You know, Tomokawa was saying, but Tomokawa looked like the monster Gamera, at the beginning I was terrified they’d pick me up as a war criminal. And I used to think: What a joke! Because they only cared about what we did to the Allied prisoners.
Nakamura could hear Tomokawa’s voice but he was seeing a huge turtle spurting flames.
And when I think about all that we did with the chinks in Manchukuo, the turtle was saying with his breath of brimstone. And the fun we had with their women!
Nakamura was fully awake now and looked around uneasily, but Mrs Tomokawa, he realised, was out of hearing range in the kitchen.
Well, you’d remember it all, I’m sure, the giant turtle—who, Nakamura had to remind himself, was really Tomokawa—went on. And so I think those POWs had it easy, and they should be proud of what they achieved with that railway and us. But to hang us for that and not for what we did to the chinks! Really—it defies any reasoning. That’s what I think, anyway.
Mrs Tomokawa came back in to the room with food, and Tomokawa, who suddenly looked human again, changed the conversation. But all the time Nakamura was thinking about what Tomokawa had said and the common-sense wisdom of it all. For they had built a railway in fifteen months that the English had said could not be built in five times that period. He rubbed his neck, where the new bump had grown even that day, or so it seemed to Nakamura, for he believed he could feel the lump growing within him every hour of every day and every minute of every hour, eating him up. He tried, of course, not to feel it. He could with an effort not think about it and focus his mind instead on what concerned him more and more: the war, for that too was growing within him.
They had battled disease, starvation and Allied air raids. It was not easy making sick men work, but how would the railway have been built if they had relied solely on the almost non-existent ranks of the healthy? He understood that he once could have stood accused of the deaths of perhaps hundreds of romusha and POWs. How many? He had no idea how many.
But in a jungle without end, where transport was difficult, sickness and death everyday companions, he knew that he had selflessly performed his duty with devotion and honour. The railway had been a triumph of Japanese spirit. They had shown that spirit could triumph where the Europeans, with all their superior technology, had not even dared try. Without the capacity to make railway irons they had taken apart strategically unimportant lines throughout the Empire—in Java, Singapore and Malaya—and then transported them to Siam. Lacking heavy construction machinery, they had fallen back on the miracles the spirit can achieve with the body. It was beyond his power to stop the deaths, because the railway had to be built for the Emperor, and the railway could not have been built any other way. He remembered with a sadness that felt ennobling the deaths of his and Tomokawa’s comrades, both those who had died of disease in the jungle, and those later hanged by the Americans.
His mind raced away from them and hurtled towards his childhood, and here he tried to dwell with a child who had lived life in accordance with some unspoken natural order. But he knew he was no longer that child—that he had somehow, somewhere broken with that child’s understanding of the world. Again, he heard Ikuko’s voice, saw that irritatingly stupid smile, and he was possessed of a shame that was also a terror. The things he thought right and true had all been wrong and false, and he with them. But how was such a thing possible? How could a life come to this? He began to fear his imminent death, not because he would die but because he sensed that he had never really lived as he wished. And Tenji Nakamura did not understand why this was so.