Authors: Bryce Courtenay
‘Nicholas, bondage is all I know how to do, and fortunately it is something that is always needed by those who can afford to pay. Besides, heroin is expensive.’
Anna Til, Port Vila
THE SUN GOES DOWN
early and quickly in the tropics; one moment it is a great fiery ball on the horizon, the next it plunges sizzling into the sea leaving a tincture of brilliant colour that quickly smudges to dusk and as soon darkens into night.
All this happened as we left Beautiful Bay and motored around Iririki Island, where I pointed out the British High Commissioner’s residence and the British Hospital to Anna. By the time we could no longer see the harbour lights, a full moon was rising out of the darker line that indicated open sea. Navigation was going to be easy in the moonlight and I cut the motor and hoisted the mainsail to catch the strengthening land breeze.
Anna stood in the stern of
Madam Butterfly
leaning into the light wind that lifted her long dark hair from her shoulders so that it flowed behind her. Her slim silhouette, silvered in the moonlight, reminded me of the Spirit of Ecstasy, the mascot on the radiator of a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost I had once seen.
My heart started to beat faster as I realised that I had been thinking of Anna as an innocent sixteen-year-old, whereas at twenty-four she was not only a sexually and intellectually mature woman but a damaged one, way beyond my mental grasp and experience. During the war I had been blooded and had fought and killed the enemy at close quarters, but what I had seen as a young warrior in the heat of battle was quite different from her experience of the mindless cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners and perceived enemies by the Japanese.
As a captive she’d been forced to become the consort of the regional commander, Konoe Akira, the scion of a famous Samurai family, a frustrated professional soldier and a highly complex personality. Like many privileged Japanese men of his generation he was an aesthete as well as a sexual aberrant. Struck by Anna’s extraordinary beauty and the idea that she was still untainted – new clay to mould – he took her as his own possession and began with great care to instruct her in his peculiar proclivities and aesthetic.
He employed the services of two retired geishas to instruct Anna in the ancient art of
kinbaku
, a highly sophisticated form of erotic bondage. Under their instruction she proved a fast learner and soon began to partially satisfy the needs of Konoe Akira. Gradually she mastered the divine rope and with it the subtleties of erotic massage so that she could meet his stringent requirements and completely satisfy and, more importantly, gratify him, her natural talent for sexual domination confirming in his mind that he had chosen well.
The two geishas had initially been brought from Japan to establish and supervise the running of a Japanese officers’ brothel known as the Nest of the Swallows. It was here that only the most comely Dutch women and girls, some as young as thirteen, were forced to become comfort women. Upon arrival and for several days thereafter, heroin suppositories were forcibly inserted into the anus of any recalcitrants to make them compliant. They soon became addicts and the threat of withholding the drug kept the girls working and willing to service even the most perverted and bizarre needs of their officer clients.
Konoe-san
was too much of an aesthete to resort to such crude tactics. He saw Anna as a part of the order and perfection he craved in his life and set about carefully and slowly coercing her so that it became her desire to please him.
Anna was by nature strong-willed and not easily influenced. She had been brought up in the Dutch Calvinist tradition and possessed a strong sense of right and wrong. This conditioning may have presented an even greater challenge to the Japanese colonel. Even so, he made no improper demands or threats. She lived separately and away from him, and outwardly seemed to have a freedom of movement denied to any of the other Dutch women prisoners of war. His demands, while absolute, took into account her intelligence and natural desire to learn, and he cultivated in her an innate sense of beauty, discipline and perfection, so that this unfamiliar tuition quickly transcended any sense of morality. If she were forced to comply with his demands, then he would later assuage her feelings with a fresh insight into the nature of his arcane discipline or some exquisite aesthetic pleasure. He was always careful to bend this young and pliant twig slowly, taking great care never to snap it or inhibit the flow of young sap.
After nearly three years of conditioning and constant reinforcement Anna willingly became mistress to his needs, incapable of separating her personality from his commands and bizarre desires. His sudden vitriolic reprimands when she failed to meet his exacting standards would cause her great distress and as a result she would become even more determined to please him. Never for a moment did she think she was handmaiden to his perversion, but only that his ultimate gratification was her most ardent wish.
Moreover, she came to believe that his insights into self-discipline and unyielding will were well worth the price of her bondage. More importantly, Konoe Akira instilled in Anna the idea that losing her virginity would mean the destruction of her perfection, that she would be impure and tainted forever, a beautiful portrait brutally slashed and destroyed. So graphic was this imagined sense of emotional and physical violation that it was to have repercussions throughout her life.
I have since learned that it is not unusual for victims of a kidnapping to grow to identify with their captors. When I suggested to her that she was the innocent victim of her captor’s nefarious influence and that she had no alternative but to submit to the Japanese colonel’s authority, that she was truly, if unknowingly, motivated by a deep sense of fear and the need to survive, Anna was quick to disabuse me.
‘No, Nicholas, this is
not
true!
Ja
, perhaps in the beginning, maybe it is so; I do not remember because from
mijn
mind all that is going. But later, this is not so. I want always to please him. I cannot fail. I will do
anything
to please him.’ She looked directly at me and shrugged her shoulders helplessly. ‘If now he walks in the door it would be the same.’
In the five years Anna had been in Australia, she had perfected her English and spoke with almost no trace of an accent. Naturally gifted with languages, she had a sound grasp of grammar, but when she became overwrought with me, and
only
it seems with me, she reverted to the slightly accented and syntactically incorrect English she spoke when we first met in Java. Thus I always knew when Anna was upset, whereas to others she appeared enigmatic. This helped her to become a formidable negotiator and opponent, someone who could risk everything while appearing to be completely calm, or punish a miscreant or avenge a betrayal without raising her voice.
However, Anna’s war was not to end in the company of her patron. Konoe Akira was recalled to Japan three months before armistice to run a military academy in Tokyo and was replaced by the regional head of the
kempeitai
, the fearsome Japanese military police, as ruthless and efficient as the German Gestapo but even more brutal. They were a force separate from the regular Japanese army, who feared these vicious enforcers almost as much as their victims did.
The new commander, Colonel Takahashi, felt a great malevolence towards his predecessor and had made it his business as head of the
kempeitai
to be informed about his private life. A commoner of no breeding, he resented Konoe Akira’s Samurai ancestry and privileged upbringing. His aestheticism he regarded scornfully as mere pretension, an excuse for his highbrow perversion. Learning that Konoe Akira’s beautiful young bondage mistress remained a virgin, Takahashi determined to deflower her so he could have the pleasure of informing the previous commander that he had personally ravaged her.
Shortly after Konoe Akira’s departure Takahashi sent a squad of six
kempeitai
to bring Anna to him. She fought like a tiger to resist them and, when finally subdued, was battered and badly bruised. The new commander, infuriated by her temporary disfigurement, could not bring himself to have his way with her until she was once again as flawless as she had been for his predecessor. She was imprisoned in private accommodation in the Nest of the Swallows, where the two retired geishas were ordered to oversee her recovery and administer heroin to make her more biddable.
With the loss of Konoe Akira’s patronage Anna’s safety was no longer guaranteed. She knew Takahashi planned to despoil her. She also knew she would rather die than submit to him and so he would be forced to rape her. Afterwards he would almost certainly kill her or, even worse, send her to become a prostitute in the common soldiers’ brothel, where she would be expected to service up to thirty men a day.
Nor did her enforced addiction to heroin help to overcome her fear of the psychological consequence of losing her maidenhead. Anna told herself that everything she had become with the help of
Konoe-san
would be destroyed: her self-esteem, willpower, sense of unyielding discipline and inner strength (the core of the persimmon tree), and the aesthetic appreciation he had inculcated; the fires he had lit in her psyche would be reduced to ashes. Without these gifts from the master Anna saw no point in continuing with her life. Whatever happened afterwards, she would, in her own eyes, be dog shit (her words).
The day had finally arrived when she was completely recovered from the bruising and lacerations she’d received at the hands of the
kempeitai.
For the following two days she was denied her suppositories, so by the time Colonel Takahashi arrived to perform his long-anticipated defilement, it took all the resolve and discipline
Konoe-san
had taught Anna for her to hold herself together.
He made her strip naked then stand to attention in front of him while he examined her closely to ensure she was unblemished. Then, seated at a desk, he offered her two glycerine suppositories containing the pure heroin and crystal amphetamine that her body craved, on condition she willingly gave him the pearl of her virginity. Anna affected compliance, feeling the relief and euphoria of the two drugs coursing through her bloodstream. She seemed to understand that she was beaten, the pain of withdrawal overriding her previous resolve. Meekly she invited him to partake of the traditional tea ceremony prior to sharing her futon. But first she offered, in the traditional geisha manner, to massage him.
Anna had been well trained by the two geishas in this preliminary to seduction, and she felt the
kempeitai
colonel flinch as her pliant fingers worked deep into the muscles of his back and neck. She noted the tension under her kneading fingers and realised that despite his bombast and bullying Takahashi was feeling the strain of his new command. The first massage, known as
unwinding the roots
,
was intended to relax his tension; it would be followed by the therapeutic massage,
growing the
lotus bud
. Anna worked steadily, relaxing the tightly bunched muscles, her oiled hands eventually beginning to play
the
slippery eel
,
the transition from therapeutic to erotic massage.
Soon she could sense his erection growing. ‘It is time to turn onto your back now,
Colonel-san
,’
she instructed quietly. Takahashi, his inhibitions overcome by her clever hands, rolled onto his back. Anna did as she had been taught by the geishas, working with the pads of her first and second fingers and thumb down the length of his erection in
the finger dance
,
moving lightly from the exposed head to the scrotum, gently massaging his testicles, then back again with the ball of her forefinger in
dragonfly dancing
where she pressed, rubbed and released the pronounced veins that run the length of the penis, teasing, building, anticipating his climax. ‘Careful!’ Takahashi cried suddenly. ‘Oh, oh, oh! Oh, no!’
He was horsemeat, no class whatsoever, his premature ejaculation no better than that of an over-anxious schoolboy. She grabbed him in
the turtle’s neck
, stroking firmly with her fist to maximise his pleasure. She could hear
Konoe-san
’s words instructing her on how to defend herself against rape:
‘Any object that is sharp and at hand will do. You can do it with a chopstick. Directly under the sternum, push it in and twist, it doesn’t have to go very deep.’
Takahashi had shut his eyes, overcome by the ecstasy of release. Anna reached under the futon where she had concealed the razor-sharp crystal sliver she’d retrieved from a broken ashtray and, doing as she had been instructed, shredded his heart.
Hunting through the dead commander’s uniform, she found the key to the private room in the Nest of the Swallows that led directly to a small enclosed garden, dressed quickly and hurried through the garden into the outer grounds. Avoiding the guards in the dark, she managed to climb over a concealed section of the surrounding wall.
Anna hid for the remainder of the night and the next day, terrified of capture, little knowing that the second atomic bomb had fallen on Nagasaki and the Japanese had already surrendered. Anna had miraculously made it through the war.