Heaven and Hell: A Novel of a Manchukuo Childhood 9780824876388

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H E AV E N AND

HELL

H E AV E N AND

HELL A Novel of a Manchukuo Childhood

8 TAKARABE TORIKO Translated by

Phyllis Birnbaum

UN IV E R S I T Y O F H AWA I ‘ I P R ES S HONOLULU

© 2018 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18     6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Takarabe, Toriko, author. | Birnbaum, Phyllis, translator. Title: Heaven and hell : a novel of a Manchukuo childhood / Takarabe Toriko ;    translated by Phyllis Birnbaum. Other titles: Tempu meifu. English Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2018] Identifiers: LCCN 2018007916| ISBN 9780824875404 (cloth ; alk. paper)    | ISBN 9780824876555 (pbk. ; alk. paper) Subjects: | LCGFT: Autobiographical fiction. | Novels. Classification: LCC PL862.A424134 T4613 2018 | DDC 895.63/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007916 Originally published as Tempu Meifu by Kodansha, Inc., Tokyo © 2005 Takarabe Toriko English translation © 2018 Phyllis Birnbaum Grateful acknowledgment to Takarabe Toriko for permission to reprint an excerpt from her poem “The Death I Always See” [Itsu mo miru shi] © 1965 Takarabe Toriko An earlier version of the Translator’s Introduction appeared in Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy: The Story of Kawashima Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy Who Commanded Her Own Army © 2015 Phyllis Birnbaum Cover art: Traditional Japanese ink painting sumi-e. Elina Li/Shutterstock.com. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Tr a n s l a t o r ’ s I n t r o d u c t i o n TAKAR ABE TORIKO IS ONE OF JAPAN’S MOST EMINENT POETS. She was born in 1933, in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture,

and two months after her birth went with her parents to live in Manchukuo, the puppet state established by Japan in China’s northeast in 1932. Her father served as an officer in the Manchukuo Army, and Takarabe remembers him “riding off to work on his horse.” She also remembers his viciousness, for his job required that he spend days and nights killing the Chinese “bandits” who plagued the region, a designation that included Chinese subjects rebelling against Japanese rule. According to Takarabe, her father was a rowdy, hot-tempered misfit in Japan but perfectly suited to the wilder ways of Manchukuo. “When he was thirteen years old in Japan, my father was sent to live with his uncle,” Takarabe remembers. “His father felt that the boy was a ruffian and should be beaten into line with lots of hard work.” The relatives did not succeed in reining him in, however, and he slipped away to China, a country large enough to absorb his rages. As a volatile man with no use for the rules, “he was responsible for rounding up ‘bandits’ and getting them to join the Japanese side. Or killing them. My father was a violent man, scary.” In a poem, Takarabe does not leave room for doubt: “My father gave off the chilling smell of blood.” Yet her father left his military job in 1939, worried perhaps about the effect of his profession on his growing children. “When we children were old enough to enter elementary school, he stopped killing people.”

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Takarabe’s autobiographical novel Heaven and Hell is based on her life in Manchukuo before and after the Japanese surrender. In returning to the days of her youth, Takarabe savors the landscape of Manchukuo, its lush forests and vast terrain, while never forgetting that murder was as much a part of the scenery as the grand Sungari River. Her novel stands out among the many Japanese writings about Manchukuo in conveying the sweetness and the savagery of Japanese life there through the perceptions of a sensitive and enterprising young girl. The narrator’s domestic circumstances are unusual: unlike the many Japanese who resided in exclusively Japanese districts set apart from the local population, her family lives in the section of town inhabited by Manchus and Chinese. The narrator learns to speak the local Chinese dialect and is befriended by the Chinese workers in the hotel that serves as her family’s residence. She feels at home among the street vendors hawking hot and sticky steamed cakes, and grows accustomed to watching the cook slaughter ducks for dinner in the yard. Later, she is desolate when the family realizes it must return to Japan, since China is the only home she has known. By the end of the war, more than 2.2 million Japanese were living in Manchukuo—bureaucrats, businessmen, idealists, and the military, who made sure the Japanese colonists remained in control. Among this number were 300,000 Japanese settlers, mostly from Japan’s impoverished farming areas, who had been persuaded to leave Japan to pursue wondrous new opportunities in Manchukuo, where they would contribute to the “paradise” Japan was creating. In this novel, Taka­ rabe’s father becomes the leader of one remote settlement deep in the interior where a “harmony of the five races”—Japanese, Manchu, Mongolian, Han, and Korean—was to prevail, though always, of course, with the Japanese in charge. By the time of Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Japanese settlers were spread throughout the expanse of Manchukuo, many in distant regions close to the border with the Soviet Union, where they had been sent to defend Japanese territory in case the Soviets were tempted to invade. Once the war was over, not only did the Soviets give in to such temptations, but local Chinese also seized their moment. On August 8, 1945,

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the Soviet troops came pouring over the border, coveting land, women, and, in particular, wristwatches, which they liked to line up on their arms. Chinese joined in, seeking a more sweeping kind of revenge. As this novel shows, the Japanese settlers were abandoned. Japan’s Kwantung Army—hitherto so feared that babies were said to stop crying at the sight of them—had quickly arranged for trains to evacuate their ranks from Manchukuo, leaving the settlers behind. Japanese families tell of rushing to the homes of their military protectors only to discover that they had departed in a big hurry, with meals still on the table. When asked what the settlers should do without any protection, a military official replied, “The only alternative is suicide.” Left to fend for themselves, the Japanese settlers began the terrible exodus described in this novel, which would take them from the hinterlands to more populated areas where they could hope to gain passage back to Japan. Before reaching their destination, they had to fight off not only the invading Soviets, but the Chinese, the bitter cold, and a host of deadly infectious diseases. It is estimated that some 80,000 Japanese died along the way. Takarabe draws upon her bitter memories of this catastrophic journey in her writings—her younger sister and father died en route. In “The Death I Always See,” written decades later, Takarabe remains haunted by the loss of her sister: My little sister wears sky-blue clothes as she shows herself and then hides behind the tall grass. My little sister carries a peony that looks like a face. But oh, she falls from the bridge to the bottom of a deep and distant valley stream. I lie awake. I lie awake to embrace my little sister and stop her fall. A blue gash runs across my arm.

Now in her eighties, Takarabe lives in a suburb of Tokyo, her dignified air giving little indication of the brutality and tragedy that bludgeoned her youth. Takarabe’s manner conveys

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the sense that life can hold nothing more terrible than what she has already experienced, and so she does not get ruffled easily. While she does not favor drama in conversation, death and blood often march through her poetry—and through this novel as well.

8 A note on the translation: Japanese and Chinese names generally appear with the family name followed by the given name. Place names sometimes appear in Chinese, but because this novel is told from a Japanese point of view, I’ve also used Japanese versions of place names—in particular, for large cities and for locations within Japanese enclaves in Manchukuo. I am very grateful to Teruko Craig for her help with this translation. Many thanks also to Abe Yumiko, Hosea Hirata, Vivien Liang, and Grace Wiersma. It has been a pleasure to work again with Stuart Kiang, who has edited my translations for more than thirty years.

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were black with mud, swallowing half the sky. Among Japanese, this huge river was also known as the Sungari, apparently from its Manchu name Sunggari Ula. In the spring of 1932, the year after the Manchurian Incident, the Japanese Army occupied Yilan. Rain, which started coming down in July, hadn’t stopped by August. The military barracks had been lost to the rising water and soldiers now moved about on a flat-bottomed lighter. The sorghum and poppy fields had flooded over a vast area of the Sanjiang Plain and the water spread out into the distance like an ocean. Even so, the rains still showed no sign of letting up. The lighter, carrying a Japanese flag on the bow, was being towed along a shallow part of the river and dense black smoke came spitting out of the tugboat funnel. There were hundreds of soldiers in the vessel as well as more than seventy Japanese civilians seeking refuge. Horses, cows, pigs, and chickens had also been loaded on board. With the firewood and cooking stoves, tin buckets, cooking pots, Chinese water heaters, and all kinds of mats and packs of cargo, the ship carried everything onboard, like Noah’s Ark. The entire operation was being directed by the short and unshaven Captain Tōno, a camera hanging from his neck. It took about half a day for the lighter to go down the Sungari and arrive at Jiamusi, the capital of Huachuan county. The district head of Huachuan, Tang Zhiyi, had consulted with the local business association and come up with a scheme to accept the Japanese group’s request to be allowed ashore. Well aware that compromise would benefit everyone, he prepared to receive this mixed group of troops and HE SWOLLEN WATERS OF THE SONGHUA RIVER

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Japanese citizens on his devastated streets. After all, it was not the flood that had caused the devastation in Jiamusi—rather the blame lay with the attacks by local bandits. On the whole, Tang Zhiyi thought these newcomers better than the bandits, and besides, even if he’d refused to allow them in, they probably would have come ashore anyway. The defense force created by the business association had been depleted in the fight against the exceedingly fierce bandit attacks—men had been killed or taken as hostages. Morale had plummeted, the mercenaries had run off, and there was no money to hire more. The Jilin Army, which was supposed to protect the region, had also been weakened and it was useless to depend on them. Now strong reinforcements were arriving. On the afternoon of the lighter’s arrival, district head Tang, looking dignified in his long white robe, was flicking away flies with a horsehair brush as he came out to meet the newcomers at the dock. A tired old man with a white beard, he was accompanied by a group of officials, among them a Jilin Army officer who had come out to greet the Japanese with some of his men. There were many curious onlookers who had also turned out, and behind them were ranks of filthy beggars banging on empty cans and bamboo boards with wooden sticks and calling out, “Zhanggui de, zhanggui de,” in the hope that the outsiders’ abundant baggage meant extra goods to be given away. Zhanggui was the term used to address a shop manager so what they were shouting was “Hey, Boss!” The Japanese women, who wore lightweight summer kimono, hid themselves behind the suits and military uniforms worn by the men, their faces turned away from the deafening banging on metal cans and bamboo, and also the stinking human smells. They wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. After Captain Tōno’s salute, district head Tang responded with an elegant bow and brought his hands together in greeting. He did not wear a queue yet clearly he lived by the manners of the Qing dynasty. Captain Tōno ordered his men to break into a march, as a demonstration of strength. When arriving at a dangerous place, the soldiers’ muscle and fighting spirit had to be shown

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to the local people—and so the Japanese solders readied their line and marched forward, bayonets gleaming, into the sodden pools of mud splashing in the rain. Curious Manchu, Han, and Mongol men and women of all ages had collected at the riverbank, and many trailed after the Japanese, who began to march toward their lodgings at the Suixi Hotel. The first Japanese in Jiamusi had supposedly come long before, but it was from this day forward that they moved there permanently in large numbers. I was not born yet. My mother and father were not on that lighter. Yet they would not have come to Jiamusi at the northern edge of China’s northeast frontier if not for that flood. If Captain Tōno had not chosen this town and the lighter had landed at another place, my mother and father would have gone there. The origin of those decisions can only be found in a light shining in the distance: whenever I search for that source, I look to the light that shone on Captain Tōno, the flood, and the lighter. That day, the flies enveloped the beggars in a black halo, sticking to their oozing sores and food utensils. Every time the beggars moved, the flies flew up with a whoosh, swirling around for a moment and then returning to cling to their original spot. I feel that I really witnessed all of this. The three-story Suixi Hotel, where our family would live later on, boasted a flower relief on its front facade and a red sign at the entrance. From a window facing west on the top floor, you could see the grain wholesaler’s warehouse and the town wall’s lookout hole, and beyond that was the Sungari, swollen with muddy water, as well as the many junks, rafts, and military boats of the river’s defense fleet. From the window facing east, you could see clouds of sand covering the town’s low-lying terrain and farther out, the sorghum fields and a vast stretch of uncultivated land, a huge expanse of territory that went on and on into the distance as far as you could see, seemingly endless. But without warning, from the western shore of the Sungari and also from the eastern and southwestern plains farther away, bandits on short Manchurian horses come galloping up and tear through the streets. The carnage and the looting begin.

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Even though I was not born yet, I have a clear memory of Jiamusi as it must have appeared from the riverbank that day of the flood.

1 The Jiamusi railway had not yet opened, and so my parents, Yamamoto Yoshirō and Yukie, went by train from Shinkyō to Harbin, stopping first at Eiju Hospital to visit Captain Tōno, who had been shot by a bandit. Countless junks, steamships, and motorboats were moored at Harbin, where the Sungari’s mud-colored waters rose up on its banks, spreading forever into the distance. Yukie had never set eyes on the strange, exotic beauty of Jiamusi’s big, unkempt sails or the Korean women in white beating their laundry with rods at the river’s edge. She studied them with the same unthinking fascination she’d felt for the women spitting watermelon seeds into Dairen harbor. The embankment with its protective wall slanted down into the river, and the railway tracks ran parallel to the wall some meters distant, with mountains of coal here and there. Between the wall and the railway tracks was a walking path where sturdy Russian men and women bustled along, the lovers among them locking arms. Carrying her baby on her back in a coat designed for this use, Yukie looked around and felt her heart start to race— it all looked like a scene from a Valentino movie she had once seen. With no sign of the bandits she had heard about, Yukie felt that Captain Tōno had been wounded in some dangerous, faraway place. Those dangers still seemed unreal as she gazed, entranced, at the sights in this foreign land. In Harbin, the Sungari flowed peacefully between the few kilometers that separated its upper and lower customs houses, but beyond that lay the land occupied by bandits, who paid no heed to the law. This state of affairs—murders, plunder, torching of houses, attacks on trains—was not something that had started yesterday or today. In fact, such events were commonplace in this region, and the residents could only hope that they themselves would not fall victim to attack.

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With determination, Yamamoto made his way down the Sungari with his wife and child, heading for that turbulent, bloody territory. The captain of the paddle boat, which had a water wheel, was Russian, his golden mustache and beard gleaming brightly in the light coming off the water and the autumn sun. At all times, no matter where he was, this man acted in a dignified manner, addressing Yukie as “Madame” in a gentle, polite way. When she climbed up the gangway ladder, he took her arm to help and she gradually came to believe that she really was acting out a role in a Western movie. A vast forest extended along the lower reaches of the Sungari. At the logging sites, fallen trees had been carelessly tossed about by the river’s edge, an area patrolled by armed men in green uniforms. From there the lumber was made into rafts and floated down the river, with lookouts to prevent seizure by the bandits. The Russian owners of the forests had even hired a powerful gang of bandits in the hope that they would fend off onslaughts from other outlaw groups. The paddle boat was safe enough, because its high speed made pursuit by bandit ships futile, but if you tried another means of transport and traveled by horse-drawn carriage or car, you never knew what might befall you before you reached your destination. You just had to think that losing your luggage or your life might be an inevitable part of the journey. Even on this safe paddle boat, you’d be finished if the bandits got on the ship disguised as passengers. That had not happened recently, but in the past there had been incidents when all the passengers had been killed. Because of this, all of the crew members were armed, and anyone who appeared to be a migrant from Shandong was not allowed to leave the ship’s hold. That’s what Yamamoto Yoshirō told Yukie, who looked around with much surprise, overwhelmed by the sight of the large river and the vast forest. He had wanted to give her a general idea of the conditions in Jiamusi, which was their destination. On the day Yukie first set foot in Jiamusi, sandstorms obscured everything, covering the whole town with a yellow veil of sand. Shandong migrants had been coming to this region in search of work for a long time, and this latest group climbed

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up from their spaces below deck before anyone else and went ashore with thin bedrolls on their backs. After that, Yukie used a summer shawl to completely hide the baby she carried, and with a basket and a canteen filled with cooled boiled water, she proceeded forward behind her husband. Policemen in soiled uniforms were chasing off a crowd of beggars with their whips. The beggars let out piteous cries of pain but they never stopped beating their bamboo boards and crying, “Zhanggui de, zhanggui de.” “Those guys too are from around Yantai in Shandong and came up to Dairen on boats, packed like sardines. Then they landed here. All they came with was one bedroll, just like the migrants we saw before. But if they’re lucky, they can make some money dealing opium or soybeans or something, and in a year or two open a shop of their own. Out of all those who come here, one or two in a hundred will end up with a shop. The rest will just get sick and die or freeze to death, or become beggars like them or robbers, or join a bandit gang. It’s all right to feel sorry for them but you definitely can’t let your guard down.” Yamamoto started walking, pressing against the back of the stunned Yukie, who stood stock-still. A man came out to greet them, his back very straight in a dark green uniform. At that, Yamamoto signaled for the waiting driver to load their bags and trunks into the carriage. “This is Mr. Fu. He is the headquarters’ translator.” Her husband introduced her to the tall man, who was about thirty years old. “Madame, we welcome you here,” he said in clear Japanese. Yukie was relieved by his pale, kindly face and his Japanese. Of course, not only the beggars but the crowds and rickshaw drivers too had dark dirty faces that looked as if they had never been washed, making the pale face of translator Fu appear like that of another species of human. She sat down beside Yamamoto in the carriage. I, then a baby, was asleep on my mother’s back. The horse hoofs went clip-clopping along and seemed to be taking Yukie toward a settled married life that was, however, full of unknowns. The driver struck the horse’s back

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hard with his whip, the crack filling the air, and as they went uphill the horse let out a rough snort. After proceeding up the hill from the wharf and then straight ahead, you reached a settled area from which you could see, beyond the smoky yellow wind, the silhouette of the low-lying town. From the bumpy streets rose the din of the drivers yelling harshly at their horses, “Get a move on!” and the lash of their whips, for these horse-drawn carriages and carts seemed to be the only way to transport passengers and goods from place to place. As they passed a cart, the driver showed off what he had stuck on the end of his bamboo pole, and Yukie gazed at his smiling face, caked with sand. At the end of the pole was a face with a mouth opened in the same way. “That’s the head of a bandit,” Yamamoto Yoshirō told her, not at all surprised. She instantly drew back in fear, for she saw that freshly severed heads caked with sand were also hanging from the telegraph poles. She did not cry out, but firmly supporting the baby on her back, she tried not to look at what was right there before her eyes. She’d heard stories about the bandits but had never imagined that things would be like this. Streets full of severed heads! She said nothing, not because she had to maintain her pride as a Japanese woman, but because she was struck dumb with astonishment. Nonetheless, for the sake of her baby, she would not under any circumstances go back to Japan. Just like those Shandong migrants who looked upon Jiamusi as the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams, Yukie definitely saw this as the fulfillment of her dreams too.

2 Dark as the dirt on its moiré windows, the house seemed to speak of its own secrets, and there were odd, unfamiliar smells in it, left behind by foreigners. In her hometown back in Japan, Yukie had lived in a dark house whose cedar roof, paper shoji screens, and wooden doors were completely covered by snow in winter. In China’s dry air, however, the

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darkness possessed a strange, empty quality, containing only the merest hint of what might lurk deep in this country’s interior, whose nature was utterly unknown. Sand covered everything—the vermilion wood floors, the black table, the pile of red mattresses—and wherever you looked, there was a thin layer of sand. That fine sand, as light as baby powder, blew in from the Pamir Mountains, having flowed across the low sky in countless waves, crossing plains and muddy bays in a journey of thousands of kilometers. A pretty, smiling girl in a dark blue qipao suddenly came in through the door, her hair done up in a bun decorated with coral jewelry. She’s really pretty, thought Yukie, because the girl looked exceedingly pure to her after all the brutality she’d seen during her trip. The girl tried to take the baby from Yukie’s back, pulling at the straps that held her, but then the baby woke up and started wailing. The girl apparently told translator Fu to spread the mattress he was carrying onto the raised, heated floor. Yukie undid the straps holding the baby— its loud crying somehow made her feel more relaxed. She put the baby to sleep on the mattress and later picked her up again, opening the collar of her kimono to nurse. I began my life in Jiamusi that day. Those first days were often mentioned in my mother’s often inconsistent memories of the old days. A small Japanese woman arrived in the middle of a blustering sandstorm; she was carrying a basket and had her coat over the sleeping baby on her back. Yukie had been brought up in the countryside of Niigata, where she ran a hairdressing shop and was her parents’ only daughter. Relatives from the main branch of the family arranged her marriage to a mineworker just back from China, but within three months he had made her give him all her money and rushed off to Manchuria. He had been summoned by his old friend Captain Tōno, who had been seconded to the Jilin Army as a military attaché during the Japanese military’s takeover of Chinese forces. About a month later, her husband wrote to say that he couldn’t return home for a while and enclosed the money he’d borrowed from her in the letter. Believing this meant the end of their relationship, she was absolutely determined to go to Manchuria, along with the baby born in his absence; in the end her father saw her off at the Tsuruga port.

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From the day the couple arrived in Jiamusi, they lived in a corner of a compound enclosed by a black brick fence, at the end of an alley off the main street and close to the Sungari. Probably this was the house of a Chinese from Shandong who’d come to Jiamusi and been lucky enough to succeed. It was not clear whether the landlord lived within the compound, and Yukie had never been introduced to him, but he was sufficiently well off to allow part of his house to be used by Japanese officers of the Jilin Army posted there. That is, to safeguard his assets and his business, he sought the security provided by a strong military presence. The house, made of black bricks, had been divided into three parts. Under the eaves to the right lived translator Fu and his wife, who looked just like a young girl in her dark blue qipao. They said they were both Manchus. In the middle lived Wu, a short, thin shopkeeper. He had come to Jiamusi from Qingdao earlier and given money to his uncle, who started a brokerage shop; Wu became the fifth manager of that shop so they called him “Wu Number 5.” Wu had started out in Jiamusi alone but was soon followed there by his wife, who had bound feet, and her big chest of belongings, which a coolie carried in on his back. Theirs was the only room that had a door to the outside, used by everyone who lived in the house. The common wall stove and vermilion table were also in their quarters. My father, Lieutenant Colonel Yamamoto Yoshirō of the Jilin Army and his family lived on the left side. A male servant and cook, who worked for the three families, lived out back. Jiang Boji, who looked about fifty, had just come from Shandong, and he prepared the meals in Wu’s room, setting the food out on the table there; in the evening he prepared the chickens and vegetables in the garden. On the first night, Yukie ate sea cucumber soup and eagerly consumed the fried chicken with green chilies and the candied potatoes. There was also a big carp with sweet red bean paste. To help Yukie produce more breast milk, the cook also served porridge made with millet, sticky rice, and candied dates. This was all delicious and completely satisfied the appetites of the Japanese couple, but both of them still wished they could have some Japanese miso soup.

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Despite the crush of the Shandong refugees who kept arriving, thin bedrolls on their backs, Jiamusi’s population was no more than thirty thousand, and this included the six hundred Japanese. But where were the Japanese? Yukie had not seen any since her husband’s colleague Lieutenant Colonel Iwasaki had come to introduce himself. Every morning the stable boy came over with horses, and translator Fu and Yamamoto went to headquarters on horseback. That’s when Yukie started her day, unable to communicate with anyone. She had the servant buy water from the water vendor, who came lugging his bucket, and used this to wash the diapers. Except for the morning’s rice gruel and buns, which Jiang Boji made, there was nothing to eat until the evening, so she stopped producing milk. Starving, she went out to the street and found a market with roadside stalls selling all kinds of foods—fried millet buns, pancakes cooked on a round griddle, hot soy milk, noodles with meat, freshly steamed sweet bean and meat buns—but unable to speak the language, she stayed back and didn’t buy anything. She wanted to go back to Japan so much that she felt she would go mad. After a while, translator Fu asked the servant boy to buy food for her, and the problem was solved. One day Yamamoto arrived at home with two women in flashy kimono and said they were Japanese geisha. Yukie felt tense at first because she had never met a geisha before, but they soon were in raptures over the baby. “Look, she’s smiling!” “Oh, let me hold her!” “What a chubby little thing!” “She’s so cute. So cute!” They nuzzled and licked the baby’s face, which disturbed Yukie quite a lot, but at the same time her nerves were soothed by the sight of Japanese women. “Remember,” they both said, nodding to each other, “if you have any problem, you must tell us. We’re living at Sanseirō so come to see us any time. Yamamoto-san has asked us to help, and we’ll be happy to do whatever we can. Really and truly, we mean it.” “This is Ryūka,” Yamamoto said. “And that is Doryūzan.”

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Yukie burst into laughter when she heard their strange names, which they owed to Captain Tōno; she felt better knowing that he had taken a liking to them. On another day, Yukie went shopping in the carriage accompanied by a middle-aged servant who understood not a word of Japanese and looked none too healthy. The roads were rough and the ride bumpy, and she gazed straight ahead, hoping to avoid the sight of those terrifying severed heads covered with sand. Later, when she looked back, it all seemed like a bad dream. The servant’s face yielded no information, and she didn’t know anything about him. Could he be a bandit, planning to sell her off to someone? Or would he take her money himself and kill her? Everyone on the street stared at this woman in Japanese clothes, and when Yukie got out of the carriage, they all collected around her. Extremely curious, they discussed her in loud voices but Yukie couldn’t understand a word. When she got back in, some people even latched onto the carriage, giving her more of a fright. Then, when she went to buy azuki beans, the shopkeeper wouldn’t sell her any, treating her with a contempt she couldn’t fathom. At that, the servant became angry and argued with the owner, and in the end purchased the azuki beans for her. Yukie, who was dying to eat some sweet red bean soup, now knew that the grain merchant disliked Japanese. Only the visits from Tōno cheered her up. “If you ever need any help,” he told her, “just let me know.” But he was very busy with his work and hardly ever came to Jiamusi. Yamamoto had also asked Wu to look after Yukie, and one day, when Yamamoto had been away for a long stretch, Wu hired a carriage and took Yukie and the baby to see a Chinese opera at a theater near the Sungari. Along the way she saw the shriveled heads on the telegraph poles, but now, like the red and green advertising signboards decorating the eaves of certain shops or the mountains of gravel and wood piled up at the roadsides, the heads had become part of the scenery of the town. They didn’t faze anyone, and Yukie had also got used to them. With the opera’s opening gong, random thoughts and anxious feelings were swept clear from the minds of everyone in the audience—even Yukie was pulled in by the delicate

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melodies from the stringed erhu, and while she couldn’t understand the action of the opera, the high-pitched songs were as intoxicating to her as old Japanese ballads. Wu ordered tea and snacks at the ticket booth and procured some hot towels, which he placed on the little table. Wiping his face, he tried to explain to Yukie what was happening onstage, but to a Japanese it remained completely incomprehensible. Wu began to nod his head to the sound of the gong as he threw himself into the performance, his enthusiasm growing with each passing moment. The high-pitched singing and the dazzling, colorful costumes, the actors’ strange makeup, and Wu’s tapping his knees in time with the music— all of this made Yukie, a woman wearing a Japanese kimono tied with an obi, listen with her mouth agape as she was drawn into the drama. Even the baby I was then was happy, and I moved energetically on my mother’s lap. There was no curtain in front of the stage, and the actors were constantly entering and leaving. Swords flashed, they did somersaults and also waved flags. Since he could see that Yukie enjoyed the opera, Wu took this mother and daughter to performances frequently. On their exit, a gong sounded, sending an ominous message through the dark main street and beyond. Wu ran over to hire a carriage and a timid driver came quietly through the darkness. Yukie and the baby got into the vehicle, together with translator Fu’s wife and Mrs. Wu with her bound feet. As was his habit, the driver sought to avoid danger by heading over to the Fushunxing currency exchange shop, which was protected by strong iron bars. As they made their way to that street, they could hear the sound of boots tramping through the darkness. Terrified, they all held their breaths. But a company of Japanese troops appeared, and when the soldiers’ lanterns shone on a kimono-clad woman in geta with a baby on her back, they gathered around her in astonishment. In a place like this, was it really possible to come upon a Japanese woman with a baby on her back? “Madame, we will pledge our lives to protect you,” the soldiers told her, with much emotion. “Please do your best in this country.”

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But the dry rattle of gunshots seemed too close for comfort. “The enemy’s still outside the west gate!” the soldiers shouted. Since the Jilin Army had most likely gone there too, Yukie clung to the hope that her husband wouldn’t get killed. If he did perish in battle, how on earth would she get back to Japan? There was a weekly paddle boat, she remembered, but she and her daughter would probably be killed while they waited for it. She checked to make sure that the pistol in her obi was still there. Although they had sought safety at Fushun­ xing, they were now enmeshed in the midst of foreigners and not at all safe. But the foreigners at the currency exchange were kind. They lit up the floor heater and urged her to put the child to sleep there. Then they brought watermelon seeds and sweets as the heater began to give off a moist smoke. Yukie thought they were going out of their way to be kind to a Japanese, and must be fearing retribution if they misbehaved. Indeed, Yamamoto was the type who did not hesitate to exact his own precise retribution: when Yukie had been bitten by the dog from the house behind, he had used his Japanese sword to kill the dog. This is why she believed that she and her child would undoubtedly be killed too if her husband died. Within a year, Yukie had heard enough of the Shandong dialect spoken in Jiamusi to be able to understand what the people were saying, and she could do her errands in that dialect too. She had desperately learned the language because she was terrified that she wouldn’t even know if the foreigners began gabbling about doing her harm. On the nights when her husband was away suppressing bandits, she slept with the baby loosely tied to her back and kept a pistol hidden under her mattress.

3 With the remarkable increase in Japanese immigrants, the streets took on a different look each year. In 1936 the Japanese Association published a small pamphlet entitled Jiamusi Basics

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to help the growing number of tourists as well as the thousands of immigrants who had settled in and around Jiamusi. The pamphlet was printed by the Sanjiang Printing House, a black two-story brick building with a tile roof that was quite close to the Suixi Hotel. Sanjiang Printing House had been written in brush on the signboard out front, and you could hear the rattle of the printing presses from the shop, which was way down a dirty lane, always wet and slippery, that ran beside the building. If you looked out from the hotel window to the street with the printing shop, you’d see Old Luo in a black cotton jacket, cap, and round spectacles. Using a file plate and stylus, he drew pictures on patterned wax paper, and when I was young I used to look out the window at his magical workshop. Whenever he saw me, Old Luo would give me a big smile, but he never stopped drawing on the wax paper. To fix a mistake, he’d melt the wax with a match flame, producing a foul smell. Since the Chinese characters he wrote all had sharp angles, they came out looking like something you’d want to cut out and hang on the wall. He had mimeographed portraits of beautiful women pasted on his wall, advertisements for Xiannu Straight Pins, and as a child I found them bizarre and scary. Wasn’t the cover of Jiamusi Basics also the work of this copyist Old Luo? Yes, there’s no doubt about it, he created that drawing. After all, wasn’t he the only copyist around? He had drawn the memorial for the war dead that had been built by the Japanese on a hill east of Jiamusi, but for some reason he’d added a nonexistent mountain range with three peaks and a lake. There were four trees that looked like pines, drawn in the traditional landscape style, but they had come out distorted in Old Luo’s characteristic angular style. On the first page of Jiamusi Basics were photos of Jì Yuandu, chief of the town’s business association, and Yang Yushu, the vice chief, two local men who had become successful. Yang Yushu had lost an arm in the Zhili-Fengtian War, when rival warlords fought for control of the central government, and even I knew that he was especially prominent. Yang Yushu was not only the chief of staff of the Jilin Army and so my father’s boss; he was also the owner of the

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Suixi Hotel, where we eventually lived. After my father left the army, Yang Yushu set him up as the hotel’s third-ranking manager, and he became my father’s employer. Yang Yushu had remodeled the hotel, building a big new banquet hall and several conference rooms and also renovating the guest rooms. The new place opened the year after my younger brother Tōa was born, and Major Tōno, who had been promoted the year he was wounded, presented Yang with a gift of framed calligraphy that read Sanjiang Di Yi Lou, the name of the hotel’s restaurant. And so our whole family moved into the newly remodeled Suixi Hotel. Translator Fu’s wife would not hear of any objections, saying now that my mother had two children she would certainly need the babysitting services of the ten-year-old boy Mrs. Fu had brought with her. That was her gift to us on the day our family moved into the hotel. The smiling boy had a dirty face with very white teeth, and he was happy to leave for the hotel ahead of us, pushing Tōa’s baby carriage. He seemed to enjoy pushing the baby carriage and running along behind it. “That’s Ma Zhanshan,” my father said with a smile. Ma Zhanshan dressed in black cotton, top and bottom, the cuffs of his trousers firmly tied, and he had cloth shoes on his feet. Agile in his movements and very friendly, he quickly ingratiated himself with Yukie. When she called for him, he’d answer in a high-pitched voice, “Coming, Taitai,” which was his way of addressing the woman of the house. My father, his employer, had given him that nickname, but in reality Ma Zhanshan was the name of a military leader famed for his resistance to Japanese operations in Manchuria. Yukie knew the characters used to write the boy’s real name, but those characters were pronounced differently in Japanese and Chinese, and Yukie only knew the Japanese pronunciation. So if her husband said the Chinese pronunciation was “Ma Zhanshan,” she believed him. Actually, no one in our house knew the boy’s real name. He came from somewhere early in the morning and returned there in the evening, eating his noon meal in the back with the hotel servants. Yang Yushu owned gold mines, farmland, and other properties so he rarely came to the Suixi Hotel. I only met

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him once, in a dark, windowless hallway in the hotel. He was slowly walking in a long blue satin robe that gleamed from a light coming in from somewhere, and he stopped when he saw me, placing his hand on my head with its bowl-shaped haircut. One of the sleeves of his robe hung down, empty. “Here’s a good child,” he said in Chinese. “How old are you?” “I’m seven.” When I looked up at him, his face brought to mind one of those dolls of the emperor that are displayed on the day of the Doll Festival. I had heard the story of how Yang Yushu had lost his arm, how he’d been in such pain that he was about to tumble off his horse, and how he’d smoked enough opium to ride through the night clutching the reins in his one hand. I must have looked up at him trembling, with fear in my eyes. “Come on, smile,” Yang Yushu said, lifting up my chin. “Show me a smile.” That’s when I saw the big red expanse inside his mouth and his quivering tongue as his face broke into a big smile. “That’s a good child!” he seemed to be saying in Chinese. I forced myself to smile though all I felt was dread. At the same time, he had a strange attractiveness. When you went up the large black marble staircase at the hotel’s entrance, there was a large mezzanine with ornamental banisters, and looking down from there, you could see the door to the quarters where our family lived, and to the right, a long straight corridor with the doorknobs to the guest rooms all lined up. The staircase up from the mezzanine was divided into two branches, left and right. Up one staircase, there was a rather extensive vermilion wood floor and four long, narrow windows with white curtains facing the street. A table and chairs had been set out by the windows, and you could drink tea there. To the left was the banquet hall while the right staircase led up to several fancy guest rooms. One of those rooms was my father’s office, and once, when he was away, I got permission to study there. I borrowed the key from my mother and entered the office, but for some unknown reason my heart was racing. I spread out my books and notebooks, intending to go to them, but I ended up

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poring through the grown-up books in the bookcase. My father admired Sun Yat-sen, and there may have been books there about his Three Principles of the People, but I was more interested in The Red Scare, Baikov’s Mountains and Woods of Manchuria, and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I found The Red Scare really unsettling, since it said that wives and children in the Soviet Union were community property. Behind a sliding door at the bottom of the bookshelf, I came upon a tin container of photo albums and, removing its tight-fitting lid, took one out. I felt guilty doing this, but I studied the photos of horses and soldiers in the album, as well as some other photos of things I couldn’t recognize. After I looked at them for a while, I gradually came to understand what I was seeing, and this made me break out in a cold sweat. Was it true? The photos showed several corpses without heads. “Wangjiatun battlefield—taken by Tōno-sensei” was the caption. My father had written the names of the dead in his own handwriting, which slanted very much to the right. Captain Ōkawa, Superior Private Kusano, Private First Class Abe. When I was a baby, these men had gone off on a bandit suppression campaign and died in the fighting. Where had their heads gone? This album had been put away in the container and stored at the bottom of the bookshelf, perhaps because my father did not want to confront an incident hidden deep in his heart. In an album we had at home, I’d seen a photo of Captain Ōkawa that had been taken while he was alive: he was wearing a Russian shirt and his hair was neatly parted at the side. After I returned home, I couldn’t speak for a long while.

4 The Suixi Hotel was on the main street dividing the city into east and west. Although I thought that no Japanese lived west of the hotel, the Japanese population had been increasing rapidly and spreading into what the Japanese called Manchu Town. Japanese who were not eligible for official residences or company housing went to live there.

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Much of the company housing was being built farther and farther from the Sungari. The primary school was east of the Suixi Hotel, thirty minutes by foot, and I had a friend who lived in company housing another thirty minutes by foot to the east of that. This friend felt that the main street, where I lived, was far away—truly at the end of the world. “My mother says there are slave traders in Manchu Town,” my friend told me. When I went to see her neighborhood and walked down a muddy street, I felt the mud could have covered my shoes for good. It was a quiet, deserted place compared to the neighborhood around the Suixi Hotel, and inside the houses you’d see a tatami room with an alcove, round windows with shoji paper, sliding doors with landscapes painted on them, and fluffy floor pillows—all making for a relaxed atmosphere totally different from our place. I had never seen any sign of slave traders, but those who lived in the Japanese section believed that Manchu Town harbored nests of robbers and beggars, a thieves’ market, and masses of bandits and spies; also the filth was horrifying, with infectious diseases rampant. Maybe there was some truth to this, but if you asked me, my neighborhood was not particularly frightening. Nonetheless, some Japanese stores in Jiamusi Ginza, the Japanese section, had posted signs at the entrance saying, “No Koreans or Manchus allowed.” Japanese were never employed at the Suixi Hotel— there were only Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese. Sanjiang Di Yi Lou, the name of the hotel’s restaurant, proclaimed it was the “best restaurant in Sanjiang” and, predictably, it was clean and served delicious food. People from the Japanese part of town did venture over to try it out, including some who must have been drawn there by the hotel’s rather suspect reputation. Young, tall, and uncontrollably boisterous, Zhang had a cloth dressing wrapped around his neck. At the register, he flicked around the seven balls of his abacus—two balls on top, five on the bottom—and then entered the figures in the account book with his brush. “That one, that Chō Kan’en, is a member of the Eighth Route Army,” a Japanese man visiting my father said. As if

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worried that someone returned from the dead might emerge from below, he looked down at the ground with a sideways glare and spoke with much gloom in his voice. “Who are you talking about?” my father asked, not grasping that when the man said “Chō,” he was using the Japanese pronunciation of Zhang’s name. I immediately realized that he was talking about Zhang. My mother also understood. The Eighth Route Army, the man explained, were the terrifying Communists, the great foes of the Japanese. Then the man went into detail about what this “Chō Kan’en” had been up to. He spoke cryptically, in a kind of code, and my father simply told him, “You’re wrong.” Once, when Zhang had ventured just beyond the fence of the nearby military police office, he’d been arrested and questioned, but he soon came home because my father, Yamamoto Yoshirō, was, after all, the third-ranking manager of the hotel. But my father’s visitor that day couldn’t keep from bragging: “He’s under surveillance. He’s one of the suspects the police have left at large.” And glaring down at his feet, he left. Afterward my mother asked my father, “Is he talking about Zan?” This further confused things since my mother was using the Shandong pronunciation of Zhang’s name. “Don’t call him ‘Zan,’ ” my father retorted. “In Beijing Mandarin, his name is pronounced ‘Zhang.’ And there’s no reason to worry about him.” My father’s tone was a rather pointed rebuke of my mother’s Shandong accent. Because Zhang had tuberculosis of the lung and sometimes spit up blood, he kept that dressing wrapped around his neck. He often went to the Sungari Theater and always hummed songs from Chinese opera. “Rongoi, rongoire, rongoi, rongoire,” he would sing, supplying his own musical accompaniment, and then he would start singing again. He ate his meals while he walked around, and I often came upon him eating in the corridor or at the front desk. If he wasn’t carrying his long chopsticks and rice bowl, he’d be brushing away the flies, especially during the summer. Zhang lived in an empty triangular space enclosed in plywood at the back of the front staircase, just across from our

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room. Above his bed, barely large enough to fit a single person, hung a naked 20-watt bulb. Lui and Ah Lu, who worked at the reception desk, were investors in the hotel and so we called them zhanggui, or manager. But Zhang was an employee and so we addressed him as xiansheng, or “Mr.” As the Japanese manager, my father was crucial to the operation of the hotel, but he was not an investor. One night when I was little, I peeked into Zhang’s small room. My father was away and just before, Zhang had brought his bowl to my mother to get some miso soup. When my mother returned the bowl with some soup in it, he thanked her in Chinese. He also muttered, in disgust, something like “Japanese sit down on the floor to eat? Like a bunch of beggars.” But he liked the aroma of the Japanese soup and drank it standing up. In his own little room, Zhang wore nothing from the waist up and sat opposite a long, lighted candle. Since he had several cream-colored bottles lined up in front of him, I eagerly watched to see what would happen next. Then, beckoning with his forefinger, he invited the little girl watching him to come in. “Mā-jia, come help me,” he said in Chinese. So I went through the plywood door and sat down on his bed. Using the flame from the candle, he lit a match and dropped it into an empty bottle. No, that must have been moxa, not a match. He turned to lie face down on the bed and I quickly stuck the bottle onto his swarthy back. We did this with six bottles, and since I enjoyed pulling them off after the moxa treatment, I didn’t mind helping him. “All done,” he told me. We kept very still, waiting for the next move. As he lay face down, looking like some kind of monster with the light cream bottles sticking up on his back, he began to reel off various insults: “You’re not Mā-jia, you’re a beggar. Why? Because you eat sitting down on the floor. And because you eat things like gobō, which are actually tree roots.” I was not going to take this. “At least I don’t eat while I’m walking around, and I don’t eat and sing at the same time. I don’t have such bad manners.” He laughed.

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The cream bottles sticking to the skin on his back produced a sucking sound when I removed them, a task I liked. With six bright purplish red circles dotting Zhang’s back, I was very sorry that he soon covered himself with his white shirt, hiding everything. “Let me see, let me see,” I said, getting him to show me what was under his shirt. I was fascinated by the weirdness of those purplish red areas, which did not look at all like human skin. He coughed, then spit into the enamel spittoon, and, after putting some ointment on his neck, wrapped a dressing around it. Odd to think of Zhang of the Suixi Hotel as a member of the Communist Eighth Route Army. Yang Yushu, who was quite skillful at making his way among powerful factions, was very likely a discreet and cautious man who wouldn’t hire a person with a murky background to work on the hotel’s accounts. If Zhang was a member of the Eighth Route Army, then he was probably a double agent, put there by Yang Yushu. Yang Yushu had money but no political power, so you could say that he had lost his arm, not fighting for his ideals, but to protect his very existence. He gave his support to Tōno not only because he liked this Japanese officer’s character, but because Tōno, having carefully weighed the pros and cons of such a connection, treated him well. Yang had made my father, Yamamoto Yoshirō, the third-ranking manager and warmly received his whole family because he trusted Tōno and also because this was a way to survive in a chaotic world.

5 In November of 1937, the same year that the war with China began, Major Tōno was transferred to the Mito regiment and departed for the front as its commanding officer. He arrived at Hangzhou in China and rushed straight into enemy lines, where he faced a barrage of gunfire. Plunging into a watery rice paddy, he was hit four times on his left arm and shoulder, the water in the paddy turning deep red with his blood.

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Tōno’s left arm was hanging by a thread by the time his men got to him, and he died soon after. Later, he received a special posthumous promotion two ranks up to colonel. Yamamoto Yoshirō had quit his military position before Tōno left Manchuria. With the reorganization of the whole system, my father’s Jilin Army had become part of the Manchukuo Army, and only graduates of an established officer training school were considered qualified to become officers. The central command had no doubt determined that the time had passed for Yamamoto and others like him who had got ahead only because of their familiarity with China. Tōno had entrusted his underling’s future to Yang Yushu, so Yamamoto became the manager of the Suixi Cinema, which Yang had invested in, and also an official of the Lianwa Company. And of course he was also a manager at the Suixi Hotel, but that job only existed to get him a salary: he had no specific work that anyone could clearly define. One day, Father took my brother Tōa and me out for a boat ride on the Sungari, the long river where pigs could be seen sleeping on the dirty, muddy riverbank. Since he wore a white shirt and a Panama hat, my brother and I must have worn straw hats, too. He stuffed three bottles of cider from a Manchu’s stall into his net bag and then dropped the bag into the water to keep the bottles cool. Then we got into the rowboat and went out as far as an island in the middle of the river. As the boat eased through the muddy water of the Sungari, a pathway of ripples sparkled like coffee jelly, and we were engulfed by the smell of rusty water. We hardly ever went anywhere with our father, and so the two of us were nervous and didn’t say anything. But Tōa did screw up his courage to ask, “Can I drink the cider?” “No, not until we reach the island,” I told him. But Father cheerfully put in, “Let him drink some now.” I couldn’t move. My father, my brother, and I were tied together with the kind of obi sash that men wear—it was a meter long with a tie-dyed shibori design “This is so we won’t get separated if something happens to the boat,” my father had explained.

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Surrounded by heaving muddy water, the boat seemed to have sunk deep into a watery valley, ready to be flooded at any moment. I was too terrified to move and couldn’t get to the cider at the front of the ship. “Get the cider!” My father stopped rowing. I tried to crawl to the front but since I was tied up, I just got pulled back. The boat was leaning to one side and my father terrified me, and so did the boat. “You’ll have to loosen the sash,” I screamed, “or else I won’t be able to move and get to the cider.” “You’re right. Tōa, be patient.” My father said this without making a fuss, and I was relieved. When we didn’t obey him right away, my father usually started yelling and then he would slap us, so he was definitely different that day, feeling in a placid mood as he rowed the boat. We landed on the island, broke off some of the tall summer grasses, and sat down. Eventually we enjoyed the cider while playing a word game. The moist grass left brown stains on my father’s shirt. In my father’s spare time, he tried to teach Japanese to Ma Zhanshan in the second floor office, but the young boy was so scared of him that he couldn’t speak and soon began to cry, clearly in no state to become my father’s student. Then my father pressed his ardor for teaching on my mother, since he had long expressed his dislike of Yukie’s Chinese, which came out in a Shandong accent. He felt she should speak beautiful Beijing Mandarin instead of sounding like a country bumpkin. Yet Yukie couldn’t understand why Shandong Chinese was unacceptable; after all, she could speak it easily, which was a big plus for her. So Yamamoto Yoshirō brought a blackboard into the room, and using a long thin bamboo stick as his pointer, he wrote Chinese characters on the blackboard and tapped at them with his stick while Yukie read them. Soon it became obvious that she had learned her Chinese by listening to others speak and didn’t know the Chinese pronunciations of the characters. Once he realized this, my father’s zeal for her education grew more passionate and he made correct pronunciation and the reading of characters the focus of the learning he

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imposed on his wife, who was at the same time a busy housewife. Eventually, however, he had to face another discovery: the servants and the cook couldn’t understand a word of his perfectly pronounced Beijing Chinese so Yukie had to translate his Chinese into the Shandong dialect. That was when my father finally abandoned his education projects. “How can you expect anyone to understand Chinese with such a funny pronunciation?” my mother would say when my father wasn’t around. My mother used her Shandong Chinese to work as an interpreter at the hotel, assisting in certain business matters— she took care of the banquet reservations for Japanese and also looked after the Japanese guests at the hotel, but I don’t think this kept her very busy. Someone from the front desk came to get her when she was needed. If her work took a long time, Lui would come calling out, “Mā-jia de! ” His halting way of speaking captured the leisurely pace of the hotel, like a nice soak in a warm bath. When I was little, everyone called me Pang Guniang—“Miss Fatty.” Lui would put his arms around me and take me to the front desk, and I would cling to his neck as he gently carried me off, swinging me from side to side. I remember the smell of tobacco and his big earlobe, which I used to pull, and his fair skin, bluish after he shaved off his beard, his white summer jacket, which looked so good on him, and the long blue or green satin robe he wore in winter. Lui, who came to work from his home in an alley near the Sungari, used to nap on a bed near the front desk. After I started primary school, I’d hang around the front desk even when my mother wasn’t there, and that’s where I learned how to eat watermelon seeds. Inside a large earthenware pot in the cupboard rested many duck eggs hardened in mud, which they called pidan. I’d sit down in a tall chair with my back to that cupboard, gazing at the beautiful glass flycatcher on the table and feeling my cares far away. Looking at the sugar sprinkled there, I watched the flies to see if they would be tempted to enter the glass trap, where they would drown in the water. With little interest in studying, I whiled away the time listening to Zhang’s humming of tunes from Chinese operas.

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For two hours after lunch almost everyone in the hotel took a nap, the quiet so complete that you’d think they had all died. You could only hear the ticking of the clock at the front desk—even Tōa must have been off somewhere, playing with his babysitter Ma Zhanshan.

6 In 1942 Fukuda Kiyoto published Cherry Trees, a propaganda novel about the colonization of Manchuria, with a picture of a young settler playing a bugle on the cover. A primary school student then, I had the odd experience of encountering my parents in the novel and discovered a number of completely untrue passages while reading the book. For example: the truth was that my father lorded it over everyone at the hotel and was not at all like an ordinary employee; also, there was no manager’s room, and my mother was not middle-aged. In Cherry Trees, my father, Yamamoto Yoshirō, was depicted as a man worthy of trust and blessed with much fortitude, a man who had staked his whole life on the settlement of Manchuria. In other words, a hero—whom I did not recognize. After Tōno had taken up his post in Manchuria, he used his own money to establish the Hokushinryō School in the northern border region and collected there a group of boys aged thirteen to nineteen who studied language, military drills, farming, and other subjects. When Tōno died in battle, however, the project lost its linchpin and fell apart, forcing the boys studying in that distant academy to fend for themselves. The boys took it upon themselves to go to the administrative office to investigate the possibility of being sent somewhere as settlers, but they were not considered part of the official rotation of Manchurian settlers and so there was no place for them. Only then did they remember Yamamoto Yoshirō, who had worked under Tōno, and that’s why their three representatives came to the hotel. Won over by the boys’ enthusiasm, Yamamoto agreed to help them find farmable land and complete all the required formalities, going so far as to agree to be their leader and accompany them to their new settlement.

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Most of the group’s energy was spent on constructing places to live. They first had to build a settlement office, their own homes, and shelters for their livestock, and so they went to get wood from the nearby mountain. The land was at the foot of the Lesser Khingan Mountains, the site of a dense, ancient forest, and the boys looked about in great wonder, thrilled to see the large trees extending into the distance in a seemingly inexhaustible supply. The novelist of Cherry Trees then brings in the boys’ idealistic leader, Yamamoto, to scold them: “No, don’t you see, this is the way the forest is now, but the huge supply of trees won’t last forever. In Manchuria and other places as well, there once were plenty of trees, but people cut them all down without thinking about the future, and that’s how the mountainsides became completely bald. Winter lasts six months here. Do you know how much firewood the stoves and other things will burn?” In an extremely cold region like Manchuria, where the temperature drops to -40 degrees Celsius, you couldn’t get through the winter without constantly feeding the stove with firewood, which had to be collected in quantity during the summer. So if you didn’t plant trees in Manchuria, the country as a whole would eventually weaken even though there might be development in other areas. It was Yamamoto’s personal belief that Japanese immigration had to go hand in hand with the planting of trees. The boys developed night blindness from malnourishment after the onset of winter, because they only had frozen radish pickle to eat, as did their leader, Yamamoto. “With a roar,” went one passage in Cherry Trees, “the north wind sweeps down over the ravines, setting off a mad churning in the sea of treetops in the forest. The eerie howls are surely wolves.” Yamamoto Yoshirō had been the chief of the Brick Association when those boys had come to discuss their troubles with him. In order to squelch speculation in bricks, he had established a rationing system in Jiamusi, where a building boom had created a huge demand for bricks. Although he was earning a good salary, he abandoned that job and became a contract employee of the Manchuria Colonial Development

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Company. This allowed him to throw himself into helping the boys settle on the land, believing this to be the dying wish of Colonel Tōno, who had fallen in battle. Yukie lamented the loss of income when his four hundred yen salary dropped to eighty yen, but Yamamoto had always deeply loved the roughness of great, sprawling Manchuria. He had chosen to settle in this basin at the foot of the Lesser Khingan Mountains because it was surrounded by that wonderful thick forest. The forests of Manchuria, for the most part, were still in their natural state, untouched by human hands. In every direction were dense stands of red pines, lacebark pines, spruce, and fir trees, along with Mongolian oaks, linden trees, poplars, and birch, among others. Few of the trees had been cut down, and the hunters who came to shoot in season were mainly seeking animal skins. Most of the people who went deep into the mountains were Russians, and they would throw their freshly skinned animal pelts onto the backs of their horses and ride on top of them as they left the mountains, looking as if they had been spit out by the breath of that wild terrain and were awakening from a dream. Yamamoto was totally enchanted by this glimpse of the Russians, which spoke of the mountains’ depths and cruelty. There were some who were said to have been eaten by tigers or killed by bandits, or to have fallen from the high crags into the valleys; but the most notable were the hunters who left the mountains with high-quality skins, having risked their lives poaching sable and other rare animals. Of course, the forest also supplied hiding places to the bandits, who were known as the kings of this green realm. In addition, the Eighth Route Army carried out their missions from outposts established within it. With the ramping up of the Japanese settlement policy, overwhelming military force was relied on to stamp out the bandits in the area, but every so often the boats that plied the Sungari were attacked, and Japanese were killed. The boys at the settlement, too, were armed, and one day, in need of food, they ventured to the very edge of the mountains to kill a deer. It was delicious but unfortunately too small to satisfy the hunger of fifty or so boys. They went deeper into the mountains, unafraid of wolves, and after two

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days brought down a fat wild boar weighing about 100 kilograms. In the winter, dead game froze solid quickly so they cut it up right there and brought it back on a sled. The original settlers in the area were Chinese and Russian loggers, and Korean rice growers lived in a village across the river. Yamamoto fought with the loggers, finally forcing them out because they would not go along with his ideas about the forests. He found he could work with the Koreans, though, and the boys learned to grow rice. “Jiamusi is paradise,” my father often said to inspectors from Japan, as well as to anyone thinking of joining a settlers’ group. His voice was full of pride, but the word tempu that he used for “paradise” had a Chinese ring to it. Probably he’d latched onto that word after he’d heard it from some well-placed Chinese. Maybe it was Yang Yushu, a man of high status in the capital city of Shinkyō, or maybe it was translator Fu, who had been promoted to the Kwangtung Army’s command center. “When I speak of paradise, I mean above all else a place with abundant produce. As the Chinese say, ‘Fertile wilderness, a thousand li / Birds and beasts in abundance / No better place than this.’ And that’s a perfect description of Jiamusi. The natural layout of the land also gives it strategic importance, since it’s shaped like a fortress, making for excellent protection from bandit attacks. The distant mountains are in back of you, and the great river is in front. Even when the Sungari’s water level drops, the river extends for 16 kilometers. People were able to build a good harbor here, and it has become an important distribution point for local products. Practically all the big shops lining the banks of the Sungari are grain wholesalers or timber merchants. Logs from the untouched forests of Jilin are shipped here in rafts, and soybeans grown on the Sanjiang Plain are also brought here. Goods and money are in play all the time. Jiamusi is that kind of wonderful place. No question, it’s paradise.” My father went on extolling Jiamusi’s virtues in this way. Completely left out of my father’s description was mention of Jiamusi’s horrible, extreme cold. The Sungari was frozen almost half the year, forcing the suspension of water transport. Residents of the area had to endure being cooped

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up during the long winter when temperatures could drop to -40 degrees C. Yamamoto Yoshirō came home from the settlement about twice a month. “It’s paradise,” he would tell visitors who had awaited his return. And then he’d go on to boast about his boys at the settlement: “I’ll have you know that they’ve already made one test home. They started off by drafting a design and next they cut down the wood. The outside is Russian-style, made of logs, and the inside is Japanese-style with a Manchurian heated floor and a stove in the wall that extends up from the floor. We based the construction on our hard-won knowledge, having lived through winters in that bitter cold.” Since the horses and cattle kept on the pastures were sometimes carried off by wolves, the settlers would go on wolf hunts with the Koreans. They also seemed to receive a lot of financial assistance from the government. As a child I, too, heard such stories. But after three or four years, half the boys in the settlement had reached recruitment age, and the military was relentless in taking them, creating trouble for Yamamoto. Those boys were used to visiting his rented room at the hotel to discuss various matters, but it happened one year that ten precious members of the group came to Jiamusi in their khaki settlement outfits to pay their respects before returning to Japan for their enlistment checkups. The boys had worked with leader Yamamoto for years, but probably they still did not feel comfortable with him and none spoke up without being prodded. Yukie made a huge batch of potato croquettes for their dinner, but after eating up everything they still seemed ready for more. One of the boys, who had never eaten croquettes before, kept saying, “What do you call this? It’s really delicious.” Yukie was moved to tears. “You used to be soldiers carrying hoes,” Yamamoto said, hiding his distress, “but now you’ll be soldiers carrying guns. Be strong. Even after you leave, I’ll manage somehow.” After dinner, they drank sorghum wine and ate fried dumplings, brought over from a restaurant. The boys got

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drunk on all that alcohol, and I was surprised to hear them sing, “I weep in parting from a pretty girl . . . danchō! ” Danchō meant “heartbreak” and also was the word for “group leader” so I wondered if they meant to tease their group leader with this song. When I looked over at my father, I saw he was smiling as the boys kept singing, “Danchō! ” Yamamoto Yoshirō and Kasuga, a member of the settlement staff, had gone to Shinkyō a number of times on work-related problems, and this time they asked the central office for fifty new settlers for their group. Explaining that the year’s harvest would fail if they did not get these new people quickly, they received permission for settlers to come to them directly without going through the established training. The officials must have understood that, from the start, this settlement had an exceptional history, and so they had to bend the rules in this case, too. For the second time, fifty boys aged thirteen to nineteen arrived at their settlement in the north, and Yamamoto became increasingly busy.

7 My father was away at his settlement for an extended period— from the time I entered primary school until I became a sixthgrader in 1945, the year of Japan’s defeat. With his office on the second floor of the hotel closed up, the photo of Colonel Tōno that had hung there was moved to a wall in our six-mat room. The top of Tōno’s head swept up into a splendid point, and his beard, extending down from his sideburns, also came to a point at his chin, so the colonel’s face had six sides. There was a wart near his right eyebrow, which softened his piercing gaze a little, and he always looked as if he were about to say something. When my mother wasn’t home, I would drink condensed milk directly out of a hole in the top of the can, but then, without thinking, my eyes would meet up with Colonel Tōno’s on the wall. In my childish way I felt a little ashamed, for his penetrating gaze, rather than glaring at me in condemnation, seemed to be expressing surprise, as if he were saying, “I can’t believe you’d do such a thing.”

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“Please excuse me,” I would say to myself. When my father was away, we felt happy and free to do what we wanted. In the evenings, the middle-aged, pockmarked waitress from Sanseirō often came over to share her personal troubles in long chats with my mother. “If you cry, you’ll ruin your face powder,” my mother used to tell her. The geisha who worked at the Suixi Hotel banquets for Japanese army officers would come to drink tea at our place afterward, even though it was late. Maybe they were my mother’s old friends Ryūka and Doryūzan, but I didn’t know their names. Their chattering voices woke me up late at night, and when I peeked into the next room I saw the women with their kimono carelessly splayed out in front, laughing and crying as they ate the expensive mooncakes they’d ordered in from a nearby shop to share among themselves. Since I’d awakened, I too got to taste the mooncakes, which had a lot of candied fruit inside, and I also listened to their conversations, something my father would never permit when he was at home. “A child can’t understand what we’re talking about. You go to sleep.” I had no desire to sleep. Nearly everything they talked about was indeed incomprehensible to me, but the room was filled with the aromas from their hair pomade and makeup. My mother relaxed with these women in a way she never did when my father was at home, and when I saw her in such a good mood my spirits also rose. “Men are like that. Especially the men who come to Manchuria—they’re like kites floating around with their strings cut off.” “A bunch of good-for-nothing kites—that’s all we have around here.” I had never seen a “kite” so I thought they were talking about the eight-legged octopus, which was pronounced the same way. At night I could hear the officers’ drunken singing from the second-floor banquet hall: “The white snow of Fuji, oh yes! The white snow of Fuji, oh yes!” Those red-faced octopuses puckered their lips as they sang, but if something didn’t suit

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them, they’d punch a servant or draw their swords, starting a commotion. I once saw an officer shouting at the top of the stairs with his drawn sword ablaze, his behavior disgusting and very frightening. A trembling Lui came in to get the small Yukie, and the troublemaker’s rage subsided at the sight of her, a simple, kimono-clad woman with the friendly, plain ways of the countryside. In the end, everyone calmed down, although that was not always the case. Once someone hit my mother, and she returned home in tears. When my mother cried like that, I too was affected and cried with her. I imagined that my father would have started a big uproar over this if he’d been at home. Late at night in our house, the geisha clapped their hands in time with the singing of those banquet songs: “The snow melts and flows along, oh yes! The snow melts and flows along, oh yes!” Ah, definitely there would have been none of this if my father had been around. In time, we rented two more guest rooms on the first floor to replace the office on the second floor. One of the rooms was for the boys who had come to Jiamusi out of admiration for my father but in fact were always idling about. Some had gone to the settlement with my father, but boys like the student of Russian Matsuoka and my father’s nephew, who wanted to be an artist, had remained behind. The other room was occupied by three young women who worked as switchboard operators but had received marriage proposals in Manchuria, which were in the process of being finalized. On holidays, my brother and I played cards with these older boys and girls, or we went out to see a movie; in this way they looked after us children and helped my mother a lot. Matsuoka was in charge of getting our rations, and I used to go with him. Without my father’s overpowering presence and strict rules, our household quite naturally centered upon my mother, so for the five or six years he was away, the Yamamoto household became quite free and easygoing. Once in a while, my father came home. When he walked through the front door he brought with him the wild atmosphere of Manchuria’s forests: his shoes were filthy with mud, his clothes dirty, and we felt that some crude, peculiar being had invaded our lives.

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We children were afraid of him and so we would play in the courtyard longer than usual, trying to avoid returning home. Surely this coldness from his family irritated my father. Usually we all went to the Sanjiang Public Bath, a family bathhouse that was very close by, and this brought deadly suffering to us children, since we had to stay immersed in that hot water until our father gave us permission to get out, or he would insist on washing our hair, not bothered at all that the soap got into our eyes. Even so, when we got back from the bath, our father did not seem like such a stranger anymore. Still, the faces of those idle, non-paying boarders in the house stiffened around my father, and conversation did not flow easily. “Yes!” they would say very politely. In a most lighthearted way, my father would say to the women boarders, “Why, haven’t you both become pretty!” Hearing this, I would feel more relaxed. After dinner, my mother took care of her third child, then a baby, while listening to my father talk. He spoke in a low voice so you had to listen to him carefully. He’d get angry if my mother asked a foolish question in reply, but even when she could hear what he said, she had a hard time following his rhapsodies on his pet ideology, which saw agriculture as the basis of Japanese life. If my mother answered half-heartedly, he would yell at her, shattering the longstanding peace of the house. The hotel’s night watchman was a skinny old man who was always out of sorts, and he usually planted himself in a chair at the front desk so that he could face the door throughout the night. One night, Yamamoto Yoshirō came back home late and the old man happened to be leaning back in his chair, fast asleep. Yamamoto called to him but the poor man was in a deep sleep and didn’t wake up. My father, who was still a hotel manager, got angry and suddenly started hitting the watchman with the cane he always carried around. The unfortunate watchman fell from the chair and didn’t say a word as he looked up, dazed, into Yamamoto’s angry face. “I have no use for a night watchman who sleeps on the job! Get out of here!” the irate manager shouted, but the next day Lui intervened and the watchman kept his job. As soon as Yamamoto Yoshirō finished his work in Jiamusi, he would immediately return to the settlement, or he’d

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go from Jiamusi to Japan on business or visit government offices in Shinkyō. He didn’t stay at home long, a happy state of affairs for his family and everyone at the hotel. During his occasional appearances, he blasted people’s lives like a hurricane.

8 I had ice skates hanging around my neck whenever I went to and from school. With the temperature in Jiamusi ranging from -30 to -40 degrees C, skating was the only option during our exercise periods so I always brought skates along with me. In the winter, an oval skating rink was built on the playground, and each Wednesday water was routinely sprinkled on the rink. During the noon break, the principal, Miss Zeze, would put on her figure skates and set out to make elegant circles on the ice. The students usually wore long speed skates. In that region, a fur coat was a necessity for complete protection against the cold, and for winter the slender Miss Zeze showed real style, wearing a thick wool coat with a wide shawl collar of astrakhan fur and a black fur fez. When she drew up her coat’s wide collar, her cheeks were completely hidden. On days when it was at least -40 degrees C, I felt that the joints of my hands and feet had frozen by the time I reached school, and there was pain every time I tried to bend them. I believed that the fluids inside my joints had truly hardened, causing more pain. When I arrived at school, the classroom was a warm 20 degrees C, but I still had to force myself not to cry as I sat completely still after my arrival. The frost on my eyelashes dripped down on me as my body slowly thawed, and I felt my blood starting to flow freely again. On those days, for the first time, I actually could sense that my body had half turned to ice. Of course, it was impossible to put on my skates in the playground when it was extraordinarily cold. I wore three layers of gloves—next to my skin were my woolen gloves, which had five fingers; then came the leather mittens that had a separate part only for my thumb, and next, for the topmost layer, large padded mittens that again separated the thumb from the

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rest of my hand. Usually I had to take off my gloves down to at least the woolen layer to be able to tie my skates’ laces. But when the temperature fell to -40 degrees C, my fingers got frostbite instantly when I removed the outer layers, even if I still kept the woolen gloves on, and that’s why they allowed us to put our skates on inside the school building. Still, we were admonished not to damage the corridor with the skates’ sharp blades, so I would put on my skates indoors and have my friends carry me outside. If no one was around, I’d crawl as far as the shoe storage shelves at the exit. I don’t remember a single time when our physical education period was cancelled because of the cold. In her teachings, Miss Zeze always extolled the virtues of mental and physical discipline and fortitude for us children of Manchuria, and so the small window in the corridor was kept open even on those cold days. Miss Zeze began her work at the Jiamusi primary school in Manchuria when I started school, in the spring of 1939. Jiamusi’s population five years previously had been thirty thousand, but now there were a hundred thousand residents, including ten thousand Japanese. Before, Yukie rarely saw another Japanese, but now there were many who flocked to Manchu Town and the Suixi Hotel on holidays. More precisely, there were nine thousand more Japanese and sixty thousand more migrants from various parts of China and nearby lands. Jiamusi had become the northern military base supporting Japan’s colonization and with so many soldiers stationed there, the bandits kept out of sight. Also, because of the railroad, people from all over came to the city seeking work, and many coolies awaited their arrival in the square in front of the station. When the Japanese primary school opened in 1935, there were only seven students, but by the time Miss Zeze arrived, that number had risen to six hundred. The next year there were eight hundred so a new primary school had to be opened. I stopped enjoying school because there was too much going on, and I was unable to calm down. Almost every day we welcomed new students or said goodbye to others going elsewhere, and when the Sungari thawed, the rush of transfer

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students turned fierce, the number of new arrivals often doubling that of those departing. I learned their names and would also try to learn the games, songs, and new expressions that these children brought over from Japan. The classes grew, and soon the desks and chairs were jammed together with no space in between. From the new girls, I learned a song they sang jumping rope: “Young miss, please join us. Yes, that’s good. Losers at paper, rock, scissors, please leave.” Or another song they sang to a hand-clapping game: “Eighty-eight nights have passed, and soon summer will be here. New green leaves flourish on the fields and mountains.” I had never been out of Jiamusi, and so the songs sounded totally new to me and stirred a longing for Japan. There was a game that involved jumping with elastic bands and they’d say, “If you want to do the elastic-band jumps, grab this finger!” But I couldn’t grab it. The more new classmates there were, the lonelier I felt: the only time I didn’t feel lonely was when I was in the hotel. There I liked to slip into the kitchen, which was otherwise off limits, and watch the cooks stretching out the noodle dough, their hands working magic in creating the long narrow noodles as thin as rain. When the noodles were tossed into a large pot, the hot water would splatter out. “Hey, this is too dangerous for you,” the cook would bellow at me. “You get out of here!” At least I did not feel lonely there. The cook wore a large apron stained with dried blood and carried a big cleaver when he went out to the black brick courtyard to strangle chickens and ducks. In preparation, the servants had poured bucketfuls of hot water into a coffin-shaped box in the middle of the garden. “Ko-ko-ko-ko—! ” the chickens cried as the cook stuck his hand into their cage, thus sealing the fate of one chicken. This bird let out a piercing cry as the cook skillfully bent its neck back and cut it off, the blood dripping into a bowl. The chicken quieted down somewhat, and when the cook had squeezed out a sufficient amount of blood, he threw the chicken onto the black bricks. Then the animal started a frenzied flapping of its wings, standing up with its head cut off and

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darting around in the moments before its soul flew away. Those ten seconds of mystery clutched the heart of the child I was then and did not let go as screams and feathers filled the courtyard. With the ducks, the mysteriousness lasted a little longer since the headless ducks strode around the courtyard for a pretty long time. Seeing a child like me taking all this in, the cook would throw a headless duck at me, and then I too, just like the duck, began to dash around in utter confusion. The servants witnessing this had a good laugh at my expense. This job finished, they gathered the chickens and ducks and put them into the box with the steaming water. Everyone collected around the steam, which stank of blood, to wash the birds and pluck out their feathers, using tweezers to pull out the tiniest feathers. Soon many pink, naked chickens and ducks were laid out on top of a board, the spurs on their feet all lined up. Then, starting at their rear ends, their innards were pulled out, including several days’ worth of eggs. The blood and feathers were cleaned away with water, and an ice cream machine with a tin pipe was carried onto the wet black bricks. Wearing a definitely unsanitary looking white apron, a servant started cranking the handle while I, seated in a chair stained with chicken blood, waited eagerly for the moment when that sluggish, monotonous sound would stop. If I happened to be there at the right time and if the servants were not being mean to me, I would get the first taste of the ice cream. It never occurred to me that the chickens’ souls were wafting all around the courtyard. No, that courtyard had already become an ice cream stand. The kitchen crew undertook these first steps of preparing the food even when the winter temperatures fell below zero, but I have no memory of this, perhaps because I didn’t go outside in the cold.

9 One day I went with my mother to buy a hat at the Kamchatka Fur Shop. Previously, my mother had gone there to have the sleeves of her fur coat let out so they would fit over

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the kimono she always wore. The thick, dark brown fur came from a type of bear, and the collar was big enough to cover her cheeks, with the hem reaching down below her knees. She’d had that coat since well before I entered primary school. While my father’s splendid astrakhan coat was made in Harbin, our coats came from the tiny Kamchatka Fur Shop, which couldn’t accommodate more than three customers at a time. Afterward my coat would be passed on to Tōa and after that to our youngest brother, Takuo. That’s why my mother and I were the ones to always go to the fur shop. Because the snow on the streets had frozen over, I put on my thick winter shoes, three pairs of gloves, and my coat of calico cat fur, while Yukie wore her usual bear coat and her warm winter shoes. The door to the Kamchatka Fur Shop was frozen shut and wouldn’t open no matter what we did. With thick ice covering the glass door, we couldn’t see anything inside so we knocked for a while and pulled at the door. We could hear them pushing from the inside, but only the door’s upper half budged. Then the frozen glass broke, falling in pieces to the ground. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Yukie yelled her apologies in Chinese. Vassily came running out. “I’m so sorry. Did you get hurt?” He practically embraced us as he brought us into the store and closed the innermost of the double doors behind him, leaving the broken outer door just as it was. A heating stove was burning bright red next to the counter, and in the corner hung a pack of furs. Vassily, a Russian from Harbin in his mid-thirties, spoke fluent Japanese: it was strange to see his red hair and green eyes while he spoke Japanese like a native. But he greeted us with a Zdrastvuyte—“hello”—and shook hands with those big hands of his, mustering a firm grip. “Zdrastvuyte,” I said back to him. When I looked up, I saw his wide open eyes, the color of green glass, and a smile floating about his lips. The reddish brown hair falling on his forehead seemed to be there just for decoration. “Vassily, I want to buy a hat for this child. Do you have something nice?”

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Vassily looked at me for a moment. “I certainly do. I have a hat that’s perfect for Mā-jia.” He turned around and quickly brought out a gray fur hat from the shelf in back. “Now this one here is made of a rare fur, marmot. I don’t usually have any in stock. Look at the luster.” He fitted the hat on my head with great care. It was big enough to cover my ears, and the hat had a gray silk border, as did the drawstring. Both gave off an elegant silver glow. At last I had a hat big enough to cover my ears—now there was only my exposed neck to worry about. “For a long time we didn’t have any of these marmot hats in stock. Ten years ago the marmot hunters came down with the plague, which caused a big epidemic in Harbin, so they stopped hunting. It’s really a very precious item. The French are great admirers of this fur.” After Vassily had recited these unpleasant events, Yukie responded by saying that the fur was merely squirrel, after all. “No, Madame, you are mistaken. But I won’t mind at all if you pay me the same price as for squirrel fur. You are a valued customer after all.” Maybe because he talked in this vein, my mother bought a black mink muffler to cover my exposed neck. “I won’t be able to pay you for the muffler now.” “Any time, any time.” Vassily bent over to give me a candy and tie the mink muffler around my neck. “Any time, Madame. Any time.” He ushered us out, opening the broken door wide. I didn’t care for that marmot hat, and even when I tied on the muffler, some cold air still hit my neck. And I couldn’t forget the story about the plague, so eventually I stopped wearing it. I didn’t see Vassily for a long time after that, but in the spring I saw him at a Manchu wedding at the hotel. How odd, I thought, observing his behavior, since he saw me but pretended that he hadn’t. The bride’s black car, decorated with artificial pink flowers, had arrived outside to the loud refrain of the hit song “Over the Hill.” Meanwhile, the beggars in front of the hotel were creating a big uproar, crying, “Zhanggui de ” while they banged on their empty cans and bamboo boards. On top of

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this, an overflowing crowd of the curious, joined by peddlers, made such a racket that I had to cover my ears. The bride and bridegroom walked on a red cloth that had been spread out for them from the entrance to the front desk and up the stairs. Family and friends were packed along the second floor banister, which looked down on the staircase, and clutched rice, beans, and confetti to throw down on the newly married couple. The bride was wearing a pink qipao with matching silk shoes, and the groom, a tuxedo. With rice and beans pelting them as they ascended the stairs, I was afraid of getting caught in the barrage so I watched the staircase from the front desk. I saw Vassily stuck in the middle of the curious crowd, his back to the counter, looking as if he had resigned himself to the impossibility of getting through the bottleneck. He really stood out with his red hair and green eyes. I tried to reach him, but I was small, my head only coming up to the chests of the adults. Forced to push my way through the thicket of grown-up clothing and dangling arms, I found Vassily’s arms also hanging down. I grasped his hand, the same one he had used to grip me so strongly the day he had said “Zdrastvuyte” and saw a ring with a golden dragon design on his little finger. “Mā-jia!” He feigned surprise and hugged me, by then a fourth grader, and lifted me up. I glanced again at his ring and realized it was exactly the same one Yang Yushu had sent to our house as a gift. I suddenly knew that my mother must have given it to Vassily. When Tōa was born and then again when Takuo was born, Yang Yushu had sent us congratulatory gifts. He sent one beautiful present after another—a gold pendant and bracelet inscribed with the character for Congratulations, a silver pendant to hang around the baby’s neck as a protective charm. But Japanese did not customarily wear such things, and so all the gifts were stored away in a chest of drawers. A pillow cover with gorgeous embroidered roses was the only item that my mother happily made use of. From time to time my mother would take the gifts out of the drawer to look them over, and I’d try on the pendant and other items. Also there was the ring with the dragon

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design, a gift to my father, I think, which was stored in a gold brocade case. The dragon eyes were crimson jewels. “You’re wearing my father’s ring.” I looked down at Vassily from my vantage point against his chest. “Da. I’m taking care of it.” An unpleasant smoldering sensation flitted across my young heart. I had always thought that the ring’s dragon design was creepy but it should not have been on Vassily’s finger. Didn’t that ring belong to us? I shook off Vassily’s arms and went back down to the ground.

10 When my mother miscarried, Tōa and I were sent off to Tōno Memorial Hall and my three-year-old brother, Takuo, went to the home of a friend of my father’s. My mother was in the Manchuria Red Cross Hospital. The Tōno Memorial Hall had been completed two years after Colonel Tōno died, on November 14, 1939. It had rooms for overnight guests, and Tōno Park was added later. Settlers passing through Jiamusi on the way to their settlements would always visit this sacred place—that is, the memorial plaque dedicated to the unknown soldier in Tōno Park and the Memorial Hall. The settlers would stay overnight to view these landmarks and then head to the interior. Yamamoto Yoshirō didn’t want to become the head of the Memorial Hall. “The way to carry on Tōno-sensei’s last wishes is to cultivate the soil of this vast land. He wanted us to build a new country here.” My father recommended Miyazaki Shirō, who used to work with Tōno at his official residence in Shinkyō, and he arrived with a middle-aged woman rumored to be his girlfriend. She would serve as the manager, along with her sixteen-yearold daughter, Seiko, and help us out. This mother looked to be around forty in her slovenly silk kimono, and she wore her hair in the kushimaki style, rolled up on her head around a comb. “A girl must look pretty,” this new auntie of mine would say when she inspected my hair and clothing. “Black

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underpants are ridiculous.” My underpants were longer than my skirt, and she turned them up so they stayed at the very top of my legs. “Now have a look.” She brought me over to the mirror. It definitely looked better to have white thighs visible beneath the bottom of my yellow dress. My mother had made my black cotton underpants, which were too big, and Auntie was right to say that I looked uncouth with the underpants sticking out below my skirt. In those days you probably couldn’t buy things like underpants in Jiamusi, so my mother had made them for everyone in the family, always using the same pattern. That’s why they turned out so big. My mother only wore a long underskirt beneath her kimono, so maybe she thought that underpants were like a pair of trousers. From that time on, I fussed about the length of my underpants, always rolling them up to the top of my legs. When Auntie’s daughter Seiko, who wore a long skirt, told me, “I don’t wear underpants,” I decided to follow her example. “Your whole rear end is showing,” Seiko now cautioned me. “You’ll have to wear underpants if you’re going to go out in one of those short little-girl skirts.” I was embarrassed to hear that my rear end had been on full view without my knowledge, but Auntie let out a big laugh. “This girl is really silly. Seiko, you fix it.” Auntie offered her opinion on this though she didn’t go so far as to help out. Yet when Seiko would flirt with one of the young male guests, she was quick to give her daughter a good slap. Longing for my mother, I crossly said, “Never mind.” “You look cute with your underpants hanging out. Remember the song ‘Hanako, named for the flowers, is prettier than the flowers’? Let’s sing that song!” Seiko started to tickle my back, but I twisted away, laughing. “Right.” Her mother, sitting on the tatami with one knee up, lit a cigarette. “Everyone would agree that it’s cute.” The two of us started singing together: “Masuko, prettier than the flowers. Seiko, prettier than the flowers.” “You two really don’t have a worry in the world.” We sang with gusto but soon tired of the monotonous lyrics and melody, so we brought out A Collection of Favorite

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Songs and sang the popular songs that we knew. Seiko and her mother usually had no difficulty lifting up a child’s mood, but when I felt lonely I went to the exhibition room. Tōa, who was scared of the large oil painting of Colonel Tōno that hung there, liked to climb the stairs by the wall and stand on the terrace, which overlooked the atrium of the Memorial Hall. From there he would let out a shout, “Yaho!” and then quickly disappear. On both sides of the terrace were small tatami rooms, and you could get a good look at the park from there. He hid in one of those rooms, and when his sister managed to find him, he’d quickly dash out and hide himself in a new spot. Ma Zhanshan quit his job around the time Tōa entered school to become a servant somewhere else. What did they call him there? I was no substitute for that young boy Ma, and so I maintained my role as the reserved older sister and didn’t go around with Tōa very much. Nonetheless Tōa kept up a dizzying pace. The expression on Colonel Tōno’s face in the oil painting had too many sharp angles, and he had truly scary eyes. Plus, his beard was scruffy enough to make him look like Zhong Kui, the demon queller of Chinese myth, and he looked very long and thin in the portrait, a completely different person from the one I’d seen in photographs. I didn’t remember Colonel Tōno, but I felt that this didn’t look like him. Another painting, by the Chinese artist Liu Rongfeng, reminded me of The Angelus by Millet since it showed a Japanese settlement on the Qihuli River, with a Japanese couple bowing toward Tōno Mountain in the distant mists. In the exhibition room’s glass cases were the shirt and military uniform that had been bloodied from Tōno’s wounds, together with other items he had with him when he died in the battle at Hangzhou: his bloodstained card holder, a copy of the Kannon Sutra, a protective talisman, a small pouch for maps and such, a dagger, a sword, a military kit bag, and a camera, among other things. Also there were many documents on view describing the achievements brought about by the colonel’s tireless efforts in the Manchurian settlements. The exhibition room was always quiet and felt like another world. Members of the imperial family and other

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important people often visited Jiamusi, and they would enter the building solemnly, walking through two lines of soldiers assembled out front. This place had become consecrated ground for the Japanese around the Sungari, but no one stayed for long. After school, Tōa and I usually went with Seiko to visit Mother in the Red Cross Hospital, bringing gifts from Auntie like salmon roe from the settlement. Five or six patients were together in one big hospital room, and there was always something tasty to eat as the patients strolled around the room in the cotton yukata robes they slept in, eating, drinking, and chatting. There wasn’t a single old person in that stuffy room full of female odors where the women were always carrying on fairly risqué conversations about men in voices bursting with laughter. “This kind of talk does you no good, does it, Seiko?” one of the patients inquired. “Doesn’t bother me at all. If you’re talking about big ones, I’ve seen my share of them.” Seiko spread out her wide skirt and sat down on an empty bed, restlessly kicking her legs. “I bet that Russian’s got a big one,” someone remarked. “What do you say, Mrs. Yamamoto?” Yukie would not dignify such talk with any kind of reply and turned to her children. “Tōa, have you finished your homework? Are you listening to what Auntie tells you to do?” “I’ll do my homework tonight. I’m behind because Seiko is always making me play cards with her.” “Then I won’t let you play cards with me.” “All the same to me.” Tōa actually wanted to play but stubbornly pretended not to care. “I must thank you for your help, Seiko,” Yukie said. “It’s no trouble. If I come here, my mother can’t yell at me all the time.” “Why does your mother yell at such a well-behaved child like you?” “Only men stay in the hall, and if I talk to them, my mother always complains. It’s a sickness with her.” “You’re beautiful so she gets worried.”

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“You look just like Asagiri Kyōko.” I was full of admiration. “Yes,” came a voice in agreement. “She looks like her.” The sixteen-year-old Seiko did resemble the movie star, who was slender, had a small round face, and big, dewy eyes. The men who came to the hall never failed to notice her, and this worried her mother, especially since Seiko was quite friendly and often laughed at their dirty jokes, not at all fazed. The women in the gynecology ward were not seriously ill, and it was heaven to be there since I was allowed to do anything I wanted. After three in the afternoon we’d order some take-out Korean noodles, a cold, spicy meal that was absolutely delicious. At four, the three of us had to go home. During that period, Tōno Park had almost no visitors, the land beyond the Memorial Hall having been so neglected that the grasses grew wild. One day as I was running around through the swarms of white butterflies with a net and collection bag, I discovered amidst the grasses a round concrete pond with no water in it. Maybe they had tried to construct a fountain here? Jiamusi’s long winters meant that the water remained frozen for half the year, so ponds and pools were of no use. Perhaps this was an example of a project abandoned because of the climate. I had a good time walking on that high round concrete rim, which made me tall enough to look down on the grasses below. I was standing on the rim and singing in a loud voice when a woman in a white Korean chima skirt also climbed onto the rim. She had long, disheveled hair, which covered half her face, but she was pretty and smiling. I was so surprised that I jumped down off the rim. With her wide skirt and sleeves waving about, she began to dance her way around the concrete rim, turning around as if she were flying. Her mouth was open wide, her lips a bright red—was she singing something? I was terrified. If I turned around, would she come and grab me from behind? I shrank away and got out of there quickly, but looking back over my shoulder, I could still see the Korean woman, a white speck flying around in the green grasses. I told Seiko about this, and she immediately informed her mother, who warned me not to go exploring in the hidden corners of the park, since bums loitered there.

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“That must have been some syphilis-crazed Korean pi-ya.” Auntie kept smoking as she muttered things a child could not understand but sounded terrifying. That image of the white butterflies and the pretty woman dancing in her long chima skirt and jeogori blouse was like a dream to me, but Seiko’s mother had given it a definite reality. In Jiamusi, they called prostitutes pi-ya. After that I used to gaze from afar at that round concrete structure sitting amidst the tall summer grasses, though I never again saw the woman in white. Maybe she would have turned up once more if I had climbed up onto that rim around the concrete pond and started singing in a loud voice. But I was too scared.

11 “You don’t have to go to the Red Cross Hospital today,” Auntie told us when we got home from school. “Take your baths early.” “Why?” “Your mother isn’t there.” “Where did she go?” “Well—I think she’ll be home soon.” “Where did she go? Is she back at the Suixi Hotel?” “She’s not at the Suixi. She’ll surely be here in a little while. After all, you and Tōa are here.” “But Mama is sick. Where did she go?” Auntie looked at me intently, not saying anything. “I think she’s in the Red Cross Hospital,” I said. “After all, she’s sick.” Absolutely determined, I had already run out to the front hall yelling, “Tōa! Tōa!” My brother came speeding over and grabbed my hand. As usual, we’d go to the hospital, I thought, so we walked fast, thrusting our heads forward. But once we got to the hospital, we could only find fresh white sheets and a mattress on her bed. The other patients all looked at us. “Mrs. Yamamoto left the hospital early this morning,” said one, who was taking a stroll around the ward. “She said that she had some urgent business to take care of. She must have gone home. Of course,

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there’s no way you would know that since you came here directly from school.” Yes, of course, she’s at the hotel, I told myself, not responding to the women there in any way. I held Tōa’s hand and we walked fast, practically running, for forty minutes. It was already evening by the time we got to the hotel. Lui was there. “Mā-jia, Tōa, what happened?” Just looking at his face made me cry. “Mama is gone.” Did I believe what Auntie had told me—that my mother was not there, and was that the reason I started crying before I even reached our apartment? Tōa seemed upset as he looked at me, tears in his eyes. “Maybe she’s here.” Manager Lui shook his head. “She’s not home yet.” “Mama is gone!” Tōa and I yelled this together. Lui wrapped his two hands around us both and carried us outside. The familiar smell of cigarettes rose from his chest as he summoned one of the carriages waiting in front of the hotel, paid the driver, and put us inside. He told the driver to take us to the Tōno Memorial Hall, all the while assuring us that everything was going to be all right, everything was going to be all right. He kept urging us not to cry. Once I was settled in the carriage, I started to cry even louder. Tōa, gripping my hand tightly, cried his eyes out, too. We had looked everywhere but couldn’t find our mother. The two of us felt that we had been left to float down the Sungari clinging to bits of driftwood. I was in despair and convinced that if I let go of Tōa, I’d never see him again. Though I was the older sister, a sense of hopelessness got the better of me and I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t for a moment think about my father, who was for us a useless bully, nothing more. That night Auntie called around to various places and then calmly told us, “I think she’ll turn up here soon.” Tōa and I went up to a secret place above the exhibition room, and from the window surveyed the scene around the gate, faintly lit by the light from the park. Any minute now our mother was sure to come through the gate to get us. Auntie came looking for us, uttering her usual refrain: “You go to sleep right now. You have school tomorrow.”

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“Mama hasn’t come, has she?” Tōa was on the verge of

“I think she’ll come tomorrow.” I felt like crying too but I restrained myself since Auntie didn’t like all this crying. She wasn’t the whining type, yet she was always nagging Seiko. At night, wearing a blue underskirt and long underwear, she told fortunes with cards. We were settled into the bedding that Seiko had laid out for us in the next room when I remembered the dragon ring I’d seen on Vassily’s finger. That finger with the red hair growing out of it. I remembered those very clear green eyes that seemed to see nothing when I had said to him, “You’re wearing my father’s ring.” But I thought that he actually saw everything with eyes that were hidden inside, and that these had looked at me intently. An ominous thought suddenly struck me as I lay there— if I went to the Kamchatka Fur Shop, I’d find my mother. Why? Because when Vassily had made such a fuss over my small mother, almost embracing her as he saw us out of his shop, my mother had clung to his arm. Also he’d visited her in the hospital—I’d heard the other patients in the ward teasing her about this. I went to sleep thinking that I wouldn’t go to school the next day.

12 In the morning, I did go to school with Tōa, having realized that I couldn’t just go walking away on my own. But my heart was flying off in the opposite direction as I slowly made my way to school, and my mind kept wandering even after I reached the classroom. Finally, during the second hour of my Manchu language class—actually a Chinese language class—I said to my teacher Sun Jinlong: “May I go home? I have a headache.” “That’s too bad. First go to the infirmary.” “All right.” I left the classroom but didn’t stop at the infirmary, where the smell of disinfectant always lingered; instead I left the school premises like a prisoner making her escape.

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In the Japanese part of town there would not be a single school-age Japanese child around, and I knew that I’d be paralyzed by fear if I set foot there. One of the shopkeepers might become suspicious and ask, “Shouldn’t you be in school?” Even so my emotions were pointing me straight to the Kamchatka Fur Shop, and I tried to compose myself as I walked from the school directly west for about fifteen minutes. Then I turned left and went down the small street that led toward Jiamusi’s Ginza. The door to the Kamchatka Fur Shop was on the left. They’d replaced the door that had broken during the winter, but it was pitch black when I peered through the glass and I couldn’t see anything. When I quietly opened the door, I smelled animal skins. Leftover scraps of skin had fallen on the floor around the sewing machine, but no one was there. “Vassily! Vassily! Zdrastvuyte.” I called out, but not a soul appeared. Then I went into the shop, a frightening place for me with its foreign atmosphere. “Zdrastvuyte!  ” I yelled, knocking on the door at the far end of the counter that I remembered Vassily using. “Just a minute!” That sounded like my mother. “Mama! Mama!” I kept knocking as I repeated this in exactly the same tone, just like a talking doll. “Coming.” This was Vassily, who finally opened the door. “Oh, it’s Mā-jia. Zdrastvuyte.” Vassily came out and clasped my right hand, but he wasn’t wearing the dragon ring. “Where’s my mother? Is she here?” “Mama has gone home.” He held out both his hands to embrace me but I stiffened and drew away. “Is she here?” “Nyet. Nyet. Mama has gone home.” “To the Suixi Hotel?” “Nyet.” “To the Tōno Memorial Hall?” “Nyet.” “Then where is she?” As I stamped my foot and shouted in my short yellow dress, my black underpants must have been hanging out. “I don’t know where she’s gone. Perhaps to where little Taku is? Maybe. But she’ll go to your place. By evening.” Vassily shook his head and smiled.

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Perhaps my mother was inside the room? I went for the knob, and when I pushed the door open, I had the feeling that someone had made a quick move to the other side of the curtain. The big room with its bed, dining table, and fireplace reeked even more of a foreigner’s presence than the shop. On the other side of the curtain were the bathroom and back entrance, with its double doors, so I opened the heavy, solid wooden outer door and went outside. The small back garden had flower beds with a paving stone path, which led me out to the front of the fur shop, as if by magic. Believing that my mother had run away from me, I was so sad that I felt my heart was going to fall out of my chest. I was crying in front of the shop when Vassily opened the door and came out to squat down in front of me. “You should wait at the Memorial Hall. Mama will go home.” He spoke in a very gentle way, embracing me firmly as I glared at him. Again feeling myself about to suffocate from the strong smell of animal skins, I pushed him off and ran away. I had calmed down a little by the time I got back to school, where I could get myself to believe that Vassily had told me the truth. The Manchu language class was over; Sun-sensei had erased the blackboard. “Sun-sensei, I’m all right now.” “That’s good. Are you all right? Your eyes are red. Have you been crying?” “No.” “Homework is the dictation from Lesson Fifteen. Will you be able to do it?” “Yes.” “Hao,” he said, meaning, “That’s good.” Manchu was the only subject I did well in, all because I had lived in Jiamusi since I was a baby. Sun-sensei was young and kind, though I actually thought he was too kind. He would even praise the students who had horrible pronunciations as they read aloud: “Japanese are really smart. You read that well.” But with accents like that, those students should have just given up. Lesson Fifteen was about kai chuang hu, guan men  —“I open the window, I shut the door.” None of the students could manage to pronounce the difficult word for window

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correctly, myself of course included. But the teacher would always smile and say, “Hao! ” You’d have to say that he was reluctant to criticize Japanese. Just as Vassily had said, my mother was in the sitting room talking to Auntie when I went to the Tōno Memorial Hall after school, and Takuo was running up and down the corridor. “Oh, Mā-chan, I got you so worried. Have you been all right?” It had only been two days since I had seen my mother, but I started crying and couldn’t stop, maybe because I was so relieved. My mother gave me a handkerchief and then turned to face Auntie as she drank her tea. “Why on earth does she cry like this?” There was wonder in her voice as she spoke to Auntie. “She likes to cry. It makes her feel good.” “When I was her age, I’d already left my parents’ house and taken care of other people’s children to earn money. I was more of an adult. Mā-chan is a fourth grader now. She’s been spoiled!” “You should know that Mā-chan has taken good care of Tōa. Every day she took him to see you in the hospital. She is a good child who cares about her parents.” Auntie hardly ever praised anyone, and so when I heard this I felt even more sorry for myself and started crying all over again. “It’s not my place to say anything,” Auntie said to my mother, “but you must make sure that this doesn’t turn into real trouble for you. Jiamusi is a small place.” “What do you mean?” “There was gossip about you at the hospital. Don’t do anything that will attract attention. People have already started talking.” “There’s really nothing for them to talk about.” My mother spoke in an evasive way. “They’re a bunch of suspicious types. You have to be on your guard all the time.” “Really now, what . . .”

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“That’s the way it is.” Auntie spoke sternly. I felt like saying how could my mother protest like this when she’d been at the Kamchatka Fur Shop that morning— instead I stopped crying and went out to Takuo in the corridor. “Let’s play,” I said to him, my voice still full of sobs. Where had my mother disappeared to for two days? When I asked her, she said she’d gone to the house where Takuo was staying, but I didn’t believe a word of it.

13 When the war with the United States and Britain broke out, the filthy vagrants and beggars, all smeared with bloody pus, stopped collecting in front of the hotel. The ditches previously covered by wooden boards had become concrete water channels, and with such projects underway in the city, the vagrants were rounded up and sent to live in a special facility. But when there was a wedding at the hotel, the beggars arrived as usual, trailing their rags and as rowdy as ever. You had to think that they had somehow sprung up from out of the earth. A Japanese noodle shop and a Japanese sweet shop opened up opposite the hotel, and with their arrival chewing gum came into my hands for the first time, ten sticks of gum tied together with a rubber band. A new shop that sold Japanese goods, Santomi Yōkō, carried Japanese fairy tales and magazines for primary school students, and I stocked up on items supplying information about Japan in order to keep up with my classmates. With a sudden spurt in the Japanese population, some began to live in the hotel for long periods, making more work for Yukie, because almost all of them asked her to translate their requests to the servants and managers. The Japanese who lived in the hotel worked in bars and restaurants and the like, or were peddlers selling goods wholesale in the interior, with no connection to the business and government offices that provided workers with their own living quarters. None of the hotel rooms had kitchens so they set their charcoal braziers and pots out in the corridor, where they did their own cooking. The old night watchman was much vexed by these people

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in their khaki uniforms or loose mompe pants who were messing up the corridors, and sometimes he complained to Yukie about how they made it impossible to clean the corridors, a problem that had no solution. In Yamamoto’s settlement, the new members reached the military recruitment age one by one, so again he had to worry about filling the vacancies. He had been trying to build a firm foundation for the settlement by bringing over women from Japan as brides for members and having them settle there, and also by bringing over families that had remained behind in Japan. Because of this, he was running all over the place, going back and forth to Japan and also consulting about various matters in the capital. As a result, we often wouldn’t see him for months. Once numbers of Japanese started living in our hotel, we had fewer carefree times. Outside Manchuria, the war was gradually expanding, and the restaurant, closed for half the time, began to be used mostly for military banquets. Zhang left the hotel, and people said that his tuberculosis had worsened and he’d returned to his hometown, but I wondered if this was true. The war made us very lonely. Not only had the magazines for primary school students become very thin, putting an end to the free toy extras, but also they ran out of fabrics and trimmings for kimono in the Tokiwa Department Store, and coarse paper began to be used in notebooks and other things. I even got the feeling that the colored shop signs on the main street were dirtier than before. Because of an oil scarcity in Japan, the school received a government notification from Tokyo ordering us to cultivate castor oil plants. So one day we students followed our teacher out to plant castor oil plants around the telegraph poles in the city, but this made no sense to me. Outside Jiamusi there were large fields extending far into the distance, so why didn’t they plant their castor oil fields out there? I refrained from sharing these doubts with the teacher, however, since I was from Jiamusi and didn’t feel that I could go against the wishes of the crowd of people who had come from Japan. In those days, there was a boy transfer student who would taunt me by calling out, “Manchu! Chink!” and this made me hold back even more. He felt himself to be a Japanese who had

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suddenly gained control of Jiamusi, and with great gusto he heaped insults on me as I walked to school from Manchu Town. The Kamchatka Fur Shop was now very busy with all the new Japanese residents who were unaccustomed to the fierce cold. When a young Russian from the main shop in Harbin was brought in to help out in the store, Vassily was able to go around taking orders for heavy winter clothing and seeing to the fittings, including orders from Japanese who had moved to the hotel. He had urged Yukie too to buy herself a new winter coat, which he had made for her, and suggested that a curly hairstyle would look good with the coat. The concrete channel in front of the hotel had been completed but still was covered only with gravel, which became muddy in the rain. Yukie hired a carriage to go to the beauty shop that had opened on the second floor of the Japanese sweet shop, saying she couldn’t walk through the mud in her zori sandals. Yukie perhaps took these precautions because she still had not got over the barbaric scenes that she had witnessed long ago in Jiamusi. Or maybe, in her mind, the barbaric scenes had come back. The carriage picked up its customer at the entrance to the hotel and only had to turn around, but despite this, the driver waved his whip and shouted at the horse to hurry up. This seemed to spur on Yukie, who was about to get the first “permanent wave” of her life. A signboard in Japanese at the shop entrance announced Japanese spoken here, but the odd handwriting must have been the work of a foreigner. Several women, wearing white kappogi kitchen aprons and sashes that proclaimed their membership in the Greater Japan Women’s Association, were standing on Jiamusi’s Ginza shouting, “Permanent waves are enemy customs! Down with permanent waves!” I saw this demonstration on my way home from school and heard their other shouts: “Down with extravagant, long-sleeved kimono!” But my mother hardly ever went out, and probably never knew about this. My mother got a permanent wave. In contrast to those days when she had worn her hair swept up into a bun on top, she now had curls around her face and looked beautiful, a different person entirely, and vibrant like a young typist. Both Tōa and Takuo did not sound like their usual selves when they

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called out, “Mama, Mama,” and embraced her. I did not embrace her since I was somehow against what she had done. “Mā-chan,” she said to me, “let’s go make some pancakes.” My beautiful mother was trying to get on my good side and shook herself free of my brothers. When she approached me, she brought along the sweet scent of her makeup. Vassily came over for a fitting. “Zdrastvuyte,” he said to me. With his pink face, red beard, and really attractive green eyes, he was smiling and cheerful. “Zdrastvuyte,” I quietly replied. He took a good look at Yukie. “Oh, it’s wonderful, wonderful.” Nodding his head, he was full of praise as he approached her: “What a beautiful hairstyle!” Then he was at Yukie’s back to drape the coat on her and stood there, hugging her close. I saw them in the standing mirror, his arms, with their reddish brown hair, completely wrapped around the black astrakhan fur on this woman’s body. Yukie, who didn’t move at all and looked as if she were in a trance, terrified me because she seemed absolutely unfamiliar. I didn’t move either. What should I do? Vassily touched my mother’s hair, brought her head closer to him, and touched his lips to her curls. This struck me as unpleasant, even embarrassing, but I couldn’t talk about my feelings to anyone. When I failed to see Vassily at the hotel for a while, I would go to peek in at the Kamchatka Fur Shop and I’d see that young worker leaning against the counter. I would decide Vassily wasn’t there, but then sometimes I’d see him sitting in the chair in front of the shelves. On occasion he would see me and would come to the door with a smile on his face. I would pretend I hadn’t seen him and quickly walk off. I had the ominous feeling that Vassily would destroy our lives, but I couldn’t say this to anyone in the world. My father was the last person I would tell.

14 Once the ice in the schoolyard skating rink had melted and everything was cleaned up, the school dug a big air raid shelter

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beyond the wall bars we used for gymnastics. When the shelter was completed, the practice siren would ring out and we would place our hands on the shoulder of the student in front of us, and a line of hundreds of students connected like this would race to the shelter. We learned to put our thumbs in our ears and the other four fingers on our eyes, to keep our eyeballs from flying out and our eardrums from being destroyed by the force of a bomb. When the drill ended, we removed our hands and felt dizzy for a while. We learned that a series of heroic battles had been fought to the last man, and because of this, blackouts were instituted along the main street in front of the Suixi Hotel. Even so, the geisha in mompe trousers continued to come over by rickshaw, but they didn’t sing “White Snows of Mt. Fuji” at the frequent send-off parties for the soldiers; instead they sang songs full of melancholy longing for home, like “Border Town,” along with military songs. I could hear the endless singing, including those sad, somber, and subdued military songs, floating up the stairs to our darkened room. Eventually the geisha stopped coming to visit us, probably because of the blackouts. There was already a shortage of goods in Jiamusi, since all items had been caught in the intricate web of the ration system. If you didn’t have a ration coupon you couldn’t get any food, but the army had its own system and the soldiers brought Japanese sake and beer to the hotel. “Mā-jia, did you eat rice or did you eat millet?” The servants at the hotel started to call this out to me as I walked down the corridor on my way to school. When I replied that I ate rice, they booed me. When I answered them softly, “I ate millet” in an effort to convince them that I was as deprived of rice as they were, they saw right through me and jeered, “You eat rice!” This commotion seemed to show that the local people were not getting enough rations. At that point, my father’s work required him to cross the mine-infested waters to go to Japan, and on his return, after a long absence, he came home to us. He brought us a set of wooden pieces that you had to assemble in a certain design, like a mosaic, just about the only gift item for sale then. Food was not sold at the station. No, I’m wrong, maybe there was

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cinnamon and plum concentrate. He told us he’d worn a life jacket throughout his time on the ship in case they hit a mine. My father talked about this while he looked at my mother’s hair with its permanent wave, and I got the feeling that his eyes had turned blue, always a sign that he was going to turn violent. My anxiety boiled up and my throat felt dry. I made an effort to sound cheerful when I urged my brothers to come play with the mosaic pieces. “Tōa, Takuo, come on!” I carried the set away and raced off to the next room. Things turned out just as I had feared. There was the terrible sound of a fight, and when I came out of the room to look, Yukie looked as if she’d spun around and fallen by the front hall. Blood was coming out of her mouth. Yamamoto Yoshirō had hit her—but he didn’t say a word. By morning Yukie’s face was swollen and purple. I knew why my father had hit her, and I didn’t cry, but from the bottom of my heart I felt myself unfortunate to have such parents. Yukie again went to the Red Cross Hospital, this time for the bruises from the beating: obviously this was the best way to escape my father’s violence. The day after my mother checked into the hospital, we again had to go to the Tōno Memorial Hall, but now there were three of us, including Takuo, who was in kindergarten Auntie looked at us and, smoking her pipe, told us that we couldn’t go to the hospital. “It’s disgraceful.” She herself was someone’s mistress and when she said “disgraceful,” she meant that if my mother wanted to fool around, she should do so more discreetly. After two or three days, Matsuoka, who had lived with us without paying rent, came to the Memorial Hall to see how we were doing. I was terrified to hear that my father wanted to take us children back to the settlement with him. I had no wish to go to a place without electricity or running water and where the wolves howled through the dark nights. Just the thought of living with my father made me want to cry. I wanted my mother to be released from the hospital so she could return to the hotel, where we would continue our usual life as before.

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“In the settlement,” Matsuoka said, “you can still get rice and sugar. They also raise lots of pigs.” He got a cigarette from Auntie and was lighting it when he lowered his voice. “Yamamoto-sensei attacked the Kamchatka Fur Shop.” “So did Vassily go back to Harbin?” Auntie asked. “I don’t know what happened to him, but the shop is closed.” “He wouldn’t go and do something awful like killing him, would he?” “He took a machine gun over there and threatened him. Sensei can really get tough when he sets his mind to it. That was his way of telling Vassily not to step foot in Jiamusi ever again.” So that’s what happened. I didn’t say a word, just opened my mouth wide. The situation had developed as I thought it would but I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to say anything to the others about my father going around town like a wild dog. “If it’s gone this far, they’ll have to divorce.” Auntie spoke without the slightest trace of sympathy for my mother. “No—Mrs. Yamamoto hasn’t done anything wrong.” Matsuoka sounded surprised. He was studying Russian and respected Yukie for learning the Shandong dialect on her own. “Yamamoto-sensei cares a lot about appearances. In that way, he’s the same as the late Tōno-sensei.” Auntie spoke of my father with respect. My father had a machine gun stored above the closet, along with a sword, a sword concealed in a cane, and a fan with iron ribs that could be used as a weapon. Since law and order were no longer a problem in Jiamusi, he didn’t need these weapons, but still he took good care of them. My mother had been admitted to the hospital, and that evening, as we children were preparing to go to the Tōno Memorial Hall on the following day, my father took the big machine gun case out from where he stored it. We had no particular interest in what kind of weapon he took out, but during the night, when we were about to go to sleep, my father returned covered with mud, accompanied by two military policemen. No longer carrying the gun case, he stood very unsteadily in the entranceway, apparently drunk.

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“I’m Tōno-sensei’s number one disciple!” my father announced, greatly annoyed. “You guys are standing here in the world Tōno created and sacrificed his life for. Don’t forget that for a moment . . .” “I see,” one of the policemen muttered. Then my father, tears in his eyes, collapsed in the entranceway with a bang, whereupon the two policemen dragged this dangerous character up into the six-mat room. There they saluted and left. The policemen said that my father had started firing away with his gun on the top of some building, but they didn’t seem to know that he had gone to the Kamchatka Fur Shop. Around that time, my classmates who were from families associated with the army and the South Manchurian Railway moved away, one after the other. We’d heard rumors about such things as the bombing of Tokyo, and those of us left behind saw our friends off with tears in our eyes, worried that they had to return by plane to a Japan full of dangers. Also, male teachers were being called up by the military practically every week, and recent graduates of women’s high schools replaced them. At such a time, Yamamoto Yoshirō finally divorced Yukie. She had no wish to leave her children behind and return to Japan in the midst of the worsening war, and so, with no family members in Jiamusi, she had no choice but to stay with Auntie at the Tōno Memorial Hall. Before my mother went there, we children were hastily taken from the hall back to the Suixi Hotel, as if to prevent an encounter with some criminal. Nor would Auntie allow us to stop off at the hall as we passed by on our way home from kindergarten and school. With the students who had lived rent free at the hotel also gone, only we three children remained there, though someone came over to take care of us—I think she was the wife of one of the drafted settlers. My determined father set about preparing to move us children to the settlement, where a school had finally been opened, but then the teacher expected to teach there was drafted, ruining those plans. My father must have felt sorry for us because he returned from the settlement once a week,

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surprising us each time, as we were beginning to take it easy in his absence. Sometimes he made us his “cute” curry rice—cute because by conceding it had “no meat in it,” niku nai, he was playing on nikuku nai, meaning it “wasn’t detestable.” There actually was meat available but he just didn’t have any at hand. Perhaps he was also trying, in his way, to express his affection for his children by implying that they were cute and that he was sorry they were living through sad times. Not at all frightening, my father would summon the children in order, saying, “Let’s eat some cute curry rice.” On the way home from school, we’d look up at the red brick walls of the forbidden Tōno Memorial Hall and I would sometimes picture my mother’s face in my mind, feeling sad to think that she might no longer be there. The hotel hired a small, Japanese-speaking man named Bai who took over the work that Yukie used to do, and this also made me sad.

15 On August 6, 1945, during summer vacation, Kasuga on the settlement staff came to the hotel with a draft notice for my father. “Idiotic!” my forty-two-year-old father spat out. He was probably referring to the army’s reckless decision to pull all the men out of the settlement, even though their numbers had already been drastically reduced. In any case, he had to go—but then who was going to take care of the women, children, and old people? As part of the Kwangtung Army’s policy toward the Soviet Union, everyone was required to stay at the border settlements to the bitter end, and a pretense of peace was to be maintained. Because of this, the army released as little news as possible. The morning that my father was to leave for the settlement, he made an unexpected announcement: “My will is in our household shrine. Masuko should take charge of it. You children won’t be able to manage alone, and your mother will come to help. You should help each other and carry on to the best of your abilities.”

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My father had been placed in an impossible position, leaving him no choice, but he maintained his manly dignity when he gave his instructions to Auntie: “Yukie is not my wife. I am hiring her as a servant. Tell her to look after the children.” Carrying his usual khaki bag, my father then departed with Kasuga. Having received instructions from Auntie, my mother opened the door to our place at the hotel that night, full of trepidation. “Mā-chan! I’m sorry to have worried you!” She tried to embrace me but I pulled back and stiffened, perhaps trying to act like someone else’s daughter. I wasn’t unhappy to see her, but what did this all mean? I was starting to get fed up with the way adults behaved. Tōa and Takuo, busy making model airplanes, were absolutely delighted. “Hey, it’s Mama!” On the morning of August 9, there was a Soviet air raid on Jiamusi in pouring rain. This was the Soviet Army’s way of frightening us with the news that they had begun their advance into Manchuria. According to someone who had actually seen the assault, only one plane was involved and there didn’t seem to be any serious damage, but some people used their air raid shelters for the first time. No one at the hotel paid attention to this raid since it took place in the faraway, eastern part of the city. Although summer vacation had started, there was school that day, and I took my time getting ready before going out into the rain. Well aware that my boots always got stuck in the mud, I wanted to be sure that the mud didn’t get into them on the way to school this time, and so I carefully selected my route. Tōa, who had gone on ahead, came rushing back to me, splashing mud all around. “School is closed! Closed!” he called out happily. From then on, we didn’t spend a single day in school. There was a big rainstorm on August 12, the day all the Japanese in Jiamusi were ordered to evacuate because the Soviet Army had crossed the border and would soon invade the city. We were told to take a week’s worth of food when

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we left our homes. Would we be able to return in a week? Was that true? We rearranged the belongings we had readied in anticipation of going to my father’s settlement: I took my father’s will from my backpack and put it in a suitcase while my mother put his most valuable military medals in a suitcase too—the Meritorious Service Medals awarded for each big battle, the Founding of the Nation Award, the Manchuria Settlement Award, eleven in all. We also packed the gold, silver, and jewelry we’d received from Yang Yushu, but after looking over the silk crepe kimono and brocaded sashes, which we had not been allowed to wear during the war, we reluctantly decided to leave them behind. I felt that I must bring my schoolbooks, which weighed down our luggage further. Mother made steamed bread, and we stuffed rice into a bag. How far would we be fleeing? The fierce rain showed no sign of stopping, and in the courtyard the pelting downpour splashed up from the ground. Outside there was much tumult, but inside the hotel things went on as usual with Bai pouring water into the glass flycatcher device on the counter. “If you don’t hurry up, you’ll miss the train.” The other Japanese in the hotel had left quickly since they had little baggage, but someone came to help us out, saying, “You better bring supplies for the winter.” Lui seemed absolutely relaxed when he came to our room wearing gaiters and the gray uniform then common in Manchukuo. “Madame, come back soon. I’ll take care of your belongings so you don’t have to worry about them when you leave.” “You’re not going?” I asked him, assuming that the dangers of war would also come to Jiamusi. “I’ll be all right.” He was from Jiamusi, and he wasn’t at all concerned. He clearly made a distinction between himself and the Japanese, a realization that made my eyes fill with tears. In a gentle voice, he kept urging me not to cry. It was easy for us to climb into the carriage as if we were going to our usual Saturday movie—actually, it was too easy. As always, the servant who carried our luggage and Lui

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saw us off: the only difference was the wagon piled with our belongings. I don’t have a clear recollection of how Jiamusi looked that day because the streets were misted over with the splashing rain. Those streets, packed with the rush of carriages and cars, were filled with the gasoline smells and the voices of the drivers urging their horses on. The mist rose over the pavement, as did the smells of the earth. The steam that rose after our horse stopped to pee is my only clear memory. I was eleven years old, and I resigned myself to never returning to the Suixi Hotel in Jiamusi.

PA R T 2

HELL

Y

by the swelling of her gums, and her nose had also become misshapen. My mother, now ninety-­one years old, had not been told that she had maxillary cancer, which was causing the swelling. She didn’t seem bothered by her own drooling, a result of the crooked shape of her mouth cavity. What disturbed her more was that there had been a small fire, leading to the painful prospect of having to move from her house in Kawagoe, where she lived alone. She was totally preoccupied by this move. It was just a small wooden prefabricated house, but the persimmons and the kumquat trees bore fruit in season and she’d built shelves in the backyard so that no one would steal the various orchids she collected and tended. The edible chrysanthemums she’d brought from Niigata, her birthplace, were in bloom by the window—Yukie liked small flowers and she’d planted a colorful assortment of small chrysanthemums and primroses near the front gate. During the extended period when she’d felt reasonably well, my brother Tōa and I took turns staying at the Kawagoe house to make sure there weren’t any more fires. “Mā-chan used to love fried pork and mushroom dumplings,” Yukie would say and enthusiastically start cooking with me, but then she would quickly forget and retire to her bed. Three months later, on January 2, my mother died in her home, with the two of us taking care of her. Even after she’d grown old, my mother had kept her fine, well-proportioned features, but now she looked like a different person. She hadn’t been in pain but kept saying, “I really want to die UKIE’S UPPER LIP HAD BEEN PUSHED UP

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quickly.” Since she didn’t eat anything the week before her death, the cancer hardened from lack of nutrition and its wild destructive rampage quieted down. I could only think that my mother had deliberately stopped eating in order to die. My husband, Kurayoshi, came right away and made arrangements with the funeral home. Tōa’s wife, Iyoko, came also. We planned to take her body to the funeral hall that day, have the wake the next day, and the funeral the day after that, but a black-suited man from the funeral home came to tell us that the crematorium was closed for the New Year. In addition, there were many other deaths to deal with and we would have to wait our turn. We called a number of times and at last were told, “We’ve been able to reserve a time at the crematorium on the afternoon of January 9. Please allow us to arrange the schedule before that and settle on a date for the funeral. We will preserve the deceased by bringing over dry ice every day. We’ll place the body in the coffin on the day of the wake.” My mother’s body froze from the dry ice as she lay on her bed in the cold room, which now, of course, we couldn’t very well heat. We family members, wrapped in jackets, coats, and scarves, took turns maintaining a vigil over her corpse. We drank warmed sake but the hot oden stew and fried foods we’d bought soon grew very cold, intensifying the bleakness of the room. Below the mattress on her bed was a large notebook with a creased cover, which Yukie had used for a long time. A list of names and addresses took up two pages, but some of the entries were for people who had already died so we couldn’t send out death notices without checking all the names first. From the very first pages, her jottings did not go in any particular order, and things like old grocery store receipts would fall out as I leafed through the notebook. A bus schedule had been copied onto the back cover, and rough drafts of letters, reminders, and bits of poetry were written in poor handwriting, mixing hiragana and katakana scripts: The ground frozen like a rock, a sandstorm from Mongolia, a flurry of yellow sand whipping up; a dead man

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glaring at the gray sky in that sandy flurry, his name unknown, face frozen white. This was in the field outside the airport, which was full of corpses—girls, young people, and children, all half naked. The starving dogs had turned into wild beasts, and just like wolves, they dragged the dead bodies along and ate them.

These were recollections of her days as a refugee in Manchuria. Some entries were like this, but she’d also written down the words to a folk song they sang at the senior center: “Snow in Niigata, buried in the blizzard. Is Sado Island asleep? We can’t see any fires.” She got a character wrong here, writing fires when it should have been lanterns. I know that she correctly said “lanterns” when she sang the song. The ten years or so of her entries included her daily expenses, ways to fertilize the morning glories, garbage pickup days, and a revised bus schedule. For a long time I sat by her corpse in my coat reading her entries, particularly struck by sentences like these, which were also about Manchuria: Around October 1945. The sadness of losing the war, children all dead from measles, no medicine, no doctors. You flecks of stardust, pitiful young souls, while you were turning into the great white crows above Shinkyō, one by one you disappeared into the bright red twilight sky. You, little one, you wear the kimono with the red flower design now and forever as you sleep nestled in your father’s bosom. May the violets and dandelions bloom by your lonely grave.

My brother Takuo died when he was four years old. “You flecks of stardust, pitiful young souls” does not refer only to Takuo, but why was the child in the lonely grave wearing a kimono with a red flower design? Who was that child? I remember the brown pants Takuo was wearing when he was wrapped in a white sheet. It was Tomoko, a baby not related to us, who was wearing a red flower design. My mother had not been present at that burial, yet somehow the sight of

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someone else’s child wrapped in a red kimono had been burned into her mind. Also I can remember the bright red setting sun, but I never saw any white crows. Like one of those trite films that show the present in black and white while the flashbacks float up in vivid color, my mother’s recollections were keyed to colors. When I switch places with Tōa in the morning, I go out to open the gate of my mother’s small house and then gaze at the living room window that faces the garden. Someone who died a little while ago lies wrapped in a white sheet, frozen on a bed. For a moment I am caught up in the idea that perhaps she’s alive. If I call out to my mother, will she not drool and complain about how she wants to die? A few neighbors and people from the senior center come to visit, and I partially cover my mother’s ravaged face with a sheet. Tōa and Kurayoshi both thought that she looked fine as she was but I felt that exposing her face and frightening the visitors perhaps did not convey the true spirit of Yukie, who so loved small and lovely flowers.

1 The large building casts a huge shadow on the field like a whale in disguise. One day in August 1945, our family walked along a runway for a long time and then went through the big entranceway of a hangar at Suihua Airport. My forty-twoyear-old father, Yamamoto Yoshirō, was in his khaki uniform; my mother, thirty-four, had on mompe trousers, which had been refashioned from meisen silk with an arrow pattern, and carried young Takuo on her back as well as baggage in both hands. Tōa was nine years old, and I was eleven. We two also had baggage in both hands as well as backpacks, which made us bend forward as if we were being crushed. I feel that reality is what we looked like in those days, while my present self as well as the present forms of Tōa, whose hair is turning gray, and Yukie, who lies stretched out and frozen, are just wooden dolls from a puppet show that’s ended.

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When I took a good look inside the dark hangar, I saw a scattering of seated people and small mountains of luggage here and there. “Mā-chan, Tōa! Come over here! Come here!” a voice called out. We couldn’t see clearly, and so we stood there until two boys came running over to us, the twins Isamu and Osamu. “What?” Tōa said. “You two are here?” The twins had been fourth graders at a national school just like Tōa but at a different location. They were the younger brothers of a member of the Yamato Village Settlement Patriotic Youth Brigade, led by my father, so the twins went to the new national school there. During summer vacations, Tōa and I went with our father from Jiamusi to Yama­to, where we served as workers, and that’s when we played with the twins. What we found most fascinating was the fact that here were two people who were actually the same human being. They both had slender necks and shaved heads, as well as single-lidded eyelids over their clear black eyes. The two of them wore black shorts and usually were naked on top or wore white tank tops, so they were completely identical everywhere you looked. In addition, they sometimes used each other’s names. The settlement’s young men had all gone off to war, leaving behind only the tubercular Miyawaki and seventeen-year-old Ichiki Tsutomu to assist their chief Yamamoto and four other men who had been called up in the draft but had returned from the assembly point when they found that the main force had already gone. The rest were women and children as well as old people like the acupuncturist Yamakawa—close to seventy people in all. Upon arriving at the hangar the previous day, they had created a living space for themselves by spreading straw and rush mats on the concrete floor and piling their baggage up around them. Those who arrived after them and headed for the concrete area were told by Yamamoto to set themselves up on the ten wooden dummy airplanes, all covered in camouflage, at the eastern end of the room. He also urged his settlement families to do whatever they could to move onto the planes, so the men quickly put wood blocks beneath the tails to level the tilting wings.

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Tōa sat himself down in a cockpit. “Boom, boom,” he said, inviting Takuo to join him, but Takuo was feverish and sat limp on top of the wing, wrapped in a towel. “He has the measles,” Yukie said. “Mine has a fever too.” Kasuga’s wife pointed to her three-year-old daughter. “Let’s have them rest quietly away from the wind.” When you looked outside from the dark, cold hangar, the deep blue sky was etched into the large entranceway and below it the white runway went on and on, an enticing scene that could swallow you up completely. Tōa and I went out to escape the noise and gloomy atmosphere that filled the building, and once outside our bodies took in that world directly, absorbing the freshness of the midsummer grasses on the large field. There were more than twenty hangars dispersed around the area, as well as broad runways that ran the length and breadth of the site. With no real airplanes around, the blue of the sky and the white of the runway were absolutely clear. The shimmering summer sunlight was also white. Scattered swaths of hundreds of big dragonflies flowed high across the sky, seeming in their chaotic dance to take the place of the planes that no longer flew. “Let’s catch some for Takuo,” Tōa said, wanting to cheer up his brother. “They’re flying too high to catch,” I replied, fascinated by the flocks of dragonflies. “We’ll be able to catch some over there.” We went into a meadow where the grasses were about our height, knowing that if any of the dragonflies should alight on those grasses, we might be able to catch some. The grasses swayed all around us, their rustling filling the air. When we saw a few people coming toward us at an alarming pace, we stood there confused. Then we crouched down in the hot, fetid grass and didn’t move. They were dragging right past us a bundle wrapped in something that looked like a white sheet with grass stains all over it. Both of us couldn’t say a word. “Did you stick all his guts back in?” someone asked calmly. Very close to us, a blood-soaked white heap was set down with a thud and opened up.

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An inspection followed. “He’s got his loincloth still tied around him so there’s no problem.” “He tried to slit his stomach open but he must have passed out,” came an amazed, mocking voice. A sense of fury seemed to follow, but when this had passed they dragged the heavy blood-soaked cloth away. We weren’t thinking about dragonflies anymore as we ran in a panic out of that grass field. By then, the long shadow of Hangar No. 8 had fallen across the grass, turning everything within it—the clear distinctions between light and dark—into charcoal gray, so that if you were standing in the sun you couldn’t see anything too well. But a closer look into the shadows revealed Takuo, who had picked some dayflowers. “Come here!” My mother called to us from the front of the hangar. When Takuo came out into the sun, his white shirt and the blue dayflowers he had picked regained their colors. “This is for you, Sis.” Takuo gave me his flowers but we were in no mood to receive them. “Somebody committed ritual suicide over there. The men were carrying him out,” I told my father, who was helping his team members to pile up bricks to make stoves. “He was an army lieutenant, they say.” Kasuga spoke as if it was old news. “Today the Japanese nation lost the war,” my father said. “Now our troubles start.” “The divine winds didn’t blow?” Tōa spoke in a loud voice but no one replied. Nor did anyone seem particularly depressed.

2 Tōa went out with the twins to explore in various directions, and one time, after a visit to the airport’s deserted offices, he came back with a big magnet that he had found inside a machine. The three boys were all waving magnets 15 centimeters long and claiming that there were a lot more they’d left behind. When the magnets were passed through sand, you could see bits of iron as well as nails sticking to them.

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“It’s a little bigger than the ones I’ve seen,” I said, assuming the know-it-all voice of an older sister. I knew that was how a magnet worked since they had come my way before, as a free extra in a magazine, for example, or in science experiments, so I’d already had a chance to test them out. The results were nothing special and I had quickly tired of them. “If you show the magnet to Gao-maimai,” I told Tōa, “maybe he’ll trade for it with some of his steamed cakes.” Our name for that individual was Gao-maimai, “Mr. Cake-hawker.” The presence of the Japanese refugees holed up in the hangars had quickly turned the runway into a marketplace for local products. The vendors mostly sold food, but since cash could not keep any stable value, they preferred payment in goods—things like pencils, sewing needles, towels. Everyone bartered. Gao-maimai, who was about fifteen years old, wore a cotton jacket, which didn’t look as if it had been washed recently, along with shorts in the same condition. He was dirty and covered with sand head to toe, maybe because he’d walked a long distance pushing his cart. His large steamed cakes were made of soybean and corn flours kneaded together and steamed, with beans scattered on top at the end. He kept them covered with a thin, dirty gray quilt to prevent them from getting cold or hardening. “Try these cakes!” He would let loose an exuberant sales pitch alongside his cart. “They’re hot! They’re sticky!” Listening to him, I forgot that we were refugees and felt myself standing on Jiamusi’s main street. There we’d had the same carts and the same voices hawking their wares. “These cakes are sticky! They’re hot!”—a sadness somehow reverberated through his cries. Gao-maimai seemed much taken with the magnet we were playing with, and just as we’d hoped, he offered to trade some steamed cakes for it. “No good, no good,” Tōa told him. Bargaining in Chinese, he probably had in mind words he’d picked up from his young Chinese babysitter Ma. He sounded rather arrogant. Gao-maimai tried to intimidate him: “Now the Chinese people rank first, and the Japanese people rank fourth!”

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Threatened in this way, the competitive Tōa refused to be cowed. “I rank first and you rank first. Once we agree on that, I’ll trade with you.” This made me laugh out loud. Gao-maimai cheerfully tore off the shabby quilt, revealing a mound of yellow cakes with a wonderful smell. He took a big bamboo knife out from under the wooden stand and measured the slices. “No good, no good.” Tōa shook his head in a demand for bigger portions. Grinning, the young boy increased the portions slightly and repeated the phrase you often heard from grown-up merchants: “I’m giving you a good deal by charging you less than cost.” Then he put some paper on the plate of his small scale and weighed the cake. “You’re getting this for less than cost,” he grumbled again, pouring dark honey over the cake. “What do you mean, less than cost?” Tōa asked in Chinese, laughing. “Just what I said, less than cost. Today I’ll let you go, but tomorrow bring two magnets.” We didn’t say anything in objection to this as we left Gao-maimai. He had wrapped the cake in pages from an old Japanese magazine, and after I divided the sweet, lukewarm cake into four pieces, I read a page from the magazine while eating. There was an article called “The Sailor from Odaiba” in a column apparently written by a reader of the magazine who had taken a boat to visit Odaiba but once there found that he didn’t have enough money for the fare. At that, a sailor said to him, “Go look at Odaiba and pay when you leave.” This was a witty play on words from the well-known pitchman’s cry, “Have a look and if you like it, make your payment when you leave,” based on the similar pronunciations of the place name Odaiba and odai —“payment.” As I savored this clever word play, I felt a distant yearning for Japan. At that time, my head was full of the highly charged expressions so common during those war years: “American and British devil-beasts,” or the line from a patriotic song, “If I go to the mountain, I shall be a corpse covered with grass.” So a phrase as light as alcohol, “Go look at Odaiba and pay when you leave,” was enchanting in a way I couldn’t

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describe. Oh, that was a really good one, I thought, and when we get to Japan, we must go to Odaiba. Actually, I didn’t even know where it was. “Go look at Odaiba and pay when you leave,” “Have a look and if you like it, make your payment when you leave”—these words went round and round in my head. “Tomorrow we’ll do another cake trade,” Tōa was talking away in jubilant Chinese. Isamu and Osamu, who didn’t understand Chinese, kept on smiling as they ate their cakes. Tōa had learned his Chinese as a matter of course from his young babysitter Ma, and when he talked to himself or talked in his sleep, he spoke in the Shandong dialect.

3 There were more than a thousand people staying in Hangar No. 8, but we were the only ones sleeping on top of the airplanes. At night, a few electric bulbs cast a dim light on the few of us up in those heights. Every day, apparently, tuber­ culosis patients, old people, and children succumbed, and while we could hear names being called out and cries of sorrow, from our somewhat elevated sleeping perches on top of the planes, it sounded like a distant clamor in a world far below. The Japanese refugees banded together to form the Sanjiang Province Group, which my father, Yamamoto Yoshirō, also joined. They met to discuss pressing matters such as where to bury the dead, what to do with the human waste from thirty thousand people, and how we had to get out of this place before winter set in. Since all the young men had been recruited by the military, only middle-aged and older men joined the circle by the runway, where grass now grew, to drink baijiu wine. They also must have been thinking about how to construct toilets. Since a common toilet could accommodate at least a hundred people simultaneously, large holes had been dug in the field and boards placed across, leaving spaces in between like rungs on a ladder. I tried to squat at the far corner, but the people squatting just across could see me. The corner was

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always crowded, and so I next tried the center, which was empty, but there people got a great view of you from all sides. So I would go over to the toilet, have a quick look around, and choose a spot where there were no men. Trying not to look at people’s private parts, I saw below me a sea of excrement rolling around, with maggots added to the mix. The smell was so bad that I felt my face turning green. There were toilets like this in various places around the hangars.

Shibuya, the small, bald leader of the R settlement, came looking for my father. They had spotted kessō that morning, he said, using an unusual word, and not a moment could be lost. My father was wearing the sweater that Yukie had carefully brought along for him. “What’s kessō?” “It’s frost. The frosts have begun.” It was around September 10 in northern Manchuria. “Last night twenty people from our group all died,” Shibuya whispered. “Really? Twenty?” Yukie cried out. “Oh, how sad!” “Looks like they died of measles and dysentery. The people from Yamato village have been sleeping on top of the airplanes so they don’t feel the cold as much. Probably no one has dysentery yet. The concrete floors are ice cold, and people just can’t take it.” “We have a lot of diarrhea,” my father said. “Anyway, we have to get moving before we think about anything else. As I told you before, the trains are still in the hands of the Japanese. Very soon the Soviet Army will take control. We had better arrange our departure now.” “We must go south, where it is warm, right away,” Shibuya kept saying. “We’ll die if we don’t reach Dairen, on the southern border.” That day the leaders of the province group all went to the train station 8 kilometers away for negotiations about the refugee train. No one had yet died from the Yamato village group, but a few children had measles. Takuo was one of them.

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4 The boxcars prepared for the Japanese refugees looked like black boxes, hitched together and extending long into the distance. Everyone said that we’d go to the south, as far to the south as possible. The train made me think hard about Jiamusi since I actually wanted to travel toward the street belonging to my beloved Suixi Hotel, a place that was, after all, my hometown. Jiamusi Station, located by the flowing waters of the Sungari, had a spire on top, and when our train came gliding in, the servant would be there to greet us in his carefree way: “Mā-jia, welcome back!” Probably even now you can hear horse hoofs clip-clopping down Nanyue Avenue and the sound of curtained carriages going along, as well as the drivers waving their whips with a flourish. But I was helpless to prevent us from gradually receding farther and farther away. Since we were caught up in the wave of those whose fervent wish was to return to Japan, the children could only drift helplessly with the flow. But why did I have to go south? Japan was an unknown country to me. There were no windows in the boxcars so we traveled with the doors half open, everyone’s hopes concentrated on the train and its ability to race on. But I was different. Unable to accept the fact that we had escaped from that coffin-like hangar, I only wanted to get back to a place now fading into the distance. Among the Jiamusi refugees was a young girl who had been a switchboard operator at the Telephone and Telegraph Office. “It’s so hot, really it’s hot, I can’t stand it.” Seated in a corner, she had gripped the front of her blouse with her two hands and was trying to fan herself with that. At the airport, the early mornings had been so cold that you could see your breath, but inside the windowless boxcar, the body heat from all those people made the air steamy and suffocating even though the doors had been left open. The switchboard operator appeared delicate with fair skin and a refined air, and I imagined that when she was living in Jiamusi, she must have worn nice clothes on holidays and gone to see movies like The Boer War at the Shandong Theater.

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Then she might have stopped off at a coffee shop on her way home to drink the coffee substitute made of scorched soybeans. “Why did things have to turn out like this? My brother asked me to come to Manchuria, but then he went off to fight in the war.” “Working at Telephone and Telegraph was a good job,” observed a middle-aged woman in glasses, who told us stories about the good life she’d left behind. “My husband had a big job at the Fuliang Company. We had a motorcycle that only we could use, our own amah, and someone who looked after the heating in our house.” Her sickly son, who was about eight years old, was leaning against her and staring into space. I recognized him, since he had gone to my school in Jiamusi. “I want some water,” he said in a petulant voice. Still talking, the woman in the glasses took out a military canteen and was opening it when her child pointed his finger and said, “I don’t want to use that canteen. I want that one.” The switchboard operator held up her aluminum canteen, which was decorated with red dianthus flowers. “Here you go, dear.” She opened the stopper and passed it over to him. When we stopped at a station, two Soviet soldiers sauntered over to rest on the rail that went across the opened door. One of the men, with eyes sunk into a red face and a torn dark green hat on his head, laughed and joked as he had a look inside the boxcar. The other one, carrying a bluish black submachine gun that seemed to weigh heavily on his shoulder, had short puttees around his ankles and big, mud-caked shoes. Yamamoto Yoshirō spoke to the two men in Russian while I peered at them from behind. I had seen Soviet soldiers in the distance when we were at the airport, but up close they were huge and rough looking, like beings from another planet. When they jumped down off the rail they had been sitting on, they left behind the imprint of their large sandy buttocks. “The soldiers said to me, ‘You’ve got some pretty girls in there,’ ” my father reported, “so I answered back, ‘We’ve got a lot of sick people who need medicine.’ Women should pretend to be sick.”

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Then we all rubbed our faces with pickled plums and charcoal. At night there was a fierce knocking at the boxcar door. “Open up, open up!” someone said in Japanese. The man beside the door removed the pole that was keeping it shut, and as the door opened he tumbled forward and out of the car. Standing in the light cast from a lantern was a Soviet soldier who looked to be no more than a boy, his sandy-colored hair sticking out in all directions. He had a searchlight shaped like a bugle, which he moved around to shine on our faces. “All men get off!” came a shout from behind the soldier. This seemed to be an interpreter who spoke Japanese like a Korean, which resonated oddly since he was unable to pronounce certain of our sounds. As about twenty men got out and lined up on the gravel, a machine gun at the door pointed in their direction. “Take off your wristwatches, your rings, too. If you don’t, we’ll kill the men,” the interpreter yelled as the young soldier and another tall one with an oddly shaped nose and a yellow mustache came up into the car. I crouched down and tried to wrap my arms around the weird smells of pickled plums and sweat that clung to me. The soldiers proceeded to trample on screaming people and kick aside wretched pieces of luggage as I pretended to be a dead bug, waiting for them to pass. Most Japanese women did not wear wristwatches, although the men forced to go outside perhaps had watches. The soldiers, seeing they had made a mistake about what they would find, became annoyed, but fortunately someone brought out a music box and asked them to make do with this. He frantically wound the organ box’s screw, and the melody from the song “The Train Whistle Sounds” started playing slowly. This was evidently a very unusual object for the surprised soldiers, and the young one quickly tucked it under his arm. “Bring out more musical instruments!” demanded the soldier who hadn’t got anything. “But we don’t have things like that!” one of the Japanese women called out, demanding that someone produce more rings or anything that would get them to leave!

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Nothing more was offered, angering the soldier with the yellow mustache, and he shouted something and knocked the lantern down. Then he poked his searchlight into every corner of the car, going in a circle round and round the same spot many times. A white blouse appeared and disappeared, and the switchboard operator, startled by the light, her hair disheveled, quickly looked down. The wandering light settled on that spot. I had seen for myself the fresh beauty of the operator’s face and how her eyes shone like fireflies. More screams came from people being trampled as the soldier’s light and his large shadow closed in on the woman and then vanished. “No, no, no! Help me!” came the operator’s voice from the utter darkness. The moaning from those who had been trampled and the woman crying, “No, no, no!” reverberated in the car, the sounds falling heavily upon the floor. In another moment I wondered if the operator had lost consciousness because we didn’t hear her voice anymore. In the total darkness of that boxcar, someone put the lantern back up, and the men crawled back in. “What do you think you’re doing? That innocent young girl’s been abducted. Please go and get her back.” The woman in the eyeglasses screamed in a high-pitched voice, which seemed all for show. Why hadn’t she hidden the operator at that critical moment?

5 The switchboard operator was nowhere to be found, though her canteen with the dianthus design and her trunk remained in the corner of the car. The recurring rumor that she’d been killed was bolstered by a woman who went out to pee the next day and saw a female corpse discarded in a clump of grass, her crotch split open. This woman brought back a skyblue glass button picked up nearby. “This button is from that young woman’s blouse,” the woman in the glasses said, trembling. Each woman studied the button in her palm as it was passed around. But there were corpses everywhere, and they consoled themselves by saying

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that this one wasn’t necessarily hers. Would the operator have survived if there’d been more wristwatches or another music box? The sickly boy kept the dianthus-decorated canteen hanging around his neck. Once the train arrived at our destination, the doors opened and the heat festering inside and the terrible odor went flowing out. At the same time, we threw down our luggage and watched it land on the gravel and then immediately disappear under the car. At first I thought I was dizzy and seeing things, but no, that wasn’t true. Without a doubt, our soiled, miserable luggage—knapsacks, bags wrapped in cloth, suitcases—was being sucked away under the car. When we crouched down to look at the tracks, we saw in the bright light opposite Soviet troops in khaki shirts wielding long poles with hooks attached, laughter in their eyes. “Mama, our luggage has been stolen!” I cried out in a loud voice, echoing similar wails coming from others. Some used their bodies to weigh down the baggage being pulled away, others crawled under the tracks. People started howling: “Watch out!” “They’re a pack of thieves!” “Damn Russkies!” But no one said a word when a Soviet officer wearing an armband approached. The theft of the luggage also stopped. “When it gets cold, what will we do?” my mother wailed. From Shinkyō Station, we were spit out into an open, semicircular space more than 50 meters wide, where bright rings of midsummer light blazed on a broad, seemingly endless street lined with spacious buildings, all the same height. It was clear that the Japanese Empire had spared no expense in constructing its capital at Shinkyō, but now almost all of these buildings were closed up. In the morning light, I felt aroused by the strange and ominous look of the avenue stretching out before me, not a person in sight. It was as if something inside me had burst open, creating a broader, limitless sense of freedom. But then I saw someone sticking his head out of a tall window on the third floor of the Kodama Building, one of four attached structures, and this young man, a Soviet soldier in a khaki army shirt, seemed altogether more carefree and contented. While the huge scorching sun beat down on the band of refugees assembled on the street, he was cheerfully humming,

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completely indifferent to what was going on below. His song rose into the sky, and I looked up with great envy at this Russian with shining blond hair who gazed out into the distance. The tatami mats were in very bad shape, a pink obi lay twisted and turned along the dusty wooden floor, and textbooks, notebooks, and other volumes had been left scattered around. The closet was completely empty: only common items like a chamber pot, a water bottle, a few cooking pots, a pestle, and a fire poker remained. Probably the looters had no interest in these things because they wouldn’t fetch any money. A book called Popular Songs of the Shōwa Period fell down from the shelf above the lintel, and when Tōa and I started fighting over it my mother crossly picked it up and returned it to the shelf. Company housing belonging to the South Manchurian Railway consisted of two-story buildings with four units inside, some with baths and laundry rooms. Our division had six buildings surrounded by a fence, and there were a number of similar divisions in adjoining lots. The former residents— railway employees and their families—had fled south. Each unit had the same three-room floor plan: from the entranceway, a large step up took you to an eight-mat room with an alcove, a six-mat room, and a four-and-a-half-mat room connected to the kitchen, which had a back door. Outside that door was a coal box with a handle, where coal deliveries were stored; another coal box with a handle was inside the kitchen for daily use, although it was now empty. In the center of each unit was a round stove, and a quarter of each room opened onto it, allowing the stove to heat the three rooms, the hallway, and the toilet. The stove door was in the four-and-ahalf-mat room so that room was really only four mats in size. We went into that four-mat room, having heard that they were allotting two people per mat. After assigning rooms to people from his village, my father went off in a hurry with Kasuga. Another eleven-year-old named Wada Tsuruko was to sleep in the room with me, along with her younger sister, nine-year-old Chikayo. Her little brother Shū-ichi, her mother, and grandmother slept in the adjoining eight-mat room, together with some other people. The older brother, a member of the settlement, had gone off to fight in the military.

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“You’re in the sixth grade?” “Yes.” Tsuruko was sitting by the bay window, her chin in her hand. She was thin, with a darkish complexion and clean-cut features, like a boy. This was almost the first time we’d talked, since she and her siblings hadn’t played with us much in the hangar. “I went to live in the settlement but they didn’t have a school. So I’m still in the fifth grade.” Tsuruko spoke as if she couldn’t care less. “But really, I’m a sixth grader even if I didn’t go to school.” Tsuruko’s teacher, Mr. Tomita, had been drafted, leaving behind only his mother and his wife, who was a teacher, too. Both had gone to the settlement with him. I had attended a national school in the city. “I hate school,” I told Tsuruko. “The kids are all disgusting. I don’t want to go to school.” “Me, too. I really hate school.” Tsuruko’s grandmother was in the corner of the eightmat room hugging her belongings and muttering to herself. When I listened closely, I could hear her saying over and over: “Who can believe that the Japanese Empire, ruled by our august emperor, has been defeated?” “That girl was raped by the Russkies. That’s the bitter grief of a defeated country,” said Mrs. Wada, Tsuruko’s mother. “What does ‘rape’ mean?” Chikayo asked. “It’s what happens to all women. They get trapped by men.” “You young girls must be careful. That includes Mā-chan and Tsuru-chan.” This was from the half-blind acupuncturist Yamakawa, who now lived in the eight-mat room. An unpleasant smile floated across his lips. Something especially dangerous had happened to the switchboard operator who’d been taken from the boxcar, but this was just the kind of thing that would amuse the acupuncturist. The adults often told off-color stories (you could tell from their peculiar laughter), but I couldn’t yet understand what they meant. The operator, who had perhaps been killed, now belonged in a category that inspired lewd laughter, and

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in fact you could say that the hidden secret of her fate could only be openly expressed by those peculiar laughs. I also understood that the operator was being laughed at because she was a woman. “After being raped, she probably won’t be able to come back here even if she’s still alive,” Mrs. Wada said. “A tainted body is shameful. She’ll have no choice but to hide out somewhere.” “Why does it have to be so terrible for her?” I asked, going over to Mrs. Wada. “She didn’t do anything bad. Won’t the Soviet soldiers be tainted?” “The men aren’t unclean.” She gave a most ridiculous reply. “It’s only the woman who’s unclean.” “It will be wonderful if she’s alive,” Yukie spoke from the four-mat room. “I agree with you, Mrs. Yamamoto,” Mrs. Wada said. “But even if she’s alive, we can only pity her.” Mrs. Wada seemed to think that the young woman would be better off dead—that this was a woman’s fate. I recalled the lively, pretty face of the operator who had gripped her blouse and fanned herself with it when she was hot, and who had passed along her aluminum canteen decorated with red dianthus flowers to the little boy, telling him that she’d give him water. No one would tell me what had happened, since it was apparently one of the world’s secrets. I went into the deserted kitchen humming a popular song and turned on the tap to the water supply, but no water came out. “The tears I shed to overflowing shine brightly / Oh the sorrows of springtime at nineteen, oh springtime / Plucking violets as the glistening dew drops / Oh the weeping springtime at nineteen, oh springtime.” As I sang, I started to feel depressed. Who had thought up such sad lyrics? As the leader of our group, my father decided that all the women of Yamato village must cut off their hair. My mother had been a beautician, and so she had haircutting scissors and clippers with her. I didn’t understand why, but my hair too was going to be cut off. “You’re not going to cut Tsuru-chan’s hair? She’s eleven just like me.” I really was upset about losing my hair.

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“We don’t have to worry about Tsuru-chan,” my father said. “We don’t know what will happen to a girl like you. Be a boy until we get back to Japan.” Were they leaving Tsuruko alone because she was thin? I didn’t even have breasts, but still my father classed me with the women. As my hair was cut with a scissors, followed by a cold metallic hair clipper running against my bare skin, I blamed that Soviet soldier who had come into the boxcar asking if there were any pretty young women around. My hair fell to the ground and I was completely bald. I might as well have been naked—that’s how embarrassed I was. I was wearing a girls’ dress at the time, but when I changed into a boy’s green school uniform, the disguise was complete: I felt like an actor with a whole new outlook on the world. “It suits you, really it does,” the pregnant Tomita Reiko said. Since her stomach was big, she didn’t have to dress like a man. Coming over to have a look, Tōa teased me: “Wow! Little Miss Ma has turned into Little Mr. Ma.” “Call me Masuo.” I picked a man’s name, conscious of others watching me. My head was very cold, as if I were all head. I was completely obsessed with my head. “What do the Soviet soldiers do to women?” I had become bald because of whatever they’d done and I was really angry about it. I wanted to ask my father this question, but again I felt that maybe it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Afterward, when I asked Tsuruko, she told me, “They put their dick into a woman’s pussy. Have you ever seen dogs do it?” Oblivious of such things, I’d never noticed dogs having sex, so this was all a muddle as far as I was concerned. Even when the facts were explained to me, I got angry, convinced I definitely had to find out for myself what this was all about.

6 The sky was a transparent blue, making the contours of the buildings stand out more sharply and loom closer as I made my way, accompanied by Tōa, the twins, and Tsuruko’s little brother Shū-ichi, across the bridge. Whenever I was with

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them, I seemed to be leading them along since I was the strongest boy in the group. But to be honest, maybe Tōa really ranked ahead of me since he was much quicker on his feet. I must say, though, that when we argued, I got the better of him: first, I’d beat him with my ability to talk, and then I’d draw on my size and strength. The view from the bridge was wonderful because when you looked back, you could see all the way to the horizon. Ahead of us lay a big group of glistening buildings on Daidō Avenue, and I liked the idea that almost all of them were empty homes. As we moved on from the bridge we came upon an old Chinese beggar who was squatting down and smoking. He had something pink tucked under his arm—it was a child’s kimono made of flowered muslin, with the kind of band, about 5 centimeters wide, that is always sewn onto children’s kimono. That band was hanging down, and the kimono looked familiar. “Hey, you kids!” The beggar saw me staring at the kimono and called out to me. “Let’s get out of here,” said Isamu, one of the twins. “Why? There’s nothing to worry about.” For the first time, I tried talking like a boy. Once I did, I wasn’t afraid of anything. “Let’s have a look.” We slowly approached the beggar, who observed us closely and grinned as he asked in Japanese, “Are you hungry?” Then he held up something wrapped in newspaper. Tōa opened it and found namagashi, Japanese sweets. “Eat it, eat it,” the beggar urged. “We Chinese don’t eat such things.” We divided up the two sweets and ate them, noticing the smell of incense. The namagashi had been shaped to represent a plum blossom and a pine, and we hadn’t eaten such sweets for a long time. They tasted indescribably delicious despite the pervasive smell. Stuffed with sweet bean paste, they seeped into our starving cells. “Earlier today, these sweets were the graveside offerings,” Tōa said after he’d finished his piece. “They aren’t celebration sweets?” “They only had celebration sweets for sale so we had to buy them.” Tōa had helped out at that day’s funeral.

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“Is that Tomoko’s kimono?” Puckering his lips, which bore remnants of the sweet bean paste, Isamu uttered the name of the child who had been buried that day. Had the beggar opened the grave and stolen the kimono? He was thin with a gray beard and a face creased with laughter, and didn’t look like a bad sort. A smile flickered across his face as he watched us eat the cakes. “Where did you steal that kimono?” I asked him in Chinese, and he held it out to me. The Chinese we knew believed that if your theft was discovered and you returned what you had taken, you no longer had done anything wrong. “I didn’t steal it. The soil returned it to me. The earth doesn’t wear a kimono.” “He says he didn’t steal it,” Tōa translated for the others. “He says that he just brought it over.” “That really must be Tomoko’s.” Shū-ichi, the smallest among us, sounded like a little girl. “My mother says that the Chinese are all thieves,” Isamu said. “Everything that dies becomes part of the earth,” the beggar declared, laughing. “Who owns that earth, I ask you?” I admired this excuse he had come up with, but did that same logic apply to the sweets as well? Here I was calling him a thief, but I had taken the sweets and eaten them—full of qualms, I didn’t say a word. I shook my head. “I’ll return this to you.” The beggar put the kimono back under his arm. “Come back another time. I’ll show you a movie.” He said this in Chinese so only Tōa and I understood him. “When?” “Any afternoon is fine.” The beggar smiled, showing his gums. “He says he’s going to show us a movie,” I told the others in a loud voice, adopting the blunt language boys used. “Let’s go see it, definitely let’s go!” Everything you could think of was on sale in the Yoshino-­ chō shopping district. After the Japanese residents had fled, you would have expected the district to empty out, but just as muddy water wells up when you pull up a stone from the

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bottom of the river, a Chinese barber had taken over the barber shop once the Japanese barber ran off, and other Chinese came to run the abandoned rice cake and grain shops. These might have been the same people who had worked at those stores before, tending the shops for their Japanese employers. Chinese street sellers sold five-spice eggs and deep-fried millet cakes from open-air stalls, some Japanese sold secondhand goods, used clothing, and used books, and children sold bowls and plates arranged on the ground. Everyone was dirty and no one paid any attention to the stench, but in that crush of people you couldn’t walk without bumping into someone. It felt like a festival—with everything there waiting, you could get exactly what you wanted. As I battled my way along the crowded street, I felt in the mood to have some fun. The trouble was that we couldn’t buy anything since we didn’t have any money. After a while, we started to feel depressed. It was hard to walk among those crowds with the smells of food everywhere. We found a side street and went down it, and though it seemed impossible, not a soul was there. Mostly these appeared to be the empty homes of Japanese who had fled, with boards nailed across the windows of each house. We peeked into all of them as we walked along, surprised to find that some houses were not, as we’d thought, completely empty and actually had people living in them. “This place is none of your business!” a man shouted at us. Still we kept marching along, studying each house. “There are people inside.” Isamu spoke softly, pressing his forehead against a dirty window. Tōa pushed Isamu aside and had a look. He was that kind of child, needing to be in charge of whatever he did. “Someone’s inside all right but seems to be dead.” “Where? Where?” I stood beside my brother and peered into the window, but the double pane was so filthy that I could only make out bare outlines in the dim light. The tatami was shabby and one of the paper shoji doors had fallen onto the floor. Next to that, someone was lying face up. Hair had fallen across the face, and the right hand seemed to be urging someone to come in. It looked like a woman, but no one living would take a nap on the floor in such an unnatural

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position. I had seen dozens of corpses by then, and I quickly grasped the situation. This woman was dead. “What about going in?” Tōa asked. With a corpse lying there, no one could be living in the house. The front door was nailed shut so we went to the back and opened that door easily. A woman’s geta sandals were overturned in the entryway, shocking us for an instant. “Someone’s here,” said Osamu, the other twin, who was small and timid. “Hello! Anyone here?” As the oldest boy in the group, I gathered my courage and called out. Peering in, I saw that the hallway was full of mud and shoe prints. When I was certain no one was answering, we went in with our shoes on. The kitchen was directly to our right, and a single rice spatula was the only thing in the cupboard. “Mā-kun!” Shū-ichi shouted, addressing me as a boy. He had just come back from checking the sitting room. “Definitely there’s a dead woman in there.” “Where is it? Where?” My heart raced with fear but I put on a show of calm and went on to the sitting room, protective of the boys behind me. A strange, unspeakable odor had settled in around a terribly small, thin woman in a cotton yukata robe with a tortoise shell design, her crotch spread apart and caked with blood that had turned black. Her arms were raised and her palms were open, teeth spilling out of her cleft palate. How could anyone have behaved so badly? I was stunned. “She certainly is dead,” Tōa said. “Let’s act as if we haven’t seen this.” I took on the overbearing tone of my father, the group leader Yamamoto Yoshirō, and issued orders to the younger boys. “If we keep this secret, we’ll be able to come back and look around again.” Aside from the corpse, we saw that no one else was there, and so the five of us calmed down and began our search by taking out all the cupboard drawers and opening the sliding doors. Inside we found an aluminum pot and incomplete sets of chopsticks. The five drawers were empty except for a skinny cockroach that had not managed to escape. Tōa and Isamu opened the storeroom and dragged out old straw mats, a clothesline, and other things.

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I tried to put the drawers back into the cupboard but discovered that one was stuck and wouldn’t go in. When I looked further, I found a small board inside the cupboard with a ring attached to its corner, and when I pulled at the ring, the board came off easily to reveal a cloth bag. The people who had forced their way in before us had ransacked the house, searching high and low, but had not pulled out the drawers all the way. At the bottom of the bag, which had been folded into thirds, I found a pack of ten-yen bills in Manchukuo currency and also a ring wrapped in silk floss. I put the ring in my pocket and tucked the bag into the waistband of my pants. If anyone should tell his parents back at our refugee quarters, the whole story would get around fast and surely my father would punish Tōa and me. So I managed to get all the drawers back in while the others went to the bathroom and then fooled around in front of the storeroom. Tōa had put a straw mat on top of the corpse to mask its terrifying appearance. “Why don’t we take it outside instead?” I said. “Guys like us can certainly carry it.” This was the first time I said guys, a word only used by men. I was tall, strong, and bursting with confidence. We wrapped the corpse in the mat, and it took the combined strength of four big children to throw it out of the kitchen into the garden, marked by some scraggly elm trees. The corpse was heavy, and we really had to hurl it out. I had wanted to place it properly in the corner of the garden but no one wanted to touch it anymore. No water came out of the tap, so we were unable to get the smell off, and that’s why we went outside and rubbed our hands with dirt. “I found a ring in the kitchen.” I drew everyone into the entryway and with a show of secrecy I showed them the ring. There was no telling who might be spying on us. “Let’s sell it and buy some buns. You’re hungry, aren’t you?” “Yes!” the boys cried. But they seemed on the verge of collapse, only their eyes showing sparks of enthusiasm. “Great—but where will we sell it?” Tōa asked. I hadn’t the faintest idea but I had to maintain a confident front. “We’ll go to Yoshino-chō. That’s where, to Yoshino-chō!”

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7 So we went back to Yoshino-chō. I was unsteady on my feet from hunger, but I couldn’t use the paper money to buy food because I couldn’t tell the others where it had come from. Why did we go into the sembei shop and show the ring to the shopkeeper there? Perhaps it was the wonderful smell of the rice crackers that drew us in. The shopkeeper, who was Japanese, was working his bellows and sweating a lot. Every so often he produced a blue flame and would quickly turn over the rice crackers so they wouldn’t get scorched. The sembei looked like small tortoise shells. “We need money so we want to sell a ring,” I announced. “Please buy it from us.” “What was that?” He was preoccupied with his sembei and couldn’t give me a proper answer. I took the ring out and showed it to him. “Did you say this belonged to your parents? Have your parents died?” After a quick look at the ring, he looked right at me. “Yes. Will you buy it?” I had no trouble telling him that my parents were dead. One by one, he arranged the finished sembei on a board. Then he put the ring in his hand again. “Looks like jade, but I can’t tell if it’s real or not.” He got up. “I’ll have to show it to someone.” He started to go out with the ring but I grabbed hold of his hand. “Let’s all go together.” “Don’t worry. Do you really think I’m going to run away with it?” “That ring is very important to me, a memento from my mother.” I put on a show of virtue and followed him. We cut through the crowd on Yoshino-chō, heading for the opposite side. In one of the open stalls, there was a woman around forty years old looking after the various kimono, obi, and hats that had been set out on a table. She was smoking a cigarette. “He says this is a keepsake from his mother.” The owner of the sembei shop passed the ring over to the woman. “Hmm. That’s what everyone says. But who cares? They

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want money for it, I suppose?” The woman held the ring up to the light, then thought for a bit. “It’s worth about this much.” She passed along two ten-yen bills. “Here you are.” It didn’t seem like enough—we’d only be able to buy twenty big buns. That didn’t seem right so I mustered all my courage: “Then it’s not for sale.” “Huh—just listen to that.” The woman looked into my face. “How much do you want?” “One hundred yen!” “It isn’t worth that much. I hate to say this about your dead mother but it’s third-rate. At most I’ll give you thirty yen, including the five yen that goes to the sembei dealer here. Thirty yen, all together. That’s my final offer.” The woman lit a cigarette and turned away, as if she wanted nothing more to do with us. I believed she was cheating us but I was really hungry. Tōa and the others must have felt the same way. As it was, we got this ring for nothing, and so we might as well take what we could get. After all, it was not my mother’s but had been worn by that corpse. “All right. We’ll settle for that.” She immediately placed three ten-yen bills on the table, and I quickly put them in my pocket. “Tell me,” I asked the sembei dealer, “do you have fiveyen change?” I couldn’t help thinking that he was about to go off with the whole ten yen. “Come along to the shop. I’ll give you the change and some broken pieces of sembei to take with you.” Trying to be kind to the refugee children who looked like beggars, he put the sembei pieces into a newspaper wrapping and we ate from that as we walked along Yoshino-chō. Each of us felt free to buy what we liked from the shops, and then we ate those treats, consuming sausages, soybean cakes, bread with sesame seeds, pigeons in soy milk—the taste of those delicious foods permeating our whole bodies made us feel we were in heaven. After all, aside from the meager sorghum porridge we’d had for breakfast and the beggar’s graveside offerings, we hadn’t eaten anything since morning and it was almost evening. That day, in my extravagance, I’d spent twenty-five yen. I definitely could not tell my parents about this, for if we said even a word about it, as I sternly told the

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others, our parents would find out everything, and that would be the end of our expeditions. I made them say: “General Ma, we promise not to tell anyone.” Of course, I was also thinking that I still had the secret money. It made me swell with pride to consider myself some kind of gang boss who possessed knowledge about an empty house with a corpse in it, but I couldn’t brag about this to anyone. I also felt a sense of unfinished business since I had wanted to properly dispose of the corpse in the cotton robe with the tortoise shell design, but I decided, after thinking things over, that it would be all right just to leave her there. The four-mat room where seven of us were jammed together in “Our Home” certainly seemed drab compared to this secret. As the group leaders who had been drafted in the last round of recruitments gradually returned, Yamamoto Yoshirō joined a band of about twenty men who went to Shinkyō Station each day to serve as workers for the Soviet Army. When his work was done, Yamamoto, who was able to negotiate with the Soviet soldiers in Russian, was allowed to bring back some coal. Although the daily wage was low, this rabota—the Russian word for “work”—was reserved for particularly favored people. Mrs. Wada, taking Tsuruko along, now went to work for a Chinese farmer’s family as a laundress, and they brought back some money, as well as buns, sorghum, and vegetables. Yukie also wanted to seek work as a laundress but instead had to take care of Grandmother Wada and Takuo, who were both sick. The grandmother stayed in bed a lot. “Ah, I want to die,” she said with a sigh many times a day.

8 The beggar who had given us the sweets was known among his friends at the pawnshop as Old Yan or Dafu, which means doctor. He looked just like a beggar although he wasn’t one. One day I accompanied Old Yan, together with Tōa and the twins, to Sima Road in the Chinese section of the old part of the city. The walk there from Xing’an Bridge took at least an

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hour, which is why we hadn’t taken Shū-ichi along. Old Yan’s home was a shack that had the look of a red brick box, pretty much stuck to the wall of the old building it was leaning against, and inside there was a bed made from a door and a washbasin that seemed to float out of the darkness. Old Yan went in to pick up something securely wrapped in burlap from a shelf, and then he rejoined us outside. Together we walked halfway around the building and found the Changchun Cinema in front. A young, half-naked man was standing at the entrance eating watermelon seeds and spitting out the husks. “Can these guys do any work?” the man asked in an arrogant tone. “Of course they can,” Old Yan answered. “They’re quite strong even though they’re Japanese.” The corridor of the movie theater was sopping wet, and the place reeked of toilet smells. As we approached, an old man sitting on a long sofa in the corridor got up, clearly happy to see Old Yan. “You children go and watch the movie,” Old Yan said. “We have to do some work here.” “How are you doing?” he asked the old man, who replied that he was a little better. We went inside to watch a Chinese historical drama. In that darkness, the air smelled of garlic. A brash gong and the sound of erhu strings swept through the theater as an on-screen military leader unfurled a huge flag and struck a bold pose. I couldn’t understand what he was saying so I got bored watching this whole long scene, but finally he exited. I had no idea what would happen next, but then came a beautiful woman with hair ornaments hanging down like raindrops, who went on and on reciting her lines in a shrill voice. “Yo, yo, yo,” she wept. The boys gazed at this, enraptured, but I was still bored. I was more interested in finding out what Old Yan was doing. When I went out to the corridor, I saw that the old man was seated again, but now he had many long needles stuck into his head, and Old Yan was trying to stick them into his thigh too. The acupuncturist Yamakawa only did moxibustion so I’d never seen a spectacle like this. I was standing there amazed when Old Yan turned around and said, “You don’t want to watch the movie?”

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“It’s boring. I don’t understand what’s going on.” “Your brothers are still watching, because they understand it.” “Maybe.” “If those little ones can understand, why are you having trouble?” Old Yan sounded perplexed. “It’s the Records of the Three Kingdoms. Did you know that?” He had taken off his jacket and was wearing something that looked like a cotton running shirt. A dark red scar went around his neck, making him look as if he’d been hanged. He saw me staring at his neck and said, “You know, I died once. Then I came back to life. So I’m not a real ‘living being’ ”—by this I think he meant people who were alive. “I’m the kind of ghost known as a jian.” The old man receiving the treatment laughed, making the needles in his head shake. “He’s telling you the truth. You Japanese used to hang Chinese people at the drop of a hat.” They were teasing me because I was a child. Old Yan explained with gestures that it was easy to return to life if you quickly pass life energy from the genitals to the top of the head. No living being would dream of hitting the corpse of a person who has been hanged—only a jian would do such a thing. Then the old man said that Japanese are jian and started laughing again, so hard that he had a coughing fit. When all the needles in his head had come loose, he picked them off himself before taking some bills out of his pants pocket and giving Old Yan ten yen. A middle-aged pregnant woman who’d been waiting in another chair moved to the sofa and lay down on her back, immediately baring a large stomach. Old Yan placed his palm on her stomach and closed his eyes tight while some onlookers on their way back from the bathroom gathered around to see what was going on.

9 When I went to take my turn at Mother’s house in the morning, Tōa, his hair now half gray, was brushing his teeth at the sink.

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I lifted the covering on her face to pay my respects. Four days had passed since she had died, and the cancer around Yukie’s mouth had turned purple and was becoming smaller. The wrinkles in her cheeks had vanished, leaving a smooth, strangely youthful expression on her face. I reproached myself for looking so frequently at the corpse of someone who had not wanted to remain on this earth. Wasn’t Mother here in this house because of the cowardice of the two of us she had left behind? If this had happened when we were living as refugees, we’d have buried her long ago in some field, which would have brought relief to all concerned. “It was cold last night, too, but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave her alone.” Tōa spoke from the corridor after his shave, wiping his freshened-up face with a towel. I put the lunch and tea I had brought on the table, knowing that, despite the cold, Tōa would most likely come here again tonight. “Mother believed in heaven, didn’t she?” Tōa said. “She talked as if her family members are all in heaven. She said that Father would come to greet her when she arrived.” “Actually there’s nothing. Just an eternal sleep.” Tōa whispered this with a smile as he took a quick look at Mother’s corpse. “The day before Takuo died she told him all about heaven in great detail. She described this with such confidence that, as a child, I believed her.” “I thought it was cruel.” I was eleven then and felt that Mother was trying to pass off some foolish lie. “No, she definitely thought that she was going there, too. Look at how much she wanted to die.” “You must be kidding!” “Really, it’s true. Mother was completely open about her belief in heaven. Our awareness of heaven and such things— that can only exist in our dreams. That’s all right, too.” There was a faraway look in Tōa’s eyes as he spoke these words. “You’ll be going to a nice place soon so just hold on for a little while longer. You’ll have all the delicious food you can eat. There will be so many flowers with wonderful smells.” Yukie was talking to Takuo, who cried in pain.

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“Will you go too?” little Takuo asked her, worried. “I’ll go. I’ll go. We’ll go together.” My mother was carrying Takuo on her back, but he had closed his eyes and did not answer. My surprise at realizing that he was going to die differed completely from what I had felt when other children died. My emotions were in turmoil, but I remained absolutely quiet. Really, where would Takuo be going? Did anyone know whether it was a good place or not? My tears started trickling out. Takuo had eaten a sausage, but then he refused food and even cooled boiled water because of the festering sores inside his mouth. The evening when Takuo breathed his last, our family was eating corn buns and miso soup with potatoes. “Little Takuo has died,” my mother announced, putting her hand on his chest. “So that’s it,” my father said. Then Tōa started crying, but I refused to cry anymore. Who was behind this terrible thing that had taken Takuo? I wouldn’t show my tears to the rotten culprit responsible for his death. Grandmother Wada cried as she took incense sticks out of her bag. The next day my father and young Miyawaki went to an empty lot behind the railway’s bachelor dormitory, where they dug a hole about 150 centimeters deep. Then they laid Takuo, who was wrapped in a white sheet, into it. My father wept as he took off the sheet, and then the sheet fluttered above my father’s head like a white flag, as if ready to fly off into the deep blue sky. My father crawled out of the hole. “Tōa, cover him with the dirt.” He too shoveled soil into the grave with great vigor, and soon you couldn’t see Takuo’s little body anymore. I’d never see Takuo again. He would never want to eat a sausage—this was the thought in my mind as I took possession of the precious sheet. “Mā-kun, take a good look at where Takuo is buried, and be sure to remember the location.” My father made it a point to say this to me even though I was making every effort to remain aloof. “Starting from there, it’s under the fourth telegraph pole.”

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We couldn’t put up a grave marker, and even if we did, it would be stolen tomorrow. I was sad, but then again I thought that with Takuo gone we’d all have more space to sleep. I made the clear decision to think only about that.

10 The man was young and sunburned, in a long and threadbare light yellow shirt tied together at his hips with a cord, his pants worn out below the knee. He wore his cloth shoes like slippers and carried a big scrap dealer’s basket on his back. “Hey, kid!” he called out a number of times. I happened to be roaming around there, and when I stopped to see what he wanted, the man’s narrow eyes were restlessly searching the area. “Where have all your friends gone?” he asked in Chinese. “I have a good job for them.” “Who are you?” I replied in Chinese. When I spoke in this foreign language, it wasn’t necessary to use the polite phrase “May I ask who you are?” I went straight to the point and asked my question with just those three words, a brusque style without any human feeling. “I am Heizi. Don’t you remember? I’m Old Yan’s friend from the Changchun Cinema. You forgot me already?” He also spoke in a blunt, direct style. I studied his face carefully and then remembered the half-naked young man who had stood at the entrance to the movie theater eating watermelon seeds and spitting out the husks. “Can these guys do any work?” he had asked. Once he put his basket on the ground I could see that it contained rags, wires, empty cans, and other things. I thought that Old Yan was a good person but this man, who claimed to be his friend, had eyes that jumped around like a thief ’s. He didn’t appear trustworthy at all. His eyes never settled into anything approaching calm, and I felt that given the chance he would start stealing whatever he could get his hands on. Those shifty eyes were up to no good. “Everyone has gone off to play,” I replied coldly.

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“So will you come instead? It’s close by. I’ll give you five yen.” He told me that I’d just be working as a guard, and although I did not say anything in reply, I started walking slowly, the mention of five yen having stirred my interest. Shiragiku-chō, where we were heading, was quite close, at the foot of the bridge beyond the company housing. If I needed it, escape from there would be easy. Heizi said that we were going to where the da bizi women soldiers lived—da bizi meant “big nose” and referred to the Russians. He told me that they might have sugar cubes there and he’d get some for me, which also spurred my interest. On the streets, I had caught occasional glimpses of groups of sturdy women in military uniforms who appeared fat, with hips and breasts bigger than any I had ever seen before. Dressed in skirts, they marched with strides that seemed to shake the ground. They looked powerful but still I felt reassured to think that we were heading toward the lodgings of women soldiers. The staircase was long and dark and led up to a thick wooden door, the kind that you could find in a Japanese company dormitory. The door opened to more darkness inside. The curtains had been drawn shut, and the room smelled of body odor. Once we were in it, Heizi handed me over to an old man, saying that I was a Japanese boy. At that point Heizi gave me the five yen, as he had promised. I was putting the money in my pocket when I decided to ask what my chore would be. But what I said was not the equivalent of a man’s saying bluntly, “What do you want me to do?” Rather, what I said echoed what I felt in my heart, which was the more feminine “May I ask you what you would like me to do?” I had become careless, forgetting that I was now a boy. Heizi disappeared somewhere and the old man lit some incense, gesturing with his chin: “Over there.” Taking a closer look around, I saw I was in a dark corridor with several Japanese sliding doors, and when my eyes got used to the dark I could also make out a round window at the end of the corridor. I was standing there somewhat dazed when the old man came over and pulled open a sliding door

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that was dimly illuminated from behind. Then he pretty much kicked me inside and noisily shut the door. This room had heavy curtains and some kind of paper-covered lamp. There were mattresses spread all around, and two unclothed women wrapped in white sheets were lying there. The room was ripe with a smell like yeast fermenting in a bakery. These were the Soviet women soldiers who would give out sugar cubes, I thought, when I tripped over the edge of a mattress and fell to my knees. The two women laughed loudly as one of them got up, embraced me, and then kissed me on the cheek. She was giving off that overpowering bakery smell. I remained unconcerned even when they made me strip because, after all, I thought of myself as a girl, and since these women were also naked, there was nothing to worry about. It was no different than being at a public bath and having a middle-aged Russian woman with red hair help me take off my clothes. Perhaps we were all going to take a bath now? But a thin bald man stood in a corner of the barely lit room, completely naked. This made me feel shy, and I wouldn’t let them take off my undershirt. “Oh, nyet, nyet,” the middle-aged redhead said, shaking her head. Yet she seemed to give up on this and instead proceeded to remove my trousers. The other fat woman was laughing and said something out loud in Russian, beckoning the man over. The bald man, who kept moving his hand over his crotch, held up what looked like a long white rod. He showed it to the women and then approached me. Squealing and screaming, the two Russian woman threw off their sheets. The man went over to the fat one, and suddenly the middle-aged redhead grabbed my pants and groped for my crotch. In a panic, I refused to let her do this but then she pushed my head down hard into the space between her thighs. The smell was so disgusting that I could hardly breathe, and when I lifted my head my eyes made contact with the bald man, who was pinning down the fat woman beside me. Gasping for breath, he said to me in Japanese, “Rub her there with your hand. Rub her! And fast. She’ll kill you if you don’t.”

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Oh, so maybe he’s Japanese, I thought, hearing the earnestness of someone on my side in his voice. But what came welling up before my eyes were the corpses that had been thrown onto the roadside, murdered. I was terrified and without knowing why, I stuck my hand into the redhead’s crotch. She let out wild moans and put her hand on mine, guiding it in to churn up everything inside her large soft vagina. My hand swam in the thick fluid inside and the awful smell, but when I took out my sticky, filthy hand she again pushed my face into her crotch, making me feel so awful I thought I would die. The man pushed me away and got on top of the redhead, carefully inserting his long white thing into the woman’s vagina. I could tell from where it was on his body that it must have been his penis, but it was still quite an odd one and you could only call it a long white rod. The woman let out a cry, throwing her head back and clinging to the man, and I took advantage of that pause to grab my clothes and get away. “Hey, kid,” the man called out from an open space between the woman’s fat white arms, “the other one needs your services. You don’t mind being killed?” With a quick move of his hand, he grasped at my ragged clothes. No matter how many times I washed my hands with water and rubbed them with dirt, I couldn’t get rid of that awful smell. I started to feel that the whole world was one giant sex organ with red hair growing out of it, and I couldn’t get this idea to go away despite shaking my head hard. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that every single adult, man and woman alike, was giving off that awful smell. Both my mother and my father too were sex organs, I thought, spitting frequently as I walked. Heizi had paid me five yen and then sold me off to do that rabota; he had earned money without doing anything. That was infuriating enough, but more than that I shivered with disgust at those revolting human beings who felt no shame about freely exposing their sex organs. I was only happy that Tōa had not come along with me because I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate my brother’s going through such an experience. I would have killed Heizi if that had happened.

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What was the difference between the switchboard operator who had been taken out of the boxcar by the Soviet soldier and those naked women who were fooling around, laughing and moaning? They were doing the same thing. “Women get trapped by men,” Mrs. Wada had said, and that was the truth. Yet I didn’t see how what the operator had endured was a shame worthy of death when the women soldiers were supposedly having a good time. I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t want to become like the switchboard operator or those women soldiers, and in fact, for my whole life, I was determined never to become the victim of someone’s deceit. That night I had an unpleasant dream. My dead brother Takuo and I were holding hands, his little hand slippery from sausage grease. “This child has died. Bring him back to life,” I kept on urging Old Yan, who was sitting on the shabby sofa. “I don’t think your brother wants to come back to life.” He spoke as if he were turning away a persistent salesman. “You needn’t bring him here.” He set out a piece of cloth stuck with needles and gazed at it. “Stick the needles in and bring him back to life!” When I said this, Takuo suddenly shouted, “I hate needles.” “You don’t want to live? You don’t want to live?” I was holding his hand and desperately shaking it while Takuo bent his neck down. He was shaking and apparently didn’t understand what I was saying. “Well then, stay dead if that’s the way you want it.” But what I said was the opposite of what I felt. Old Yan lifted up my trousers as I sat on the sofa and tried to stick a long needle into my thigh. My leg was so skinny that you could see my bones. “Oh, so you’re a girl.” Old Yan clutched my ankle. “I can tell by touching your ankle bone.” “Let go of me!” I cried, writhing and thrashing my leg around. “Let go!” Then I woke up. If he had been Heizi instead of Old Yan, I felt I would have kicked him to death since I still had not recovered from my fury.

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As usual we had fallen asleep on top of one another, Chikayo’s heavy head on my chest, my leg on Tsuruko’s. It was almost morning. Wasn’t Takuo sleeping somewhere in this room? Had I only dreamed that he had died? I saw that the room was completely packed with sleeping bodies but couldn’t remember where Takuo had slept. Had his life had any meaning at all?

11 With the money from the corpse’s house in my pocket, I was happy to be part of the boisterous crowd in Yoshino-chō again. Tōa and Osamu had come with me while Isamu, staying in bed with a fever, had asked Osamu to bring back a sesame dumpling. I used some of the money in my pocket to get a meat bun, then we bought a rice cake stuffed with sweet bean paste, as well as a sesame dumpling for Isamu. Busy eating, we wandered over to the house where the corpse had lived, at the far end of the alley. Nothing of any value remained there, but we had no other place to go. The trees around the house were on their last legs, and the front gate had broken off. We went around to the back and found the kitchen door gone—more precisely, the door seemed to have been carted off, no doubt for firewood. The outside light from the entryway made that ruin of a house look even worse. By the elms in the corner of the garden we got a shock— the corpse we’d wrapped in the mat was no longer there! Death had turned that woman into a miserable wreck so it was hardly possible that she’d come back to life. Maybe her family had returned to take care of her remains? It frightened me to think that a dead person, who as I understood it couldn’t possibly move, had vanished. The hallway was even muddier than before, not a single cupboard drawer remained, and even the board covering the secret hiding place was gone. Since I could not imagine that the people who had originally lived there had done such things, I decided that vandals like us had probably been in and out of the house many times. But it was no vandal who’d moved the corpse. “Let’s go back.” I felt a little scared.

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“I’m staying here tonight.” Tōa was bouncing around the corridor. “I want to go home.” Osamu spoke in a low voice. “I have Isamu’s sesame dumpling.” “You’re a coward, scared of your own shadow,” Tōa complained. “How can you be such a sissy? This is a big place. You can spread out when you go to sleep, and there’s no Tsuruko to complain or pinch you when you get in her way. And besides, there’s no corpse.” “There’s no door, and no quilts. What will you do if someone turns up in the middle of the night?” “I don’t care. I’ll just get booted out. I’ll pretend that I don’t know anything about what’s going on.” He was really bent on staying there. Tōa had been a boy all his life, and so he knew how most grown-ups treated young boys: they didn’t really seem to see the boys right there in front of them as long as they didn’t cause any trouble. I knew this because I had walked around dressed as a dirty young boy and felt the great freedom of having become an invisible human being. A young girl sleeping flat on her back on a park bench is absolutely visible, but a young boy— apparently not. “Let’s go to the movie then,” Osamu said. “Both those ideas are no good,” I said. “Have you ever tried to figure out why Old Yan will let you into the movie free?” The two of them stared at me in amazement. They’re still little children, I thought, and I spoke to them with the firmness of the tough, experienced person I had become, because I had been tricked by Heizi. “A gang of kidnappers is waiting over there. If they catch you, you’ll never come back.” “Would they sell us to the circus?” Osamu seemed about to cry. “You’d be lucky if that happens. They’ll turn you into a slave.” I proceeded to frighten them with my recollections of what I had learned in school about the slave trade in the United States. Not only parents and children, but even siblings were separated. I laid out a description of everything I knew, telling them they’d be whipped and forced to pick cotton.

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“I want to go home.” Osamu was practically in tears. I got more and more angry as the thought of Heizi brought back fleeting images of that dark room in Shiragiku-chō where I’d fallen into a sordid pit filled with obscenities. “Mā-kun, you’re really being mean today,” Tōa said. “Don’t bully Osamu.”

12 Carrying a heavy jute bag on his shoulder, Old Yan came off the bridge to meet me on the day we’d agreed on, but he was late. He held a green blanket against his chest. He complained about not making any money from these dealings and emphasized the favor he was doing me: “You’re just a starving child so I have no choice but to help out.” He was unsteady on his feet and wasted no time in passing over the weighty bag of rice and the blanket. “What about the sugar?” I asked. He told me to get that from the big-nosed Russians. “Why do I have to get the sugar from the Big Noses?” I was disgusted with the Russians. I also told him that I hadn’t asked for a blanket. “You’ll need the blanket in winter. Do you want to freeze to death? You’ll be able to get the sugar free from the Big Noses. They’ll give it to you. Go to the army barracks close by and see.” Old Yan said this not knowing anything about what had happened to me. I didn’t want to go anywhere near that place. Every day the Soviet Army gave my father the wages for the men working in the rail yard, paid in the all-green or allred Soviet Army scrip. The city had reverted to its former name, Changchun, and Manchukuo currency was still in circulation there, but my father had very clearly stated that it would soon be worthless—news that made me panicky since I was still holding eighty yen of Manchukuo currency in secret. I thought long about what to do and came to the conclusion that the only person a thief like me could consult was that fellow thief Old Yan, so I ordered some stuff from him. Even

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if he took off with all the Manchukuo cash, Old Yan was the only person I could rely on. In my longing to eat plain white rice without any sorghum or bean sprouts mixed in, I didn’t feel like finding out if this transaction would actually require eighty yen of Manchukuo currency: I only focused on the idea that Old Yan was not the sort to deceive me. Once again I had to come up with a lie to tell my mother when I gave her the rice and blanket. But I’d been telling lies since I’d become a boy and so you could say that my whole appearance was a lie, making it easy for me to lie about other things. Neither my father nor my mother was at home when I got back with my purchases—she had gone with Tōa and Mrs. Wada to dig up coke for fuel—so I had time to consider my lie. “Was it someone we knew in Jiamusi?” my mother asked, not suspecting anything when I gave her the rice and blanket. “I think so,” I said. “I’ve seen him before. He’s probably Father’s friend. He said he would come to visit.” “You should have asked for his name.” Similar acquaintances had lent us the boy’s uniform that I wore, as well as the mortar and cooking pot we used in the kitchen. When my father returned from the rail yard, he dropped a bag of coal down on the kitchen floor with a bang, and not wasting a moment, he sat next to the wooden box that served as our kitchen table and poured himself some baijiu wine. “Wonder who it was—he’ll probably turn up soon.” That was all he said in response to my lie. As we were eating the white rice, which we hadn’t had for a long time, Tōa looked like he was about to say something, and I quickly turned to him, putting my finger to my lips and exchanging glances. Even if I had really met up with an acquaintance from Jiamusi, how would he have known that I was Yamamoto Yoshirō’s daughter, disguised as I now was as a boy?

13 The twins Isamu and Osamu died of typhus, a day apart. It hadn’t even been a week since we’d gone to Yoshino-chō with Osamu.

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“So strange to think that those two are gone.” I was thinking this when an astonished Tōa said the same thing. Tōa’s eyes seemed awfully big. He was thin, his cheeks were hollow, and those eyes had become very big. Not only that, dirt had collected around his ears and neck, turning them gray. The collar and sleeves of his clothes glistened with grime, the dirt so thick that it covered the weave of his pants fabric and left the original color only in the folds of the creases in back of the knees. I too was in the same filthy, stinking state as Tōa. We had been wearing the same clothes for three months, and swarms of lice had established themselves there, so no matter how much we tried to pick them out, they laid eggs in the seams and multiplied in great numbers. We woke up early, itching from their bites and unable to sleep in our struggles to get rid of them, so we ended up needing sleep. Then we whiled away our boredom picking off those small and elusive gray bugs. We knew that typhus was caused by lice, but there was no way to kill them all. The Alien Residents Association said we should boil our clothes, but we had nothing to change into and no vats either. In addition, everyone in the refugee quarters had lice, so we would all have had to do this simultaneously in order to eliminate the problem. All we really could do was stand around with our arms crossed, waiting for bad luck to come our way. You could say that Isamu and Osamu had merely won the bad luck lottery. “Osamu wanted to go see Old Yan’s movie.” I was trying to talk about that dead child but had to make sure that the adults couldn’t hear me. The movie was the only thing the gentle Osamu had pushed for in his whole life. “Is Old Yan really a kidnapper?” Tōa asked in a whisper. “No. But there’s a kidnapper named Heizi at the movie theater.” “What kind of guy is he?” “All you have to do is meet him to know what he’s like. Next time I see him, I’ll beat him up with one of those iron fans.” Tōa said he didn’t believe me. My heart was aching because of Osamu, and so I talked about beating up Heizi, but I knew that if he and I ever got into a fight I would be no match for him.

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It seemed that lice made a swift departure from the body of a dead person since they hated cold blood, and so in a great mass commotion they would head straight for the warm blood of the nearest living person with a normal body temperature. Osamu and Isamu’s dirty clothes were their shrouds, and when we all assembled for their wake we could not avoid gaining possession of their lice.

14 The lice poked their tiny heads into my body and sucked my blood. When did the typhus germs come surging in to replace them? As usual, we spread out in groups and went to dig for coke in places where charcoal cinders had been discarded. One day we found the corpses of two men that had been thrown away into a hollow beyond. Strangely, they still had their shirts and pants on, and even their shoes. Miyawaki must have decided that he would relieve the corpses of any items he could get money for rather than spend so much time picking out pieces of coke. Before we knew it, he’d gone over to that hollow to inspect the corpses. I was with my mother, who was repelled by the corpses, so I couldn’t go near them. They had evidently been there for some time, their stench wafting over to where we were. If you were like Old Yan and stripped items from a fresh corpse, you might be able sell them, but you wouldn’t be able to get anything for a discolored shirt that had been stuck tight to a corpse’s skin. Miyawaki, whose face was dried up and thinner than the dead men’s, went over there, crouched down, and tried to remove the crushed leather shoes, which were covered with sand. While I didn’t go there with him, I observed him closely out of the corner of my eye as he grasped the shoes with his hands and pulled. Then what happened, I wondered. “Oh no!” he yelled, throwing his head back. A rat had hidden in the space between the foot, shriveled by decomposition and dryness, and the sole of the shoe. A long gray tail had come flying out with great gusto.

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Mrs. Wada and Tsuruko, who were also keeping watch on what Miyawaki could manage to get, laughed from the distance, exposing Mrs. Wada’s crooked teeth. “Damn!” But Miyawaki soon returned with two shoes, which he threw into his bag. Now everything seemed to me to be receding into the distance somewhere: the corpses and the rat were far away, and I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or not. As usual we went to Yoshino-chō to sell what we had collected that day, and on our return we formed a single line as we walked past a deserted field some distance away where everything grew wild. Ahead of me, all was hazy. This blur was a result of a high fever, for I had finally come down with typhus. Beyond the encumbrance of my raging fever, I saw myself carrying two old oil cans to the children’s park and scooping up water from the tap there. Water spills formed a mountain of ice towering over me, and I clawed my way up that steep slope of ice with the cans in my hand. Slipping, slipping, I struggled hard but couldn’t reach the top, so I began to crawl and once I did that I slipped in my dizziness, the cans rattling as they fell. For a long time, I kept on yelling. Occasionally I could hear my mother calling out my name and felt a cold pressure on my forehead, but again that ice mountain towered over me, the cans rattled, and for a very long time I yelled in distress. Then I could hear Tōa saying, “Look, to cure typhus you need to make a mustard paste and put it in a mustard plaster, to be applied to her chest. Also she must constantly drink a lot of water . . . constantly drink water, don’t stop.” That is what the doctor Old Yan had advised him to do. “Who is Old Yan?” I could hear my mother asking from far away. Actually, when we went to collect our water in November, a kind of skating rink had already formed around the tap in the children’s park, a result of the water spilled by everyone who came to get water. Each day the water kept on spilling out, eventually becoming a frozen hill. We’d slip on the hill and lose all the water we’d gone to all that trouble to collect, and this only forced us to go back and draw more water. By the time I got back to the second floor of our company housing, my wet clothes had frozen stiff, just like the hill. But they

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would gradually thaw and dry so I didn’t worry too much about it. I remember, in disconnected snippets, that a hot mustard plaster was put on my chest and water collected in a big bottle was constantly being poured down my mouth. Two weeks passed before my fever broke, and one day my mind became clear as if I had finally awakened, feeling like a traveler who had been away from home for a long time. Once back, I found that Grandmother Wada and Chikayo had both died, and with the two of them gone, there was more room on the tatami. Shū-ichi was not feeling well but he was alive, and so was Miyawaki, who, in the grip of tuberculosis and now typhus, moaned in his high fever. Mrs. Wada said that we didn’t even know what the next day would bring. “My mother-in-law said that she would be happy to die. When I said good-bye to her I also thought that death would be better for her, but I feel so sorry for Chikayo. She was just eight years old.” Mrs. Wada had opened the sliding door and was talking at my bedside, her voice reverberating inside my head like a megaphone. “You’re wrong,” Tsuruko said. “She was nine.” “It doesn’t matter how old a dead person was.” Mrs. Wada covered her face and wept a little. “But Mā-chan, you’ve come back to us alive. I’ll bet it’s because of the plaster.” “Miyawaki took off his mustard plaster,” Tōa said. “Grandmother Wada also said she didn’t need it and wouldn’t let us use it on her. We treated Chikayo just as Old Yan told us, but then . . .” “Where did you meet Old Yan?” “When we went to the Changchun Cinema. Remember, Old Yan is a doctor. He said that if the mustard and water don’t work, they’ll die.” Miyawaki’s brain had gone crazy from his high fever and he was singing. But the only thing you could clearly make out was, “Oh, it was like this, like this,” a refrain from a Japanese folk song. When I looked around I saw my mother by my feet, reclining on a seat she’d stolen from the rail yard. She had been sleeping with a blanket over her.

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“Mother,” I asked with a sense of foreboding, “what’s wrong?” “Well, it looks like I have it, too.”

15 When I was able to get up, my father gave me a red sweater, a piece of winter clothing that had come our way through the Alien Residents Association, which was made up of those Japanese still living in Shinkyō. When I put it on and gazed at myself in the mirror, I saw a pale thin girl with bluish eyes in the reflection. My hair had grown out, with a little fringe framing my forehead, and the redness of the sweater looked darkened with moisture, swallowing up any color that remained on my face after my illness. Looking like the frail young heroine of a romantic novel, I still was wearing a dirty jacket with cotton padding on top of my sweater. But I regretted having to conceal my new sweater so I left one button open even though the cold rustled through. Outside the window, I saw that the scenery had undergone a complete change and the wild patch of land outside now lay covered in snow. I could almost feel the chill going through me. My mother remained fast asleep in that cold room throughout the day. “There’s a clinic on the other side of the park, but they say there’s no medicine for typhus.” Tōa had been venturing out everywhere so he knew such things. “The student there has been taking disinfectant baths in cresol to avoid getting it.” “Student?” “He says he was a pre-medical student at the Jiamusi Medical College.” “They rushed his graduation and that’s how he got a medical license.” This was my father’s opinion. “I’d say he’s just a youngster about eighteen years old who can at least give injections.” Because my mother was sick in bed, she could not cut my hair, which had grown longer. To tell the truth, I liked myself as a girl. I was able to live more honestly, in harmony

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with feelings that exactly suited me. I myself had changed a little after my illness, and it wasn’t just because of my hair. Tōa and Shū-ichi no longer called me by my boy’s name, and only my father still used a shortened form of that name when he was drunk on baijiu. When I went out, I wore my heavy cap as protection against the cold, pulling it down over my eyes and buttoning it at my jaw, so again I looked just like the boy I had been. Since I still felt weak, I couldn’t go to get our water but I did have a job, which was to go to the building where the Alien Residents Association served a noon meal and get corn buns and one container of rice soup. One day I decided to go to the building where the medical clinic was, and there I found a young man in a khaki student uniform with a padded overcoat thrown on top. He was leaning against a desk outfitted with stainless steel sterilizing equipment. There was no heat so it was terribly cold. “Is the doctor here?” I asked. “He’s gone out. I’m a doctor, too.” “My mother has typhus.” The moment I said this, he turned away from me. “That’s bad, very bad. You need to get out of here. My friend died of typhus.” “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” “I’m a syphilis specialist. I only have drugs for that.” This young man had hollowed out cheeks and a pained expression on his face. The Soviet soldiers wore winter boots that appeared to be made from a black canvas fabric, and this young man’s boots looked exactly like those. “With typhus, you either die or get better naturally, one or the other.” He glanced at me sharply. “There’s no treatment for it.” I wondered if this was the medical student taking cresol baths. “I just got over typhus,” I told him. “Really?” He gave me a decent answer for the first time. “Is that true? Then it’s a miracle. I was at the clinic on Anmin Street, which was seized by Soviet soldiers. They even took the bed we used for examinations. I can’t tell you how furious I was. My friend had typhus and was sleeping in that bed.

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He died. All you can do for typhus patients is to let them sleep quietly. Go home and take good care of your mother.” He spoke abruptly as if he wanted to get rid of me. “Well, I’ll go home,” I said. “I took these felt boots from one of the Russkies.” There was a proud smile on his face. “Those lecherous bastards. Every week I examine the dancers in a Changchun club. They all have gonorrhea. These women used to be switchboard operators in Fulin and they were assaulted every night by the Russkies so they ran away to Shinkyō. I tell you I get so angry, so very angry that I don’t know what I’ll do. This dormitory area is in a luckier spot because the Soviet auxiliary military police are nearby. Did the Russians take things from you?” I didn’t know what gonorrhea was, but this medical student apparently examined the women’s sexual organs every week. I associated this with that room teeming with sexual organs that Heizi had taken me to. I completely understood his fury—to my mind, he was right, absolutely correct. Nothing about him offended me so I respected him a little. “They probably said, ‘Yaponskii Madame furufuru khorosho!’ ” “I wonder. I don’t understand Russian.” “It means, ‘Take me to where there are Japanese women with big breasts.’ Those damn lecherous bastards.” He slammed the table with his fist, and the lid on the sterilization machine shook. “Well, I’m going home.” “You’ve got no color on your face, and you’re thin. Here, take some butter and vitamins with you. What’s your name?” I told him my boy’s name, Yamamoto Masuo, and he said that his name was Chiba Taichi. There was something creepy about him. I told my brother that I didn’t understand half of what he said. “Still, that’s amazing—stealing boots from the Russkies.” Tōa’s eyes gleamed. Butter on corn buns tastes so good you can’t believe that you’re eating corn buns. My mother had a high fever and didn’t want to eat anything so my father and we children wolfed them down.

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16 On December 30, Yamamoto Yoshirō came home with some Soviet Army scrip and distributed them equally to the group members before collapsing with a high fever. It was typhus. I didn’t have a choice—I had to treat my sick father with a mustard plaster because there was no other treatment available and the mustard plaster was our only hope even if my father didn’t believe it would do any good. Wearing the warm padded winter shoes my father had somehow acquired, I waited on Xing’an Bridge, stamping my feet. It was quite cold. I waited for a while hoping I might be able to meet up with Old Yan, but when I didn’t even see any of his friends who dealt in stolen goods, I gave up and started walking. Coming slowly along from Xing’an Avenue just then was a two-horse cart, the square luggage area at the back piled high with a mountain of frozen white corpses. All of them had hands and feet and faces and human expressions I could see, as the cart went shaking and rattling toward the airport. Were they the bodies of the refugees, now mostly naked, who had been housed in the primary school near the bridge? Old Yan couldn’t possibly have stripped off their clothes? Then I decided that their clothes should be regarded as a gift from the dead to the living. I had heard that the primary school stored corpses in the corridor, but to actually see such a thing so vividly with my own eyes was a shock and more waves of nausea swept over me. Those who had died had become things and didn’t feel anything. The stupid expressions on their faces, the looks of resentment—even the ones who seemed to be smiling or bending their hands in some kind of struggle in fact had no connection anymore to the same men and women when alive. Still, I heard the voice of each corpse in that mountain despite the fact that I’d decided they had no feelings. It bothered me a lot that I couldn’t understand what this meant. A dirty, dried-up face with narrow eyes narrowed even further now made an appearance by my side. Perhaps my eyesight had become worse since it took me a while to recognize Old Yan.

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“What have you been doing?” he asked in Chinese, his yellow teeth showing in this, his winter face, the flesh stuck tight across. Not even wearing gloves, he was so very dry that he probably never got frostbite. “A lot of corpses have gone by today. With so many dead people, the lice will starve to death.” He meant this as a joke. “I need lots of mustard. How much will it cost?” I only spoke about the errand at hand. “Who needs the mustard plaster?” “My father.” “Tōa told me that your father drinks. That means it’s certain that he’ll die.” When I didn’t say anything, Old Yan added, “Get him to drink water to bring down his fever. That way he’ll have an easier death. Right, you should go home immediately and make him drink. Typhus moves very fast. Work hard so it doesn’t win the race.” Old Yan took a Japanese sweet out of his bag and gave it to me. It was a flower-shaped cake filled with sweet bean paste, frozen solid so no dirty scraps had stuck to it, and its color was hideous. Old Yan’s talk about the speed of typhus had made me realize that there was variation in the amount of time it took for illnesses to do their damage, and this filled me with alarm. How could a human being battle such a foe? When I had typhus, two weeks had passed before I knew what was happening. How could you catch up with something moving with such speed? I was shouting, “I must get Father to drink!” as I climbed the stairs to our quarters. When I walked in, he was still in bed, making Tōa search for something. “That broomstick is too short, just like I said.” Tōa had a short tatami broom in his hand. “It won’t reach. We have to make it longer.” “Father, what are you going to do with a broom?” I asked. “I’m clearing away the snow,” he seemed to reply. With his breath coming in gasps, he couldn’t speak clearly.

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Tōa went to find the 1-meter bamboo ruler that had been left by the former residents. He brought it in and tied it to the broomstick with a hemp rope. “How’s this?” he asked, passing it along to our father. “Isn’t it still too short?” My father spoke in a thick voice. “It’s all right.” My father nodded and took the broom with the ruler attached. Still in bed, he held it upright toward the ceiling and began to murmur, “Hey you, start sweeping,” while swinging it all around. “Start sweeping.” “Father has lost his mind.” Tōa, demoralized by the effort he’d put into this struggle with the broom, went out to get our rice soup ration. For the first time I understood. My father had been a track sweeper at the rail yard! The group leader who used to be so proud of himself had worked there every day with armed Soviet soldiers and Chinese security guards yelling, “Hey, start sweeping! Start sweeping!” My father had lost his mind, but he understood that the broom did not reach the imaginary rail line. He got up and lunged at the ceiling, then fell crashing to the floor. He kept getting up and falling down. Then he put the broom down and started to take off his clothes. He took off everything—his Chinese padded jacket, his trousers, his vest, cotton military shirt, and wool shirt, and then his undertrousers, long underwear, and underpants. My strong father was naked, his penis exposed, as he crawled on all fours to the toilet. I followed behind, stunned. He had really lost his mind. He’ll freeze, I told myself, confused about what to do. When my father came back from the toilet, I tried to help him put his clothes back on, starting with his underpants, but he just lay there, collapsed on the bed face up and not moving. I straddled my father’s stomach and in a frenzy I pushed his hands and feet into his clothes and got them back on. I was completely exhausted when Tōa came back with the rice soup. “I didn’t have time to get him to drink water.” I called this out desperately as I straddled my father and tried to close his buttons. “I couldn’t get Mother to drink either.”

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“If we get them to drink this soup, they’ll drink water afterward,” Tōa said as he poured the soup into rice bowls. I urged the rice soup on my father, and he took the bowl and drank it down at once. Then I tried to get him to drink some water, but he brushed me away. After Tōa got my mother to drink the soup, she said, “Thank you,” but already was half asleep. “I went to the back entrance of the Soviet barracks shouting for Marco but then out came Ivanov with some frozen milk wrapped in paper. I bought some rice cakes too. They said it’s New Year’s day.” Tōa took two round rice cakes out of his pocket, and sand and other trash also came tumbling out. “In Jiamusi we used to eat soup with rice cakes on New Year’s day.” Tōa’s voice sounded very small. Just then, it dawned on me that Tōa, who had just turned ten, was only a child. We put the rice cakes into the simmering milk, and my father drank it in one gulp even though it was hot enough to burn his mouth. I wondered whether it had given him blisters inside his mouth. The next evening, my father again started a ruckus, ordering me to take off all the knot buttons on his Chinese jacket and the clasps that went with them. “Don’t you think . . . ?” I said, hesitating, but he yelled at me, “Take them off, I’m telling you. Take them off!” Without buttons, his jacket would remain open, and I knew his body would not be able to stand the sub-zero temperatures. But he was out of his mind and angry, and so I again straddled my father’s stomach and started taking off the buttons with a scissors. Since he was not in his right mind I did it slowly. He started singing a Russian song, a slow melody that sounded like a Volga boat song. It was monotonous, like the sound of bee wings flying low through the evening sky, and the song never seemed to end. By the time I finally removed all the buttons and clasps, it had become dark. I got off my father’s stomach, which had been heaving up and down every time he took a breath for his song, and went to the kitchen. I began to prepare a thin rice gruel, using the small amount of white rice I’d bought with the Soviet Army scrip.

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As I washed the rice with the water Tōa had brought back for us, I felt the cold shoot through my spine. The wild area outside the kitchen window was bathed in blue, waiting for the darkness of night. There was no longer any electricity, and so I hurried to finish. My father had stopped singing and seemed to be asleep. I felt it would do him good to have a quiet sleep. If he would just be quiet like Mother, drink some water, and eat the rice gruel, he might get better. “Oh no! Tōa! Mā-chan! Something terrible has happened!” Mrs. Wada yelled. “Chief Yamamoto is dead!” I immediately returned to the room and saw my father in the dim glow of the candlelight. His mouth was open and he was completely still. Perhaps he was about to sing the next verse of his song, I thought. After all, his eyes were open. I went to his side where Mrs. Wada was standing and touched his face, hands, and chest: his hands were cold, but his chest was still warm. “He stopped singing,” she said, “and I thought that was strange so I slid the door open. Mrs. Yamamoto, Mrs. Yamamoto! The chief has died! The chief has died!” Mrs. Wada shook my mother as she lay there, but she only turned her eyes to look up and said, “Oh really.” Then she turned over in her sleep, lost to the world. “She’s still in a daze and doesn’t understand what’s happened. She’s better off that way.” Tōa leaned against the wall and started to cry. As for myself, what can I say. I felt relieved, as if a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders and come crashing down. It was just as Old Yan had said—I had run as fast as I could, but in the end I wasn’t able to catch up with that fast-moving typhus. A short time before, Chief Yamamoto had conferred with the other members of his group and drawn up regulations intended to curtail the spread of typhus at least slightly: as soon as someone died of typhus, the body was to be brought out to the stair landing, and the wake was to be held there. That way the corpse, together with the lice that spread the disease, would freeze, exterminating the typhus germs. So my father, still wearing his buttonless jacket, was carried out through the kitchen door to the second-floor

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landing. Some incense left over from Grandmother Wada’s death was in the teacup that served as the incense burner. It was so cold that we soon returned to our room as one after another the settlement members and their families came to pay their respects. The landing was small, and if we remained there for very long, we thought we’d also freeze. My father, completely frozen, was buried near the shooting range you could see in the distance from our kitchen window, about 500 meters away. A big crowd gathered, and when the sutras were being chanted, one of Yamamoto Yoshirō’s old friends offered these words: “More than anyone, you embraced the great adventurous spirit of our age. You were a patriot and a man of character. Alas, you have been deprived of the years to fulfill your promise.” My father had just turned forty-three. I could see my father’s grave from the window, and so I often gazed at the dirty wild field with its sparse covering of snow. By dirty, I don’t mean the soil was unclean, only the buried bodies abandoned there. Since last year, the half-­naked corpse of an old man had been caught on the torn barbed wire around the shooting range where my father was buried. The corpse had completely dried out and become black while the empty field in front of it had received increasing numbers of refugee corpses and typhus victims. Scraps of rotting clothing, hair, and bowls lay scattered around the corpses that had come up out of the earth and were now exposed for all to see. I couldn’t believe that a man like my father could die. At night, when I lit our candle I saw hundreds of candles reflected in the double-paned window. When the flame flickered, so did all those countless candle flames. Believing that I could see my father drinking his baijiu outside the window, a strange feeling coursed through me, and the distinction between inside and outside vanished as I murmured, “Father.” But really all I was addressing was my own sense of fear while trying to calm myself. When Tōa called out my name, I was surprised and leapt to my feet. “What happened?” he asked, also surprised.

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17 On my way home from the place where we got our rice soup, I met up with Chiba Taichi in a deserted alley that ran between two fences. “Aren’t you Yamamoto? Did your mother recover?” There was a sour expression on his face as usual, although he actually smiled as he asked these questions. “I’m not sure yet but I don’t think she’ll die.” “Really? Your mother is getting better? A miracle.” “But my father died. He just died.” “Oh no! That’s terrible. Are there still people with typhus?” “Many. Is it true that you take a bath in cresol?” “People have been letting me use their baths since I need to be especially careful to stay healthy for my patients and not get typhus. There’s a young lady, the daughter of an executive at the Manchuria Nichi-Nichi Shimbun newspaper, who has bone tuberculosis. I go every day to give her a shot, but she’s not going to make it. I take a cresol bath there—her whole family does too.” Since their daughter was very ill, they didn’t leave the house, he said. But they must have been living in the same comfortable style as before. “Is the patient with bone tuberculosis going to die?” “There’s no hope.” “If she’s going to die, then why do you give her shots?” “We’re trying to keep her alive as long as possible. Also, my professor and I must earn a living. Now you be sure you don’t die.” He said good-bye and turned off in the other direction. His words about making sure you don’t die brought sudden warmth to my heart; they stayed with me and their gentle sweetness lingered for a long time. It was more than I could bear. I felt jealous of the girl with bone tuberculosis who received a shot from Chiba every day, but really it was useless to feel jealous of that “young lady” since, in the end, he only thought that I was a boy. When my mother returned to her senses and clearly understood that my father had died, she murmured, “Well

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now I won’t have to be terrified anymore.” Then she looked at me and said in great agitation, “I have to cut your hair! I’ll leave you with some fuzz on top since it’s so cold. But come and sit down here.” She was so weak that her hand shook when she held the clippers. Apparently she still could not hear very well, and she said that a lot of bugs seemed to be flying through the sky. So once again I was a boy going out with Tōa, Miya­ waki, who had recovered, and Mrs. Wada to earn some money. We dug for coke, scavenged through abandoned houses, sold tobacco, and did anything else we could think of.

18 As we sat together in the cold during the wake, the two graying siblings talked about wild dogs in Manchuria. We were still living as refugees one bitterly cold winter morning when Tōa, who liked to get up early to go exploring, went out and saw an abandoned baby beyond the fence. Amazed at this discovery, he came back in and called for me, and the two of us rushed down the stairs to have a look. But the only things that remained on the frozen, snow-speckled ground were the baby’s clothes, left just the way the baby had worn them. Nothing else was there. We were totally shocked. Where was the baby? We went to tell our mother and then quickly returned to the spot, only to find the clothes also gone. “Someone’s taken the abandoned baby.” My mother spoke as if no further discussion was necessary. “But it really was there.” Tōa was annoyed. I too kept insisting that an empty shell of clothing had definitely been there, but since nothing now remained, it was hard to convince my mother. Tōa and I eventually decided that a wild dog had eaten the baby, and a human being had taken the clothes. “The dog must have been satisfied with what was inside the clothing,” Tōa mused during our mother’s wake. “It was very tasty. Back then, even though I was a child, I felt that I had to live by my instincts like that wild dog. The guy who

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stole the baby’s clothes, though, eventually sold them and used the money for food, but actually what he did was the same as eating the baby. The dog at least was absolutely straightforward and followed its instincts.” “Are you trying to say that we’re not being straightforward about Mother’s funeral since we have to wait around for the formalities and can’t follow our instincts?” “This is all pretty unpleasant, don’t you think? It would be better to bury her in the garden and plant one of those plum trees that she liked in her memory.” “I agree with you.” Mother was still frozen. It was six days after her death.

19 The three bachelor dormitories were at a distance from the South Manchurian Railway’s extensive company housing. Each building had a name associated with the life of Kusunoki Masashige, the fourteenth-century samurai famed for his loyalty to the emperor. One building was called Kikusui, after the floating chrysanthemum in Kusunoki’s crest; another, Chihaya, after the fortress he captured; and the third, Shijō, was where his son died in battle. Following the Soviet Army’s withdrawal in March, Yukie had started to work at the Chihaya barbershop, a job that Yamamoto Yoshirō certainly would not have allowed if he’d been alive. He would even have preferred that she dig for coke, a job that meant getting completely covered in black soot, because he so disliked the physical aspect of this work that Yukie had done since her youth—in particular, the need for her to run her hands through the hair and around the faces of men. Throughout the time they were together, she was his exclusive barber and never cut the hair of the settlement members. At the refugee camp she only cut women’s hair. When Yukie began her job, Tōa entered the temporary primary school that had been set up by the Alien Residents Association. I was twelve years old and already out of primary school. According to Yukie, girls faced many more dangers, and this is why she kept me cooped up in the room in my

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male disguise, even though Tsuruko wore her hair in a bowl cut and went out everywhere to work with her mother. When I complained that it wasn’t fair since she and I were the same age, Mrs. Wada flashed that unpleasant smirk of hers: “Mā-chan looks suspiciously like a girl in every way. She’ll only get sold off by the slave traders for three hundred yen.” In the four-mat room, I read through the books left by the previous residents. The room had become more spacious after the deaths of my father, Takuo, Chikayo, and Grandmother Wada, who were all buried somewhere in that wild field. I could see them in my imagination, but really they were nowhere on this earth. Only those damaged books and I were in that room. In addition to Little Lord Fauntleroy and Earring, which I read many times, I read adult books like The Traveling Heart by Hosoda Tamiki and Baikov’s Our Friends. Just three years before, the author of The Traveling Heart had visited the Patriotic Youth Brigade and been impressed by the youths, but those times were already dead and gone. His words already seemed like complete nonsense to me, and I wondered how the author felt now. Such thoughts made me grieve in sorrow as I read about the things now gone from our lives, among them my hometown. The Russian exile Baikov had his own convictions about life, for he wanted above all to cultivate bravery in the men under him, whether they were soldiers or hunters, and he urged them to prepare themselves by training snakes. Brushing off their negative feelings about snakes, he trained the men to feel comfortable holding them in their hands. He actually believed that in this world the scariest creatures were humans—indeed, he wrote, humans are the ones you should be scared of. One day, in a big warm hat with cotton padding, I went out to buy bean sprouts at the market near the company housing. It was close but limited to items that only poor refugees could buy—rice cakes that had been soaked in water to increase their size, cigarettes wrapped in pages from books, and old clothes. The bean sprouts on sale there had been cultivated in total darkness—in boxes covered by blackout curtain fabric and lined with sand, where the sprouts, seeking

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sunlight, would grow thin white roots. With the sandy bean sprouts in my bag, my errand was completed, but I was feeling very lonely and with nothing else to do I took a roundabout route back. I passed the Soviet Army barracks after a while and though I had heard that the soldiers had already decamped, now I saw that this was true. I strolled through the empty barracks and noticed that the Chinese security guards, in overcoats with green belts, didn’t even have their guns ready. In fact, no one took notice of a dirty boy passing by. The wind grew stronger as I crossed the Xing’an Bridge, a sandy wind blowing against me from the west. There had been some pawnbrokers’ shacks below the bridge, but now they had burned down, most likely the work of the Nationalists. I didn’t have any special requests for Old Yan even if I had run into him there, but still I waited by the bridge for a little while to see if he would turn up. No one came by, not even the beggars and scrap dealers who usually gathered there. The wind was still blowing after I left the bridge, so I sometimes walked with my back to it as I made my way toward Chiba Taichi’s clinic. I felt a pang in my chest once I spotted the dirty, cream-colored wall of his office. I knew that if Chiba was there, I would have to say something to him—I would tell him that I was really a girl. The door opened easily but the place was empty. Scattered about were a broken chair, the sterilization equipment, which had been thrown to the ground, and the brown and blue glass medicine bottles. I knew immediately that this was the work of intruders who had vandalized the place—stolen what they wanted, made a mess of everything else, and then left. The deep cold had settled into the room. Why was it so cold? Where had Chiba gone in his Russian boots and Russian overcoat? What had happened? Could he really have died of typhus? I couldn’t shake my loneliness as I walked toward the home of the young lady with bone tuberculosis, knowing only that she lived near Kodama Park, and I cried as I walked. When I reached an area with buildings that looked like more company housing, I noticed a yard containing many simple brick stoves constructed in a U shape, just like the ones where

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I lived. The stoves reeked of poverty, but the young lady surely lived in a fancy house where family members took cresol baths. I continued to memorize the names of the places where I walked so I wouldn’t get lost. They had names like Cherry Tree Town, Flower Garden Town, and White Chrysanthemum Town. Why on earth did they have a place called White Chrysanthemum Town? Was it the awful, stupid Big Noses who were responsible? Yellow Rose Town, Hibiscus Town, Bellflower Town, Iris Town—the flower names hardly suited the ugly concrete buildings all around. By then I was totally exhausted from malnutrition, and as I crouched down on the street I believed I wouldn’t be able to get up again. I don’t know why but I decided that the young lady with bone tuberculosis had died and Chiba Taichi would never walk down this street again. Then too, even if he was alive, I was sure I would never see him again.

20 The corpses of those who had died over the winter had spent those long months in a frozen state, and when spring came they still looked the same. The clear amber remains of the children looked like wide strips of candy while the bodies of those who had died of starvation had become transparent, and you could see down into their internal organs. At a slightly higher spot in the field, a man’s head had emerged from the ground, and his splendid, thick mustache and big, sand-covered front teeth made him look as if he had just issued a prediction about the future. The bodies of two young girls with naked upper torsos had been tossed to the side of a street I went down often, and the dogs had begun to eat them, starting with their legs. When spring came, the corpses that had been buried in shallow graves began to surface, face up, but only their tangled, brownish pubic hair came out of the ground to glare at the gray sky. Many who had died during the fierce winter had been stored above ground and they remained there, covered in gravel mixed with snow. The winds from Mongolia blew up a cloud of yellow sand, always a sign of spring, and the

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corpses’ color changed, as if they’d been coated with roasted soy flour. This covered any signs that they’d recently been alive, making them look more like broken dolls. This somehow calmed me as I viewed them each day. We had to pass along that street on our way to dig up coke or to go to Yoshino-chō, and so those corpses turned into familiar street markers for us. Some had probably died of illness, others had been murdered or killed in accidents, but I didn’t investigate the causes of their deaths. I had no connection to any of them, but still they called out to me from beyond and the terrible smell of the dead came wafting in whenever I opened the window. During the ferocious winter, when everything had frozen and no smells came in, I used to cross that wild patch of land on my way to Yoshino-chō without a moment’s hesitation, but I couldn’t do that anymore. I cried out, horrified to think that when the frozen soil softened, the dead would grab my ankle and I would be completely swallowed up in their rotting flesh. “It looks as if we’ll be evacuated back to Japan in the summer,” Kasuga came to tell Yukie. “So we want to cremate Chief Yamamoto.” Kasuga’s young daughter had been buried by the side of the railroad tracks at one of the stations en route, but her body was dug up soon after and her clothes stripped off. They could do nothing but abandon her in that state. With this in mind, Yukie considered Kasuga’s proposal but could not answer right away. Also, cremation was not a custom in her village back home, and so the request was unexpected. There had already been a memorial service for Yamamoto, she thought, and this had brought her the peace she needed. “My husband said that he wanted his bones buried here.” “We will take his remains back to our country. This is the wish of all the settlers here. Remember, if our chief is not cremated, no one else will cremate their dead.” After these remarks, Yukie could not very well object. We also thought of the buried Takuo. Should we cremate him and bring his bones back to Japan, too? For the first

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time I understood what my father had told me when we buried Takuo: “He’s under the fourth telegraph pole. Be sure to remember that.” Did my father sense that he himself might soon die? Since there was a whole line of telegraph poles and no grave markers, I couldn’t identify the exact spot by the pole where we’d find Takuo’s grave. The ground was slightly uneven in certain places, and so I stuck my shovel in at the bulge closest to the pole and almost immediately discovered a corpse in dark blue clothes. In the eight months since Takuo had died, corpses had been buried around the pole extremely close together, leaving no spaces in between. “Please forgive me,” my mother apologized to the corpse. She quickly covered it with soil and stopped this work. For her, Takuo’s burial had also marked the conclusion of his death rites, and she no longer had an emotional attachment to his remains. I, too, could feel Takuo floating up and saying, “Sis,” which is what he used to call me. I had no wish to search for his remains. Old Yan would probably have said that we should not meddle with the next life. The empty lot near the shooting range, where my father was buried, was overgrown with weeds and the place looked like a jungle. Summer had arrived. I used to gaze out at that spot from the window but had not gone to pay my respects at his grave even once. I had put this off, thinking of all the corpses strewn about on the way there—but more than that, I did not respect the corpses and my mother must have felt the same way. One of the two young girls left by the side of the street that led to the rail yard no longer had legs. Her ribs were visible, her torso hollowed out, and her bones had been blackened by the sun. The bones of the second girl’s hollow torso were still white and had fat dripping from them. During the freezing cold winter they had kept their fresh beautiful faces, but now I couldn’t regard them as humans. Maybe Chiba Taichi was also sprawled out somewhere—I only met him now in my dreams. That day I had to go to the burial ground to help with the exhumation. The settlement members were making the arrangements for the exhumation and cremation, and Kasuga

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had told the family members to get there on time. My mother said that this was not what she intended to do, while I simply feared meeting up with my father: I still could not get myself to believe he was dead. The grass grew taller close to the shooting range, and when I looked at the uneven ground at my feet I realized that these were the places where soil was covering dead bodies. It was just like the song we used to sing at school in the morning assembly: If I go to the sea, I shall be a corpse in a watery grave. If I go to the mountain, I shall be a corpse covered with grass. But if I may die by the Emperor’s side, I shall have no regrets.

That sinister waka sang of this very scene. Many large, tender ferns had sucked up nourishment from the humans below, and the sorrel had grown large, too. Small orange lilylike flowers were blooming in great abundance, reflecting the bright sunlight shooting out in many directions. In the budding heat of early summer, the air smoldered with the powerful stench of the dead. “Mā-chan, you’re standing on someone’s head,” Tōa told me. I had stepped near the forehead of a mummified man whose eyes were completely closed. His body was still in the ground, and only his head had emerged. When humans die, they turn into pieces of putrid garbage, unpleasant, nothing more. “No!” I screamed though no voice came out. Without screaming, I wouldn’t have been able to live. The digging up of the earth had concluded, and the settlement members surrounded the pit where my father was buried, muddy shovels in their hands. Their “dreams of the Continent” had been blown to pieces by Yamamoto Yoshirō, and their families and possessions lay scattered all around. Trembling with fear, I peered into the pit of my father’s grave. Down there was someone who looked like my father,

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crushed and dark brown, wearing the jacket whose buttons I had removed. White clumps of maggots crawled around his elbows and thighs. If the ground had not been dug up, would the maggots have grown to their full size and remained there, living underground? The maggots were disturbed by their exposure to the sun, and my father also was disturbed. His squashed face, with features like pickled plums, seemed to be melting away after having slept too long. Yet my father looked as if he was still dreaming, a long and terrifying dream apparently. Weren’t we who stood here playing roles in my father’s dream? Standing at the edge of the pit, Yukie kept her eyes tightly shut. She could not bear to view the end of her husband’s journey. The muddy waters of the Sungari flowing by the city of Jiamusi; the red sign at the Suixi Hotel, where her family had lived; the ideas about agriculture as the soul of Japan that her husband had extolled; the members of the Yama­to Village Settlement Patriotic Youth Brigade, half of them now dead; this disinterment—all these were scenes from hell.

About the a u t h o r was born in 1933 in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture. Two months after her birth, her parents moved the family to Manchukuo, the puppet state in northeast China established by Japan in 1932. After Japan’s defeat, Takarabe, along with many thousands of other Japanese settlers, suffered through the terrible ordeal of fleeing China. Takarabe finally reached Japan in 1946 and went on to become one of the country’s most eminent poets, winning major prizes for her work over a long career. Heaven and Hell is her only novel. TAKAR ABE TORIKO

About the tran s lato r is a novelist, biographer, journalist, and translator. Her books include Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy: The Story of Kawashima Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy Who Commanded Her Own Army, the biography of a controversial figure who gained notoriety during the period described in Heaven and Hell. Birnbaum’s translation of Uno Chiyo’s Confessions of Love won the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. PHYLLIS BIRNBAUM