Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I took a machine gun bullet during the fierce battle of August 13, 1945, on the outskirts of Hailar, and as I lay on the ground I lost my left hand under the treads of a Soviet T34 tank. They transferred me, unconscious, to the Soviet military hospital in Chita, where the surgeons managed to save my life. As I mentioned before, I had been attached to the Military Survey Corps of the Kwantung Army General Staff in Hsinching, which had been slated to withdraw to the rear as soon as the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Determined to die, however, I had had myself transferred to the Hailar unit, near the border, where I offered myself up as a human bullet, attacking a Soviet tank with a land mine in my arms. As Mr. Honda had prophesied on the banks of the Khalkha River, though, I was not able to die so easily. I lost only my hand, not my life. All the men under my command, I believe, were killed, however. We may have been acting under orders, but it was a stupid, suicidal attack. Our little portable mines couldn't have done a thing to a huge T34.

The only reason the Soviet Army took such good care of me was that, as I lay delirious, I said something in Russian. Or so they told me afterward. I had studied basic Russian, as I have mentioned to you, and my post in the Hsinching General Staff Office gave me so much spare time, I used it to polish what I knew. I worked hard, so that by the time the war was winding down, I could carry on a fluent conversation in Russian. Many White Russians lived in Hsinching, and I knew a few Russian waitresses, so I was never at a loss for people to practice on. My Russian seems to have slipped out quite naturally while I was unconscious.

The Soviet Army was planning from the outset to send to Siberia any Japanese prisoners of war they took in occupying Manchuria, to use them as forced laborers as they had done with German soldiers after the fighting ended in Europe. The Soviets may have been on the winning side, but their economy was in a critical state after the long war, and the shortage of workers was a problem everywhere. Securing an adult male workforce in the form of prisoners of war was one of their top priorities. For this, they would need interpreters, and the number of these was severely limited. When they saw that I seemed to be able to speak Russian, they shipped me to the hospital in Chita instead of letting me die. If I hadn't babbled something in Russian, I would have been left out there to die on the banks of the Hailar, and that would have been that. I would have been buried in an unmarked grave. Fate is such a mysterious thing!

After that, I was subjected to a grueling investigation and given several months of ideological training before being sent to a Siberian coal mine to serve as an interpreter. I will omit the details of that period, but let me say this about my ideological training. As a student before the war, I had read several banned Marxist books, taking care to hide them from the police, and I was not entirely unsympathetic to the communist line, but I had seen too much to swallow it whole. Thanks to my work with intelligence, I knew very well the bloody history of oppression in Mongolia carried out by Stalin and his puppet dictators. Ever since the Revolution, they had sent tens of thousands of Lamaist priests and landowners and other forces of opposition to concentration camps, where they were cruelly liquidated. And the same kind of thing had happened in the Soviet Union itself. Even if I could have believed in the communist ideology, I could no longer believe in the people or the system that was responsible for putting that ideology and those principles into practice. I felt the same way about what we Japanese had done in Manchuria. I'm sure you cant imagine the number of Chinese laborers killed in the course of constructing the secret base at Hailar- killed purposely so as to shut them up, to protect the secrecy of the bases construction plans.

Besides, I had witnessed that hellish skinning carried out by the Russian officer and his Mongolian subordinates. I had been thrown into a Mongolian well, and in that strange, intense light I had lost any passion for living. How could someone like me believe in ideology and politics? As an interpreter, I worked as a liaison between Japanese prisoners of war in the mine and their Soviet captors. I don't know what it was like in the other Siberian concentration camps, but in the mine where I worked, streams of people were dying every day. Not that there was any dearth of causes: malnutrition, overwork, cave-ins, floods, unsanitary conditions that gave rise to epidemics, winter cold of unbelievable harshness, violent guards, the brutal suppression of the mildest resistance. There were cases, too, of lynchings of Japanese by their fellow Japanese. What people felt for each other under such circumstances was hatred and doubt and fear and despair.

Whenever the number of deaths increased to the point where the labor force was declining, they would bring in whole trainloads of new prisoners of war. The men would be dressed in rags, emaciated, and a good quarter of them would die within the first few weeks, unable to withstand the harsh conditions in the mine. The dead would be thrown into abandoned mine shafts. There was no way to dig graves for them all. The earth was frozen solid there year round. Shovels couldn't dent it. So the abandoned mine shafts were perfect for disposing of the dead. They were deep and dark, and because of the cold, there was no smell. Now and then, we would put a layer of coal over the bodies. When a shaft filled up, they would cap it with dirt and rocks, then move on to the next shaft.

The dead were not the only ones thrown into the shafts. Sometimes living men would be thrown in to teach the rest of us a lesson. Any Japanese soldier who showed signs of resistance would be taken out by Soviet guards and beaten to a pulp, his arms and legs broken before they dropped him to the bottom of the pit. To this day, I can still hear their pitiful screams. It was a literal living hell.

The mine was run as a major strategic facility by politburo members dispatched from Party Central and policed by the army with maximum security. The top man was said to be from Stalins own hometown, a cold, hard party functionary still young and full of ambition. His only concern was to raise production figures. The consumption of laborers was a matter of indifference to him. As long as the production figures went up, Party Central would recognize his mine as exemplary and reward him with an expanded labor force. No matter how many workers died, they would always be replaced. To keep the figures rising, he would authorize the digging of veins that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been considered too dangerous to work. Naturally, the number of accidents continued to rise as well, but he didn't care about that.

The director was not the only coldhearted individual running the mine. Most of the guards inside the mine were former convicts, uneducated men of shocking cruelty and vindictiveness. They displayed no sign of sympathy or affection, as if, living out here on the edge of the earth, they had been transformed over the years by the frigid Siberian air into some kind of subhuman creatures. They had committed crimes and been sent to Siberian prisons, but now that they had served out their long sentences, they no longer had homes or families to go back to. They had taken local wives, made children with them, and settled into the Siberian soil.

Japanese prisoners of war were not the only ones sent to work in the mine. There were many Russian criminals as well, political prisoners and former military officers who had encountered Stalins purges. Not a few of these men were well-educated, highly refined individuals. Among the Russians were a very few women and children, probably the scattered remains of political prisoners families. They would be put to work collecting garbage, washing clothes, and other such tasks. Young women were often used as prostitutes. Besides the Russians, the trains would bring Poles, Hungarians, and other foreigners, some with dusky skins (Armenians and Kurds, I should imagine). The camp was partitioned into three living areas: the largest one, where Japanese prisoners of war were kept together; the area for other criminals and prisoners of war; and the area of noncriminals. In this last there lived regular miners and mining professionals, officers and guards of the military guard detachment, some with families, and ordinary Russian citizens. There was also a large army post near the station. Prisoners of war and other prisoners were forbidden to leave their assigned areas. The areas were divided from each other by massive barbed-wire fences and patrolled by soldiers carrying machine guns.