He had sold the dog’s body to a butcher for ten yen and then walked back to his Japanese family. The air smelt sweet, a soft wind felt cool and good on his face, every person he passed seemed to be smiling and friendly, and he felt an enormous sense of tranquillity and fulfilment. How he longed for that feeling again, to again know that exhilarating moment of strange power and freedom that had come with the killing of another living thing. But there was nothing in his cell that he could kill to recover that feeling, and it was others who would soon take pleasure in his death, as he once had in his killing of the Japanese engineer’s dog. As his cell lit up ever more brightly—as he could see clearly first his hands and next his thighs and then his feet—he felt a sudden terror gather inside his stomach. For Choi Sang-min knew he would never again see himself in the morning light.
He fought the guards when they came to take him to the gallows. He had seen a cockroach and wanted to kill it. There wasn’t time. After they had strapped his wrists together behind his back, a doctor was called for, and through a translator Choi Sang-min was asked if he wished for drugs to calm him. Choi Sang-min screamed. He could still see the cockroach. He was given four phenobarbital tablets to steady his nerves, but his body was too excited and he vomited the pills straight back. Before the doctor gave him an injection of morphine, he managed to crush the cockroach beneath his boot heel. Feeling nauseous and slightly dizzy, he walked the short distance out of P Hall and across to the gallows with a soldier supporting him on either side. Everything was happening very quickly now. He saw two sandbags leaning up against a wall as they entered the courtyard. There were perhaps a dozen men, perhaps more, six on the scaffold, most below. They walked him up a ramp covered in straw matting to the top of the scaffold. He was struck by how the rope was far thicker than he had expected. It reminded him of a ship’s hawser. He sensed a joyous brutality about the large, powerful knot. I understand, he wished to say to the rope. You long for me. His thinking was calm, even vaguely pleasant, but his face was twitching. So many people and no one was talking and his face would not stop twitching. To his side, perhaps five metres away, a second trapdoor lay open, spent, and rising out of it a taut rope. He realised at its end, out of sight, dangled Kenji Mogami.
He was asked if he wished to say anything. He looked up. A bell somewhere tolled some hour. He wanted to say he had an idea. Someone laughed quietly. He looked down at the soldiers and pressmen. He had no idea. He had been paid fifty yen, and fifty yen was not even a good deal, far less an idea. Fifty yen was nothing. On the trapdoor in front of him he saw chalk lines marking what he knew were the correct places for his feet. Fifty yen! he wanted to say. The soldiers continued to hold his arms. He could see the chalk dust as if they were white boulders. He bowed his head and a hood was dropped over it. He closed his eyes, then opened them. After months that had passed by interminably slowly, everything was now happening too fast. He could feel the canvas, and its blackness seemed somehow more frightening than the night of his own eyes, so he closed them again. The morning was already hot. It was stuffy in the hood. He felt the noose dropping over his head, and at the same time he realised his ankles were being bound together. He went to ask them to slow down, to wait, but with a hard, decisive shove he felt the noose tighten hard around his neck and the only sound he made was an involuntary gasp. He was finding it hard to breathe. His face was jumping wildly. He could not even spit on them, as he hoped Kim Lee had done when they killed him. The soldiers holding either arm frogmarched him two steps forward, and he knew he was now standing on the chalk lines on the trapdoor. His last thought was that he needed to scratch his nose as he felt the floor beneath him suddenly vanish and heard the crashing noise of the trapdoor slamming down. Stop! he went to yell. What about my fifty—
9
THE YEARS PASSED. He met a nurse called Ikuko Kawabata, a young woman whose parents had been killed in the firebombing of Kobe in the final months of the war. After the peace her brother had died of starvation. That city, too, was a wasteland of rubble and ruins, and Ikuko’s story was so commonplace that she, like so many others, found it better not to talk about it.
Ikuko had lustrous skin and a large birthmark on her right cheek, both of which inexplicably moved Nakamura more than he wished to admit. She also had a lazy smile, which he found both erotic and irritating. She would seek to end any disagreement between them with it, something that was at once agreeable to him but also suggested, he sometimes felt, stupidity and weakness of character.