“When it was finally over my uncle started puking. When there was nothing left he puked gastric juice, and when that was gone he puked air. His comrades ridiculed him. The officer called him a ‘pitiful excuse for a soldier’ and kicked him hard in the side with his army boots. No one sympathized. Instead, he was ordered to decapitate two more prisoners. This was for practice, to help him become accustomed to cutting off people’s heads. A soldier’s rite of passage, it was thought. Participating in such carnage made a man a ‘true warrior.’ But my uncle was never meant to be a warrior in the first place. He wasn’t put on this earth for that. He was born to make beautiful music, to perform Chopin and Debussy. Not to chop the heads off other human beings.”
“Are some people born to chop off heads?” I asked.
Masahiko shook his head again. “I can’t answer that. But I do know there must be quite a few who are able to get used to it. People can become accustomed to almost anything, especially when they’re pushed to the limit. It may become surprisingly easy then.”
“Or when they’re given justification for their actions.”
“You’re right there,” Masahiko said. “In most cases, they’re provided with some justification for what they do. I’m not confident that I’d be any different, to tell the truth. I might not be strong enough to stand up and say no if I were thrown into a system as violent as the military, even if I knew the order was horribly wrong or inhuman.”
I thought of myself. Would I be any different if I were in his uncle’s shoes? The image of the strange woman I had spent the night with in the port town in Miyagi popped into my head. The young woman who had handed me the belt of her bathrobe and asked me to strangle her in the middle of sex. I still remembered how the belt felt wrapped tight around my hands. Probably I would never forget.
“Uncle Tsuguhiko couldn’t refuse his superior’s order,” Masahiko said. “He lacked the guts to do that. Yet later he was able to sharpen a razor and use it to kill himself. In that sense, I don’t think he was weak at all. Only by taking his own life was my uncle able to recover his humanity.”
“The news must have been a terrible shock to your father in Vienna.”
“That hardly needs saying,” Masahiko replied.
“I’ve heard that your father got caught up in some political events in Vienna that got him deported back to Japan. Did those have any connection to his brother’s suicide?”
Masahiko folded his arms and frowned. “It’s hard for me to say. You see, my father never said a word about what happened.”
“What I heard was that your father fell in love with a girl who belonged to a resistance organization, and that she was involved in a failed assassination attempt.”
“Yes, I know about that. Apparently she was an Austrian student at the university, and they were planning to get married. But when the plot came to light, she was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. She probably died there. My father was arrested by the Gestapo and forcibly repatriated as an ‘undesirable alien’ in early 1939. Of course, this didn’t come from my father but from someone in the family—a credible source.”
“Do you think someone somewhere prevented your father from speaking about what had happened in Vienna?”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure authorities on both sides—Japan and Germany—laid down the law in no uncertain terms when they arranged his deportation. He knew he had to keep his mouth shut—that was the price he paid for saving his own neck. But I don’t think he wanted to talk about those events, either. Otherwise he wouldn’t have remained so close-mouthed when the war ended and the threat was gone.”
Masahiko paused for a moment before continuing.
“I think it’s entirely possible that Uncle Tsuguhiko’s suicide played a role in my father’s involvement in the anti-Nazi resistance in Vienna. The Munich Conference removed the threat of war for the time being, but it also strengthened the Berlin-Tokyo axis, and set the world moving in an even more dangerous direction. My guess is that my father was determined to try to put the brakes on that movement. He was a man who prized freedom above all else. Fascism and militarism ran against everything he believed. The death of his younger brother could only have strengthened those convictions.”
“Do we know anything more?”
“My father never talked to anyone about his life. He did no interviews with the media, and left nothing written down for posterity. He was like someone who walks backward, erasing his own footsteps with a broom.”
“He kept his silence as a painter too, didn’t he,” I said. “He exhibited none of his work from the time he returned from Vienna to the end of the war.”
“Yeah, eight years in total, from 1939 until 1947. All that time, he stayed as far removed as possible from what we might call ‘artistic circles.’ He couldn’t stand that crowd anyway, and their ‘nationalist art’ glorifying the war effort made him like them even less. Lucky for him, his family was well off, so he didn’t have to worry about getting by. And, thankfully, he wasn’t drafted to be a soldier during the war. In any case, once the postwar chaos had settled down, Tomohiko Amada reemerged, having metamorphosed into a purely Japanese-style painter. He had jettisoned his old style and adopted a totally new one.”
“And thus was born a legend.”
“That’s right,” Masahiko said. “The rest is legend.” He waved his hand, as if shooing something away. As if the legend were a mote in the air, interfering with his breathing.
“As I hear you tell the story,” I said, “I begin to think your father’s student days in Vienna cast a shadow over his whole life. Whatever the exact circumstances may have been.”
Masahiko nodded. “Yeah, I think that too. Those events changed the course of his life in a drastic way. The failure of the assassination plot must have led to a number of dreadful things. Things too horrible to speak of.”
“Still, we don’t know the details.”
“No, we don’t. I didn’t know them growing up, and it’s an even bigger riddle now. The man in question can’t have a clue either.”
Perhaps, I thought. People can forget what they should remember, and remember what by all rights and purposes they should forget. Especially when death approaches.
Masahiko polished off his second glass of white wine and glanced at his watch. He gave a slight frown.
“I’ve got to head back to the office,” he said.
“Wasn’t there something you wanted to tell me?” I asked, suddenly remembering.
He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop as if to echo my feeling. “You’re right,” he said. “There is something. But we spent all our time talking about my father. It’ll have to be next time. It’s nothing that urgent.”
I looked at his face again as we were about to get up. “Why are you being so open with me?” I asked. “Showing me the skeletons in your family’s closet.”
He spread his hands on the table and thought for a minute. He scratched his ear.
“Let’s see. For one thing, I’m getting a little tired carrying these ‘family skeletons’ around all by myself. Maybe I wanted to share them with someone. Someone who has nothing to gain from them, and who’ll keep his mouth shut. In that sense, you’re an ideal person to unburden myself to. Also, to tell the truth I’m feeling a little guilty where you’re concerned, so this may be my way of trying to pay you back.”
“Guilty?” I burst out. “In what way?”
Masahiko half closed his eyes. “I’d intended to tell you about that,” he said. “But there’s no more time today. My next appointment is one I can’t miss. Let’s meet again soon. Then we can talk all we want.”
Masahiko paid the tab. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This much I can write off.” I accepted with gratitude.
After that, I drove the Corolla station wagon back to Odawara. By the time I parked the dusty old heap in front of the house, the sun had almost reached the ridge of the western mountains. A large flock of cawing crows was winging across the valley, heading to their nests.
38
HE COULD NEVER BE A DOLPHIN