He understood that somewhere in that goodness his wife and daughters loved in him, that goodness which had saved a mosquito’s life, was the same unswerving goodness that had allowed him to devote his life, no matter the anguish and the doubts, to the Empire and the Emperor. And this goodness was unlike Ikuko’s patient nursing, getting up two hours before work and the touch of her fingers on his cheek. It was a different goodness, and the Emperor was its embodiment both now and in the future. For it and for him Nakamura had shed the blood of others and would willingly have shed his own. He told himself that, through his service of this cosmic goodness, he had discovered he was not one man but many, that he could do the most terrible things he might otherwise have thought were evil if he had not known that they were in the service of the ultimate goodness. For he loved poetry above all, and the Emperor was a poem of one word—perhaps, he thought, the greatest poem—a poem that encompassed the universe and transcended all morality and all suffering. And like all great art, it was beyond good and evil.
Yet somehow—in a way he tried not to dwell upon—this poem had become horror, monsters and corpses. And he knew he had discovered in himself an almost inexhaustible capacity to stifle pity, to be playful with cruelty in a way he found frankly pleasurable, for no single human life could be worth anything next to this cosmic goodness. For a moment, as he was being eaten by Tomokawa’s oppressive armchair, he wondered: what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil?
The idea was too horrific to hold on to. In an increasingly rare moment of lucidity, Nakamura recognised that what was imminent was a battle not between life and death in his body, but between his dream of himself as a good man and this nightmare of ice monsters and crawling corpses. And with the same iron will that had served him so well in the Siamese jungle, in the ruins of the Shinjuku Rashomon and at the Blood Bank of Japan, he resolved that he must henceforth conceive of his life’s work as that of a good man.
His mind felt suddenly serene. He had always used his powers for the sake of the Empire and the Emperor. He wished to tell his children that he was going peacefully, with good grace, to the land of the dead, where his parents and comrades awaited him. His idea of his own goodness, though, was becoming harder and harder to hold on to. It came close to collapsing altogether when Ikuko touched him, when he saw her skin still beautiful at her age, her slightly stupid smile, and he instinctively understood that her goodness was something that, at heart, was not within him. He tried to recall good things in his life—separate of the Emperor’s will, of orders and authority—with which to build some other idea of goodness, that might offer evidence of a good life. He remembered offering quinine to an Australian doctor. And despairing of the violence of a beating. But these thoughts gave way to a general hopelessness that was mixed up with images of skeletal beings crawling through rain and mud, and among the monsters in Tomokawa’s apartment he began seeing those crawling corpses everywhere, amidst ceaseless rain and the fires of hell. And Tenji Nakamura understood that these deaths would have been no more welcomed by those who inhabited those awful bodies than his own would soon be welcomed by his.
You remember that prisoner painter? asked Tomokawa. I’ve told her it wasn’t you, but she never hears. It was an Australian. He used to get about with that sergeant. The one who used to sing of a night. All those horror stories they tell about us! And prisoners singing—it can’t have been so bad.
How we lived, Nakamura thought.
It was the happiest time of my life, Tomokawa said.
Beyond Nakamura’s thoughts, snow swept through the world heavily, endlessly, erasing all that existed. Soon he would die, and all good and all evil would be as nothing. The monsters would melt and run into the black ocean. For a moment he thought he smelt DDT and saw many things: Sato looking up from the go board about to say something, lice fleeing a dead boy’s body, a man less than a man crumpling in the mud of a jungle clearing. He had a fulfilling sense of having cheated destiny in his life. His body suddenly jolted and he was awake. He had no idea how long he had been asleep.
Some carp sushi, Commander? Mrs Tomokawa asked in her strange way, half-conversation, half-mastication.
Nakamura felt without emotion, yet his body was trembling as he imagined the hospital scales had once trembled when the American’s heart was placed on them.
I get it from the market. It’s a little salty, but we like our carp sushi a little salty.
Nakamura shook his head.
The following spring, the Tomokawas received a card from Mrs Nakamura saying her husband had died. She did not mention to them his final ravings, his petty bad temper, or his vicious attacks on her and her daughters, who were nursing him, for even the simplest things such as stroking his cheeks or just smiling. Instead, she wrote of how the night before he passed away, knowing his time was rapidly approaching its end, and being something of an amateur poet and in accordance with tradition, he set out to write his death poem.
A humble man to the end, continued Mrs Nakamura, he struggled for some hours, but, weakened by his illness, he concluded it was beyond his powers to better the death poem of Hyakka, which, he said, expressed everything he felt, but far more beautifully than he could ever manage. Mrs Nakamura added that she felt that Mr Nakamura had in this final act been inspired by his visit to wintry Sapporo the year before, and for that reason she was forwarding them a copy. His family had been with Mr Nakamura when he died, concluded Mrs Nakamura. They knew he was a kind man who could not bear to see even animals suffer. He knew he was a blessed and lucky man who had led a good life.
Mrs Tomokawa picked up the separate page on which the death poem was copied, and read it out to her husband:
Winter ice
melts into clean water—
clear is my heart.