“Why don’t you ask him?”
“He’s alive?”
“Of course. Sometimes Japanese live long lives. Longest in the world , you know. Are you surprised I’m alive? I don’t really think so. Kawabata is probably younger than me.”
“He’s alive ? Where is he alive?” Owen was furiously calculating. Kawabata would have to have been young in Manchuria, but that made perfect sense. The youth would see the atrocity clearly, and find a way to overcome it. Or at least live in conscience with it, but he’d read conscience was not a Japanese property. Those who argued God existed because something had to explain the presence in human beings of a sense of right and wrongness needed to live in Japan, Owen had decided.
There were no interior voices. Conscience quite kayoed. Instead, the antennae were supremely fixed on messages from the group outside. It was not that Kawabata was diligently listening to outside voices; a good Japanese he had never heard anything else. He knew he existed because neighbors existed. If they vanished so did he, was that it? But still he brought extra pages—the young supremely obedient, supremely fixed person opted to bring an extra sheet. Perhaps he was part Danish? He managed to store extra sheets safely somewhere and after the war bring them safely home. In the midst of the inferno a hand took hold of him and simply guided him through a simple kindness. The Samaritan paused on the roadway out of what? Messages directly from the supreme being? The example of Christ? It made no sense to think of Christ as a modest risk-taker, did it?
Owen repeated as if to savor the syllables, “Kawabata is alive?”
“Oh yes and very fit. A tennis player. I used to play tennis and I was very good. But not now,” her voice trailed off.
“A tennis player?”
“I said that.”
“Not a saint. A tennis player.”
“Yes, not a saint, but I suppose he might be—mightn’t he? No I think not. Too worldly. Like you.”
“And he comes to see you?”
“He came once. Just once. He’s not a regular. He’s not a ‘returner’. I didn’t have information for him.” She smiled.
“And tea sweets.”
“Boxes and boxes of them. This place is littered with them. And of course I offered him some, but he wasn’t much interested. Do you play tennis?”
“Avidly,” Owen answered.
“Then you must play with him some time.”
“Why?”
“Because I think he’d teach you something. He’s very precise in his demeanor and very serious. He always turned down the sweets. Unlike you.”
“I understand Japanese relentlessly push away proffered food,” Owen said quickly, smiling at her.
“And they squat on their haunches to smoke at train stations,” she replied.
“Before they serve and run to net.”
“They seldom go to net, as well you know. They’re back court players, and so is Kawabata, I bet.”
“So he came here more than once.”
“Never. I just surmise certain things. It’s a generalization I can offer after a long and thoughtful life.”
“I wonder if Mogens died thoughtfully.”
“I do wonder that myself, sometimes. And I wonder if he might be waiting for me in the afterlife.”
“Waiting with vengeance?”
“Oh yes. He might not believe, as we Japanese do, that the dead are all good. So there I’d be quite dead and quite good, but he might not believe it.”
“And would he have reason?”
“Perhaps Kawabata-san might know that.”
“You confided in him?”
“No. But perhaps Mogens did. He’d after all, be the one to know if vengeance was required, wouldn’t he?”
“Was it?”
“Perhaps. But we’re forbidden vengeance, aren’t we?”
“We are indeed,” Owen said. “But Kawabata might not be. Is Kawabata a Christian?”
“Heavens no!” she answered.
Her instant response surprised him, and he suddenly realized that in the non-Christian world, which presumably Kawabata inhabited, retribution might be more than just possible. It occurred to Owen that delivering the scribbled, emotional sheets to Mioko might have been more than simply informing her of Mogens’ situation——rather a sharing in its degradation, a sharing of pain. Or more than that, a getting even, perhaps a direct assault on her for whatever role she might have had in Mogens’ fate. Or might Kawabata be simply the supreme naif who did as he was asked—out of some strange very Japanese amalgam of obedience and compassion?
On the train back from Suma, the gentle rocking summoned Mariko again and her slick softness blended off into the darkness of the Inland Sea to his right, undulating in the reflected light of the train car in the window, gathering him up in the steady clicking of the steel wheels, spinning him back into that wavy beachball hard breathing so that he felt like a child slowly congealing in freezing slushy water whose arms were being hacked, then sawed off. He heard Mogens’ coughing question, “Why, Lord, do you show me these things?”
And he heard Mariko’s sly answer, beckoning him onward, “So you may go more deeply into them—more and more deeply.”
4
In the backroom of the second floor Chinese restaurant at Hankyu Rokko station, Archie Hesseltine, having introduced Mathias to his “kept bottle” of Suntory Special Reserve directly answered Owen’s question. “You’re asking me about Unit 731 in Harbin? That’s rich. I translated maybe half of reports coming out from that place, right after the war. In Tokyo, for Ambassador Atcheson. On a top secret basis since a lot of the doctors involved in the Unit were going to the U.S. to help bio-warfare there, and the other half were escaping judgment in Tokyo. They were held long enough to determine their accurate status, and then eventually tossed back into Japanese life, where most of them found good work, good pay, and local status as having passed through the toughest container offered by the Occupation—jail until D.C. decided what to do with them. I went home, and, bingo, the great change of ‘47 suddenly made all those sadists and butchers, a pretty pathetic and very, very silent lot indeed, made all of them wonderful Japanese citizens again, and dispersed them back into Japanese life. Some of them run hospitals and med schools in every major Japanese city, especially Kanazawa. It turned out perfectly for them. We forgot to bomb Kanazawa and so, the old Japan was wonderfully preserved and who should return to the old Japan, but the cream of the old Japanese medical profession. Not jail terms, not execution for savagery or atrocity or whatever you want to call it. No. Just reclaimed status. Healers of the sick, keepers of the flame of Japaneseness. Talk about tatemae/honne. Jesus! Can you hold bifurcated views in your same brain? These people sure can. Some of the best were taken to the good old U.S.A. for ‘extended debriefing,’ but most just reabsorbed, as if they had never been gone. ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ ‘Well, let’s see for a good while in Manchuria I dissected living human beings without anesthesia, so their blood and organs would not be fouled by anything to make the suffering less. And then on the weekends I got to freeze and hack children to death. I got to saw off arms and soak kids in salt water and watch them freeze outside and monitor how their breathing eventually stopped. That’s what I did in the war. And now of course I took all that knowledge, after I shared it with the Americans in their heavy smelly boots, and now I put it to use to ease the suffering of my fellow citizens.’ ‘Oh Daddy, you were so brave in the war. How we love you.’”
Hesseltine poured another four ounces of Suntory