Fuminori Nakamura - Evil and the Mask

“Huh?”

I reacted without thinking. Mikihiko smiled faintly.

“During the Sino-Japanese War, the Kuki Group fanned the flames of war and cozied up to some of the military authorities to get the concessions in Manchuria. But why did their son have to go and serve? The son of a corporation that was still making enormous profits from World War Two? Because Shozo Kuki wasn’t from the main branch of the family. You can guess. He was raised as a cancer.”

“A cancer?”

My heart started to beat faster.

“That’s right. When the family patriarch at the time, Yosuke Kuki, was sixty years old, he sired our father for his own amusement, to be a cancer on the world. The father of the man who was leader of the Rahmla cult, a high-ranking officer who committed as many atrocities as he could, was our father’s twin brother. To prolong the entertainment, the old man decided to send the cancer twins off to war.”

With a bored expression he lifted the whiskey glass to his thick lips. The buildings I could see through the window were already largely in darkness.

“And then they both went insane.”

IN THE DARK, quiet room the rumble of the air conditioner rang in my ears like a low murmur. Outside the window most of the lights in the surrounding buildings had gone out, and a half-moon shone strongly between the tower blocks. Mikihiko kept on drinking, sunk deep in the sofa. The alcohol had not soaked to his core, however — rather than making him drunk, it had simply softened his gloomy exterior. Without thinking, I lit another cigarette. My heart continued to beat rapidly, ignoring my best efforts to slow it.

“It’s going to be a long night,” he said, rolling his tongue around his mouth. “Today I’m going to tell you the complete history of the Kukis.”

I still couldn’t read his face.

“What did Shozo Kuki do in the war?”

“So you’re interested, are you, Koichi Shintani?” He smirked. “What did Father do in the war? I did some research and it gradually became clear. From his infancy, he was exposed to violence. Out of malice, he wasn’t fed properly and was horribly thin. He was constantly beaten. Because of that, he became all twisted inside and learned to act violently towards other people. His father, that is Yosuke Kuki, used to thrash him repeatedly for no reason and without showing any emotion. You know that Father was missing part of one ear. His twin brother, who was raised in exactly the same way, twice got into trouble for assaulting women and had a juvenile record, but not Father. My guess is he just harbored that violence inside him. But then he was sent off to war.”

The painting of the lake behind him started to get on my nerves again.

“He was posted on the front lines in the Philippines, places like Leyte and Luzon where the Japanese army had been completely destroyed. He was commanding a surviving platoon as a second lieutenant in the 356 thDivision. You probably know that most of the Japanese soldiers who died in World War Two died of disease and starvation. They weren’t killed by the US army, but just wandered around in the tropical jungle until they died, waiting for supplies that never arrived because the central government was incompetent. Father’s platoon was the same. There’s almost no evidence that the 356 thtook part in battle. They were starving. They couldn’t prevent their basic human instincts from coming out, terrifying though those urges were. It’s not difficult to imagine what happened to Father, raised as he was, when he was put in that situation.

“In the area where his men were roaming there was a small village that was destroyed by fire. That got me interested, so I tracked down one of his men and asked him what had happened. This old man had a fine son and grandson. He had locked up his violent past inside him and lived in agony, unknown to anyone. He told me his story. We did everything, he told me. They set fire to the village to destroy the evidence of their ferocity, but it’s not easy for me to condemn them. Do you think it was possible for them to act like civilized human beings in those circumstances, carrying the burden of certain death, suffering terrible hunger for days on end, never knowing when they might be killed? With Father, who was accustomed to violence since his earliest childhood, the platoon trudged through the jungle, resigned, just putting one foot after the other, watching their friends die one by one of hunger or malaria, walking the boundary between life and death, covered in sores, convinced that their lives were over. And there in front of them was a peaceful village.

“This village had a little bit of food, the people were weak and there were plenty of women — young women with beautiful bronze skin exposed to the tropical sky. With soft lips, gorgeous, fleshy legs peeping out from their skirts, smooth bodies. That’s probably when Father’s violence was released, with an ominous, overpowering noise, as though all the darkness of the world was concentrated there. They burned the villagers’ bodies, leaving nothing but bones. They must have been trying to destroy the evidence, the evidence of the lust and madness that burst forth from inside them, that they had forced themselves on the fleeing women until they were all corpses. Father and his men killed the men of the village and ate all the food. Then they herded the women to the center and raped them all at once. Day after day after day they ravished their victims. They lost themselves in the madness. Apparently some of the men kept on assaulting the women, not even realizing that they were dead. Not out of some elaborate perversity — it was simply a time of chaos, when humans revealed their true viciousness. The soldiers were no longer in full possession of their reason. They were already convinced of their own impending cruel death. Their dark lives were squirming, their reason was probably almost lost to insanity, and in its place their black unconscious minds were whispering to them. Whispering, ‘If this is the end, why not?’ ”

His face still betrayed no feeling.

“In nineteen forty-five we were defeated. Father answered the Americans’ call to surrender, became a prisoner and was returned to Japan. Apart from him and a few of his subordinates, the Three Hundred Sixty-fifth Division had almost entirely perished. The survivors were no doubt appalled by the cruel fact that they were still alive. Many of his comrades committed suicide. Father probably surrendered less out of a desire to keep on living than because of the thought that he still had unfinished business here. On his return, at first the other members of the Kuki family could hardly recognize him. That’s how much he had changed.

“Japan had been occupied by the Americans and was ruled by MacArthur’s GHQ. The Americans dissolved all the conglomerates, because they figured that the close ties between some of these industrial giants and the military had been the cause of Japan’s aggression. The Kuki Group was one of the corporations that was broken up. Some of their shares were also confiscated. Amidst the confusion the head of the family, our grandfather Yosuke Kuki, died of stress, and his eldest son, who was much older than Father, and his son were killed in a car crash. They said it was caused by faulty maintenance, but I suspect that Father was behind it. The direct line had died out and Father, from the branch that was supposed to be cancers, became head of the Kuki clan. His twin brother, who was also a cancer, died during the war, completely insane. They say that he was killed by his subordinates, who could no longer bear to witness his vicious acts, but that’s not definite.