The Investigation (14 page)

‘Dear Suna, the spring I’ve been waiting for isn’t coming to this prison, which I so want to leave. They say spring has come, but damn it, the cell floor is like ice and the
guards run wild. People are dying all around me and it doesn’t even make me flinch.’ The old man shouted out expressions that went well beyond the danger zone, as though determined to
be caught.

Hiranuma’s pencil raced across the postcard transcribing the old man’s sardonic voice. The prisoners crowded around, curious as to whether the pale writer could repackage the old
man’s complaints. When he finished writing, Hiranuma read out in Korean what he’d written. The old man’s intent and feelings were intact, but his overt complaints had been
restrained. The courier collected the postcard. The prisoners were tense. Each cell whispered and bet about the fate of the missive. Two days later the postcard was sent off, but the old man
wasn’t called to the interrogation room. Silent cheers spread through the cells. The prisoners finally understood who 645 was: someone who would help spirit their souls to the outside.

One by one, prisoners came looking for him. Before Hiranuma wrote their postcard, he asked them who they were sending it to, what their relationship was, what memories they shared. He carefully
observed the way they talked and the words they liked to use. He wasn’t simply writing down what was dictated. He constructed a cover that would camouflage the true meaning of what they
wanted to convey. When he read back what he had written, the men shed tears, as they heard their true feelings put into words. Hiranuma shaped the desperate sentiments of the prisoners while
avoiding the blade of censorship, a perilous high-wire act. A fortnight after the postcards were sent out, answers began arriving, slashed intermittently with black ink, only traces left of
undesirable words that didn’t pass Sugiyama’s censorship. The letters sparkled with hope and love. Hiranuma read them out; even if Sugiyama blacked out all of the lines he could
resurrect the words, read what was hidden and what couldn’t be said, revealing unshed tears and undreamt dreams. Hiranuma felt alive again. More and more prisoners rushed to secure his
services; the old man fashioned ledgers out of scraps of wood and kept records written with a lump of coal. Hiranuma grew busier, the old man’s books grew fatter and Man-gyo busily scurried
off to the Japanese wards to supply labour.

‘It’s a hit, Dong-ju,’ the old man said, grinning. ‘People are lining up. If they’ve done it once, they’ll naturally come again. If you reduce the silly
interview time, then the poor saps won’t have to wait so long.’

Hiranuma was editing a postcard he’d just written. ‘But if we get caught it’ll all be over,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t you want to keep doing business?’

‘You’re right! Just keep doing what you’re doing. We’re doing pretty good.’ The old man shook his head and looked at his log. ‘Forty-five prisoners wrote
postcards in a fortnight. So that’s 180
sen
, and your share is ninety
sen
.’

Man-gyo came up to them. ‘You need anything? Cigarettes? Rice? Sugar cubes or red-bean jelly? I can get you anything.’

‘I could use some labour. How much for a day?’

‘We get four
sen
from the Japs, but I can’t charge the full price for a business partner, can I? How about half? Two
sen
a day!’

Hiranuma smiled. ‘Okay. I’ll use the people I write postcards for.’

The old man’s face fell. ‘Look at this boy! A real wolf. You’re trying to take the meat meant for someone else’s belly.’

Man-gyo looked from one man to the other in confusion.

Pitying him, the old man explained what Hiranuma was proposing to do. ‘If Dong-ju writes a postcard, we get four
sen
. That’s the cost of the labour of the man who sends the
postcard. We get four
sen
from the Japs and send the postcard-writers to them. We take half and this boy gets the other half. But now he’s going to repurchase the manpower of the man
who asked for the postcard. And for two
sen
a day!’

Man-gyo grew concerned. ‘Then we don’t have a worker to send to the Japs, and our business . . .’

‘Is over.’

Man-gyo looked alarmed.

Hiranuma jumped in to reassure him. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll have the man work for the Jap, and then you can give him the two
sen
you would have given me. Then everyone
wins. You and the old man can keep earning your cut, the Koreans will make money for their labour, and the Japs can find a Korean to do their work for them. Of course, the guards will keep getting
a nice bribe, too.’

‘Then you don’t get anything,’ Man-gyo said. ‘Shouldn’t you get something out of it? You’re doing the writing, after all.’

‘I do get something out of it.’

‘What?’

‘I can use a pencil and paper every day. As long as I can write something, I don’t care what it is.’

It was an ideal arrangement, but the old man and Man-gyo didn’t realize how good they had it.

Sugiyama opened the outgoing post box after his afternoon rounds and found four postcards inside. He settled into his chair. One was by a Korean prisoner sending a postcard to
his wife. The neat handwriting succinctly relayed what he wanted to say. He spoke of the prison, but he didn’t complain, and while he wrote about pain, he seemed relieved. Sugiyama was a
little suspicious, but he couldn’t pick out exactly what was unsanctioned. The second postcard was to a prisoner’s mother. It was in the same hand as the first one, but its writing
style and expression were different, as though a completely different person had written it. He couldn’t find anything problematic about this one, either. This phenomenon repeated itself
again and again. The writer knew which words to avoid. Sugiyama suppressed his scepticism and stamped the blue
Censorship Completed
mark in the middle of the postcards. He leaned back and
rubbed his dry eyes. He suddenly sat up as he picked up the last postcard:

A thought struck him: the author of the postcards was writing all of this with Sugiyama in mind. He could tell there was something fishy going on. He would show this brash prisoner what would
happen to someone who played pranks on him.

Prisoner 645 sat ramrod-straight on the hard chair, much like his neat handwriting. Sugiyama lowered his voice. ‘The postcards you wrote were for me. You knew I would
read them.’

Hiranuma’s brain whirred. One wrong step would cripple him and the prisoners who had asked him to write the postcards.

‘I know you’re crafty. But it doesn’t work with me. I know you’re the one who’s behind all this!’ Sugiyama shouted. He avoided meeting Hiranuma’s eyes,
afraid that doing so would change his mind.

‘Yes, you caught me. But it was worth it. I learned a lot about you.’

Sugiyama’s heart sank – had 645 been conducting a secret investigation of his life? He could guess how it happened: 645 would have written his first postcard very carefully,
suppressing any emotion and avoiding any expression that might become a problem. After that first postcard passed review, he would have gradually got bolder. One day he would have slipped in a
suspicious word, and on another he would have cleverly inserted a phrase with dual meanings. He would have figured out how Sugiyama took the meanings of the words, inferring from the blacked-out
letters the prisoners received which expressions Sugiyama disliked. Sugiyama had been fooled into thinking that he was in complete control. He hadn’t been watching Hiranuma; in fact, Hiranuma
had been looking straight into Sugiyama’s heart.

The thick veins in Sugiyama’s neck thrummed. ‘You’ve gone too far. I’m no writer, but I’m not so stupid that I don’t realize what’s going on.’ He
was incensed; he gritted his teeth and rubbed his hand over his prickly hair. ‘You knew you’d get killed, but you still tried to fight me!’

‘You can’t kill me.’

‘You knew full well that you’d be beaten if your plot was revealed!’ It dawned on Sugiyama that the prisoner was right. If he were the type of censor who would kill a man for
writing postcards, he would have been stricter with several of Hiranuma’s postcards. Hiranuma must have sensed that Sugiyama didn’t catch the seditious undertone of the postcards or had
looked the other way. That quiet passage of the postcards informed Hiranuma that this guard, no matter how violent, wouldn’t be able to beat him, let alone kill him. Sugiyama shook his head.
‘Don’t you know they call me The Butcher?’

‘I know more about you than your nickname.’

‘Oh, really. And what do you know about me?’

‘That you understand and love the secrets harboured by words.’

Sugiyama smirked. But it was true that he’d seen the world; the roots of the sentences created a gigantic forest of meaning. His voice hardened. ‘What makes you say such foolish
things?’

‘Because I know the real you. You yourself aren’t even aware of who you are.’

Sugiyama recognized that the young man was taunting him. He had to fend him off. He had to fight with vocabulary sharper than knives and with sentences more fatal than spearheads. The odds were
against him: Hiranuma was an intellectual, while Sugiyama had barely thrown off the cloak of illiteracy. Sugiyama sensed that he was being dragged into a black, unfathomable swamp. But there was
nothing he could do. The battle had begun; all he could do was fight.

Under the shadow of the wall, Hiranuma continued to listen as the men in front of him sobbed and yelled and shook their fists. He soon became familiar with their stories; what
their childhoods were like, what crimes they’d committed, how wronged they felt. He wrote postcard after postcard, recalling their voices, expressions, intonation. He had to accurately convey
what they wanted to say, but delicately plant two or three other meanings in one phrase to avoid censorship. Each morning Hiranuma woke up from the same dream, drenched in ink-black sweat –
the red censor stamp was branded on his forehead. He didn’t know when Sugiyama would tire of this game. But on the other hand, if the censor was firm, the rules Hiranuma had to toe became
simpler. He was persuading the censor, one postcard at a time, in a slow and insistent seduction.

Sugiyama felt himself changing. He was getting pulled into the prisoners’ writing, so much so that he subconsciously looked forward to the postcards. The faint letters
written on the brownish paper contained longing and hope, tears and sighs between each line. Reading them made him feel relaxed, as though submerged in a warm bath. All day long Sugiyama felt
overcome. He struggled to get away from the tug of those postcards. He handled the prisoners with even more cruelty.

Hiranuma observed Sugiyama from far away. The guard was becoming more and more violent. He swung his club and swore and hollered. Hiranuma smiled to himself. It was working.
Violence was the final line of defence. He could tell that Sugiyama was in flux. A letter had arrived a few days ago from a prisoner’s wife. Sugiyama had censored the letter, which was
streaked with red lines. But Hiranuma could still read the words underneath; before, Sugiyama would have completely obliterated the sentences with black ink. Now, Hiranuma thought, he could begin
using bolder, more overt expressions.

Sugiyama glanced at a postcard written by a prisoner to his thirteen-year-old son; it started off with praises for the beauty of the season and went on to describe the burdens
of war. Imprisonment, destitution, death . . . These were bold words, the first overt descriptions of the war in a postcard. Sugiyama rubbed his stamp on the red ink pad.

It was a daring message, but there wasn’t really a reason to censor any of it. After all, the postcard was encouraging the child to embrace pain. Sugiyama thought for a moment. Was he
expressing criticism and scorn for the challenges of the times? Or was he merely offering his son a burst of hope to help him come to terms with his sadness? Sugiyama realized that he would have to
read the poems mentioned in the postcard to determine that. His impatient feet led him to the library of confiscated documents. He dug through Prisoner 645’s box and found a yellowed old
book,
The Poetry of Francis Jammes
. He opened the book and scanned the table of contents: ‘Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys’, ‘Prayer to Have a Simple
Wife’, ‘The House Would Be Full of Roses’, ‘Orchard with Raspberries in the Sun’, ‘These Are the Labours’. The pages created a breeze at his fingertips. He
took in a deep breath and started to read ‘Prayer for Loving Sorrow’: