t, you can sell your body. If your body’s damaged, you can sell your life. Son, you studied at a university! You were fortunate
enough to study abroad in Japan! If you can read and write in Japanese, you have something to sell.’

‘How could I possibly sell that?’

‘We’re allowed to send out a postcard written in Japanese once a month. But most prisoners are illiterate. Forget Japanese – they haven’t even learned Korean properly.
You can write postcards for the prisoners who can’t write. Since Korean is banned, you can translate what they tell you and write it in Japanese.’

‘There must be other Koreans who know Japanese.’

‘The censor here is incredibly strict. He’ll destroy your postcard if there’s a sentence that is even a little bit problematic. You’ll also get a beating. A couple of
prisoners wrote postcards for others, but when they almost died from the beatings, nobody wanted to do it any more. Lots of people are itching to send out postcards. Can’t you see the money
piling up?’

‘But you just said you can die from a single wrong word.’

‘That’s why you’re the right man to do it. You’re a literary man who knows about writing, so you can avoid expressions that will get censored. And you can make
money.’

Hiranuma frowned. ‘How could I make money off penniless Koreans?’

‘The Japs in Wards One and Four are always looking for people to do their work for them. So the Koreans sell their labour. In exchange for writing a postcard in Japanese, you can get them
to work for a Jap for a day and take their wages. Then everyone wins.’

‘You’re saying I’m to sell Korean manpower to the Japs?’

‘That’s the deal. If they register as patients with the guards that were bought off, they can avoid physical labour here, and that’s how they can fill in for the
Japanese.’

Hiranuma was disgusted. ‘I can’t make my countrymen suffer.’

The old man shook his head. ‘And here I was, thinking you were smart. With your talents you can help the illiterate send news home. But you’re going to decline. Are you stupid? Or
cruel? Most prisoners can’t send word to their families. If you aren’t going to help them, what’s the point of your education?’

Hiranuma pondered the questions for a long while. ‘How much do you get for a day’s work from the Japs?’

‘Four
sen
. That’s the official price.’

‘So how much do I get?’

The old man’s eyes glinted. ‘We’ll split fifty-fifty. Two
sen
each. But considering that I’ll take out Man-gyo’s cut and the bribe for the guards from my
share, it’s actually a better deal for you. Take it or leave it.’ The old man waited expectantly.

Hiranuma gave him a short nod. The old man grinned, and scurried around to publicize his new service. The news about the ghostwriter quickly and quietly spread throughout the cells. But people
didn’t approach Hiranuma as he stood under the prison walls. Everyone knew that evading censorship was as precarious as balancing on a straw cutter. Emotional expression, descriptions of the
reality of prison life, questions about the war were all immediately blacked out, and both the sender and the writer of the problematic postcard would be called into the interrogation room for a
beating. The old man decided that the only way to convince the fearful prisoners was to be the first. He stood in front of Hiranuma and called out his letter in a loud voice so that all the Koreans
could hear.