The Investigation (28 page)

I had seen pictures of those paintings; I’d cherished a book of Van Gogh paintings in colour that we had at the bookshop. ‘Van Gogh was the artist of stars,’ Dong-ju said.
‘He loved stars and loved painting them. He wrote to his brother Theo about them, too. Listen to this.’ He took a few shallow breaths. ‘“But the sight of the stars always
makes me dream
in as simple a way
as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream. Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less
accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. What’s certainly true in this argument is that
while
alive,
we
cannot
go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train . . . To die peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot.”’ He
looked anxious.

I knew he was having difficulty sleeping; his insomnia made him more agitated. I led him to the underground library, hoping it would lift his mood.

Dong-ju looked around the dimly lit space. ‘I’d hoped you wouldn’t find out about this. It’s too dangerous.’

‘But I did,’ I said, my voice crackling with fear. ‘I don’t know what to do. If anyone finds out, none of us will be safe.’ I regretted not running to Maeda the
minute I’d discovered that dank underground space. It was too late, though, and now I could only live with the anxiety. Dong-ju grabbed my shoulders. ‘Even if it’s discovered at
some point, you don’t know anything about it.’

‘You’re not going to implicate me?’

‘Even if I wanted to tell everyone, I won’t remember. Soon enough I won’t even remember this moment.’ He smiled bitterly and traced a finger down the spine of each book,
as though to engrave the title forever in his head.

‘Soon these titles will vanish from my mind. As though I’d never heard of them. At some point you’ll have to tell me that I once read such beautiful books.’ His breath,
visible in the cold, drifted around his pale face.

Each time he let out a breath, it was as though his soul were escaping.

Dong-ju recited another poem from memory. ‘“Hospital.” Shielding her face with the shadow of the apricot tree, lying in the back yard of the hospital, a young woman reveals her
pale legs under her white gown and sunbathes. Not even a butterfly visits this woman suffering from tuberculosis. There is not a breeze against the not-unhappy tree.

// I came to this place for the first time after suffering for a long time from an unknown pain. But my old doctor does not know the illness of my young self. He says I am not ill. This
excessive hardship, this excessive fatigue; I must not become cross. // The woman gets up and straightens her clothes and picks a marigold from the garden to place on her breast and disappears into
the hospital. I wish for her health – as well as mine – to recover quickly; I lie down where she lay.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ I said, more to reassure myself. ‘The doctors said your side-effects will disappear. You’ll leave this place on 30 November and write poems and
publish books. After the war, when the world becomes a better place, countless people will read your poems.’

‘That’d be nice,’ he said, smiling faintly; he, too, must have been hoping for a happy ending.

Secretly, I was afraid that I already knew this story would end differently.

The New Year brought nothing new. The winter deepened; there was no sign of spring. Something had tipped; the war wasn’t going as well and Japan was starting to lose.
Nobody said it out loud, but everyone could tell. Citizens sank into torpor and anxiety infected everyone with lightning speed. An angry voice on the radio promoted a final battle to defend Japan;
flyers were plastered all over the city, urging us to defend our country with our lives. I wasn’t convinced that victory would bring us anything other than more death and shattered
consciences.

The prison was no longer a safe zone. In the middle of the night an immense shadow covered the city. Explosions overshadowed screams, blanketing everything in silence in their aftermath. The
streets were engulfed in a sea of fire and later settled into ruin. Everything – love, belief, hope, dreams – burned. That January twenty metres of the northern prison wall collapsed
under heavy bombing. Ensuing attacks cratered the yard, and two poplar trees on the hill were burned to a crisp. When the loud siren blared, the frightened guards dashed into bomb shelters;
sometimes, the enemy planes flew in ahead of the warnings.

Everything hung on the abilities of the nation’s air defence. Warden Hasegawa ordered a review of the prison’s facilities; the newer Wards Four, Five, Six and the infirmary were
fine. Stairways in the corridors led directly to the solid underground bomb shelters. The problem was the old central facilities, which didn’t have an underground shelter. Fearing retaliation
after Pearl Harbor, the warden had tried to build one, but it had been determined that digging under the building would risk collapse. As a last resort, a bomb shelter was built outside, about
thirty metres away, but it was too far to run to when sneak attacks were launched.

One early morning I finished my shift and left my office, rubbing my eyes. A group of guards pushed past me, heading down the corridor. I wondered what was going on; the inspection ward was
usually deserted. Cold sweat pricked my spine as I watched the guards enter the library. Would they discover our secret? I sprinted after them, the sound of my footsteps whipping my back. I reached
the door to the library, which had been flung wide open. The guards were talking among themselves in the doorway; they looked at me oddly and let me by. I stepped inside, willing my trembling legs
not to buckle.

The desks and bookshelves that lined the wall were gone. The floor had been ripped out. The darkness below spread open its maw, with a faint trickle of light shining out. I slowly approached the
opening and went down the narrow stairs. At the bottom I involuntarily closed my eyes. All the shelves had been smashed; the books had been flung onto the floor.

Maeda, his expression deadly serious, was down there, surrounded by guards. He grabbed a black book. ‘These Korean arseholes dug their way into the heart of the prison,’ he spat out.
‘As if this is their playground!’

I looked around, shell-shocked.

‘Take everything out of this rat hole and put it in the yard!’ he shouted. ‘It’s going up in flames! In front of all of them! Find out who did this!’

I froze.

Maeda whacked his thigh with his club in anger as he went up the stairs. The others began to gather the torn books and haul them upstairs. I picked some up, too.
Gulliver’s
Travels
,
Great Expectations
,
Sonnets of Shakespeare
,
Poetry of Jeong Ji-yong
. I couldn’t believe that these beautiful stories would soon be destroyed in the
flames.

A senior guard followed me up. ‘I guess we need to thank the damn Yankees. If it weren’t for the bombings, this rat hole would never have been discovered.’

I must have looked puzzled.

‘Maeda examined dozens of blueprints from when the central facilities were constructed,’ he explained. ‘So that we could build a bomb shelter under this building. That’s
how he discovered this basement. It used to be an interrogation room. Since this space already existed, we could save time and money. We could just expand and fortify the space, instead of digging
somewhere new. So we came down here to see where the non-load-bearing walls and beams stood. And then we found this shit!’

My heart rattled like a worn-out cart. What if Maeda discovered my involvement? I thought of my mother, and my eyes clouded over in sorrow and fear.

The senior guard spat in disgust. ‘The Japanese handwriting is clearly Sugiyama’s. Can you believe he was in cahoots with those Koreans? He should have known better. But that’s
what happens when you get mixed up with them. You get yourself killed.’

So I wasn’t a suspect. I was safe. I wiped my eyes furtively. ‘Why would a Korean kill Sugiyama, if he helped them?’

‘They’re like that. They pay back a favour with revenge. Or maybe he tried to reveal their secret.’

Just then a loud siren screamed, signalling prisoners from Ward Three to assemble in the military training ground. The prisoners lined up, trembling from cold and fear, avoiding the
guards’ vindictive gazes.

‘We have granted excessive special privileges to you seditious, delinquent Korean prisoners!’ Maeda boomed. ‘But you abused our goodwill. This morning we exposed yet another
plot. Now you’ll watch what happens.’

A guard wheeled a cart to the front of the platform. Another cart came out, and yet another; the pile of books grew. A senior guard poured a steel can of petrol on the pile. I stood to attention
nearby, nearly overwhelmed by the noxious fumes.

‘Watanabe! Incinerate!’ Maeda’s voice was chilling.

My heart flipped. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice my anxiety. I knew I had to demonstrate how deeply I despised these banned volumes. I flicked the lighter and its blue light danced.
Maeda’s eyes glinted coldly. I picked up a book with a trembling hand; it smelled of oil and the pages were practically transparent.

I remembered a passage from
Crime and Punishment
:

I could never write something that examined life with such deep, thought-provoking insight. But as I read that passage, I’d become convinced that I was in conversation with Dostoyevsky. We
existed in different eras and places, but we dreamed the same dreams and understood the same truth. At this moment, the very moment I was forced to burn his masterpiece, I was seeing the clearest
vision of his soul.

The prisoners watched the spark at my fingertips. I spotted a pair of clear, deep eyes amongst the blank gazes; Dong-ju’s face lit up when our eyes met. I wanted to think that he was
telling me, ‘Yuichi, light it. The books won’t die.’ Just then my grip loosened and the lighter slipped. The oil-soaked paper sucked in the flame and burst into an immense column
of fire. Planks crackled, the wind fanned the flames, and black smoke rose, heat pushing against our faces.

‘Watch carefully!’ Maeda shouted as he became enveloped by smoke. ‘This is what happens when you betray the Empire!’

The prisoners inched closer to the blazing fire, lifting their frozen feet surreptitiously to warm them. Dong-ju watched the fire blankly, as though he didn’t have the energy to be sad or
enraged. Perhaps this was the best outcome; everyone could chase away the cold for a moment while the books burned. But after they were rendered into ash, the last spark died and the remnants
fluttered away with the wind blowing along the blackened ground, what would be left to give comfort to these barren souls?

We assembled in the warden’s office. Hasegawa was looking out through the gauzy curtains. ‘It’s loud out there,’ he said, sounding placid and annoyed at
the same time.

‘The Koreans instigated an incident involving banned books,’ Maeda said pompously. ‘Fortuitously I discovered their plot and destroyed it before they could do much damage. Even
better, the important task of building a bomb shelter under this building can proceed.’

Next I gave a short report, as the crime had happened in my territory.

Hasegawa puffed on his pipe. ‘Good. Find out who did this. Punish them as a warning to the others. The shelter must be completed as soon as possible!’

Maeda had already ordered a senior guard to ferret out the leader of the plot and his co-conspirators by beating all the literate Koreans. ‘We’ll find out who did it and hang
’em,’ he said confidently.

The warden took his pipe and tapped it against the ashtray. ‘There’s no point. All Koreans are the same. Everyone’s the leader and everyone’s a co-conspirator.
They’re all pigs. A pig is a pig, no one any better-looking or uglier than any other.’

Maeda licked his lips. ‘You’re right, sir, they’re pigs. I’ll bring in a few who are responsible, and we won’t have any more problems.’ His eyes gleamed
expectantly as he waited for the warden’s consent.

The warden sucked loudly on his empty pipe. ‘There’s no point, anyway. The bomb shelter is strictly for us. Those vermin won’t be able to survive the Yankees’ attacks
now.’

That night, in the interrogation room, Dong-ju and I stared at each other across the desk. I could tell he wanted to revisit what had happened during the day, but we were too
tired.

After a long silence Dong-ju asked, ‘Can you take me to the underground library?’

‘There is no point,’ I cried, springing up from my chair. ‘The books were burned. They’re all gone.’

Dong-ju stood up slowly. ‘It doesn’t matter. The books may have been destroyed, but their essence still remains. Their voices are still there.’

‘It’s all over! I burned them with this very hand!’ I began to tremble as emotion took hold of me. Everything poured out of me – regret, guilt, powerlessness and the
emptiness of losing everything.

‘It’s not your fault, Yuichi.’ Dong-ju patted my back. ‘Yuichi, you can’t blame yourself. We all have to survive. We have to survive so that we can see the end of
this war. Remember, surviving is winning. A corpse cannot cheer.’

‘But I can’t survive unless I become evil.’

‘If these times make us evil, fine, let’s become evil. But let’s keep a human heart. Like Sugiyama.’

‘I can’t bear to see what I ruined.’