“Everyone knew that my uncle wasn’t cut out for the rugged life of a soldier or the carnage of the battlefield—he was a high-strung young man, and physically weak. To make matters worse, the young men of southern Kyushu who made up the 6th Division were a rough group, known for their violence. My father agonized over the news that his brother had been drafted and sent off to war. My father was egotistic and highly competitive, a typical second son, but his younger brother was shy and retiring, the somewhat pampered baby of the family. As a pianist, he had to be careful to protect his hands. Even as a child, my father learned to look out for his little brother, who was three years younger, and shield him from the outside world. It became second nature to him—he was his brother’s protector. But all he could do in faraway Vienna was sit and fret. The only information he got came in his brother’s letters from the front.
“Of course those letters were strictly censored, but the two brothers were so close that the elder could read the younger’s feelings between the lines. Moreover, the true meaning of those lines was skillfully camouflaged, so only he could figure it out. My uncle’s regiment had fought their way from Shanghai to Nanjing, engaging in fierce battles in the towns and cities en route, and leaving a trail of murder and plunder in their wake. Those bloody events left my high-strung uncle with deep emotional scars.
“One of my uncle’s letters described a beautiful pipe organ they had come across in a church in occupied Nanjing. It had survived the fighting in perfect shape. For some unfathomable reason, though, the long description of the organ that followed had been inked out. What military secrets could an organ in a Christian church possibly have compromised? The standards used by the censor attached to their regiment were impossible to fathom. As a matter of fact, it was common for him to black out the most innocuous and unthreatening passages of a letter while overlooking the parts that really might have put troops at risk. As a consequence, my father was left in the dark as to whether his brother had been able to play that organ or not.
“Uncle Tsuguhiko’s year in the army ended in June of 1938,” Masahiko continued. “Although he had arranged to reenter the conservatory right after his return, he went back to Kyushu instead and committed suicide in the attic of the family home. He sharpened a straight razor to a fine edge and slit his wrists. It must have taken tremendous resolve for a pianist to do that to his hands. I mean, if he had survived, he might never have been able to play again, right? They found him in a pool of blood. The fact that he had killed himself was kept a deep, dark secret. To the world, the official cause of death was heart failure or something like that.
“In fact, though, it was clear to everyone why Uncle Tsuguhiko had taken his own life—his war experience had ruined his nerves, and wrecked him psychologically. I mean, here was a delicate young man of twenty, whose entire world was playing the piano, thrown into the bloodbath of the Nanjing campaign, surrounded by heaps of corpses. Today we talk about post-traumatic stress disorder, but that phrase—even that concept—was unknown then. In that deeply militaristic society, people like my uncle were dismissed as lacking courage, or patriotism, or strength of character. In wartime Japan, such ‘weakness’ was neither understood nor accepted. So the family buried what had happened, as evidence of their shame.”
“Did he leave a suicide note?” I asked.
“Yes, they found a personal testament in his desk drawer. It was quite long, closer to a memoir, really. In it, Uncle Tsuguhiko recorded his war experiences in excruciating detail. The only people who saw it were his parents—my grandparents, in other words—his eldest brother, and my father. When my father returned from Vienna and read it, he burned it while the other three watched.”
I waited for him to go on.
“My father kept his lips sealed about what that testament contained,” Masahiko continued. “It was the family’s darkest secret: to use a metaphor, it was nailed shut, weighted with heavy stones, and sent to the bottom of the ocean. However, my father did tell me the gist of what was in it once, when he was drunk. I was in grade school, and it was the first time I learned that I had an uncle who committed suicide. To this day, I have no idea whether it was the alcohol that loosened my father’s lips, or if he figured that I had to hear the story at some point.”
Our salad plates were cleared, replaced by the spaghetti with Japanese lobster.
Masahiko took his fork and stared at it for a moment. As if inspecting an implement used for some special task.
“Hey man,” he said. “This isn’t really something I want to talk about when I’m eating.”
“No problem. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what, for example.”
“Something as far removed from your uncle’s testament as possible.”
So we talked golf as we ate our spaghetti. Of course, I had never played the game. No one around me had either. I didn’t even know the rules. Masahiko, however, had taken it up in order to play with the people he did business with. And to get back into some kind of shape after years of inactivity. He had purchased a set of clubs, and spent his weekends on the golf course.
“You may not know this,” he told me, “but golf is the oddest game you can imagine. As weird as it gets. You could say it’s a sport unto itself. Yet I’m not even sure if it can be called a true sport. The funny thing is, once you get used to its weirdness you can’t go back.”
Masahiko went on and on about the strangeness of golf, telling me one off-the-wall story after another. A great conversationalist, he made our lunch extremely entertaining. We laughed together as we hadn’t in ages.
Our plates were cleared away and coffee was brought in, although Masahiko opted for another glass of white wine.
“Anyway, back to my uncle’s suicide letter,” he said, his voice abruptly serious. “According to my father, Uncle Tsuguhiko wrote about being forced to behead a Chinese prisoner. He described it in painful detail. Of course, a common soldier like him didn’t carry a sword. In fact, he had never touched a sword up to that point. I mean, he was a pianist, right? He could read a complex musical score, but wielding an executioner’s sword was beyond him. But his commanding officer handed him one and ordered, ‘Chop off his head!’ The prisoner wasn’t in uniform and had no weapon when he was picked up. Nor was he a young man. He claimed he was a civilian, not a soldier. But the army was grabbing any likely men they could find and dragging them in to be killed. If your palms were callused, you were deemed a peasant and might be released. If they were soft, however, it was assumed that you were a soldier who’d tossed his uniform to pass as a civilian, and you were summarily executed. Arguing the sentence was a waste of breath. The method of execution was either being gutted by a bayonet or decapitated by a sword. If a machine gun unit was in the area, prisoners might be lined up in a row and shot, but there was a general reluctance to ‘waste’ ammunition that way—bullets were always in short supply—so bayonets and swords were used. The bodies were collected and dumped in the Yangtze River, where they fed the many catfish who lived there. I don’t know if it’s fact or fiction, but it was said that some grew as big as ponies on that diet.
“My uncle took the sword from the officer, a young second lieutenant who had just completed officer training school, and prepared to cut off the prisoner’s head. Of course, he didn’t want to do it. But it was unthinkable to refuse an order. Not something corrected by a simple reprimand. An order from an officer in Japan’s Imperial Army was an order from the Emperor himself. My uncle’s hands were shaking. He wasn’t a strong man, and to make matters worse it was a crummy, mass-produced sword. The human neck isn’t that easy to sever. His attempt failed. Blood sprayed everywhere, the prisoner thrashed about—it was gruesome.”
Masahiko shook his head. I sipped my coffee.