Jung-myung Lee - The Investigation

‘Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum”,’ she said. ‘It’s a movement in Die Winterreise and part of Professor Marui’s repertoire.’ She played on.

I wondered what the bleak title, the subtle, sorrowful allusion to melody and all the terse German words meant. ‘I’ve heard it before, but I couldn’t understand the lyrics.’

‘Schubert devotees usually prefer the original lyrics. German is rough and turbid, so it goes well with the masculine tone and heavy atmosphere. Die Winterreise is a song cycle based on a serial poem by the German poet Wilhelm Müller. You can really understand the piece if you pay attention to the sound of the original language.’

She played another tune, low and sorrowful. I stole a glance at the neat parting in her hair. The sunset caressed her rhythmically moving shoulders.

‘This is “Gute Nacht”, the first lied in Die Winterreise .’ She spoke without turning around.

That was when it came to me. ‘Good Night.’ It was the mysterious poem I had found in Sugiyama’s pocket. I recited it aloud. ‘As a stranger I arrived, as a stranger again I leave. Now the world is bleak, the path covered by snow.’

She froze like a salt pillar. Fear pooled in her eyes. Why was she so frightened? She must know something.

My face betrayed no emotions. I told her, ‘I found that poem in the dead guard’s pocket. He was a violent guard they called the “Angel of Death”.’

She curled her white fingers into a fist. ‘Don’t talk about him like that,’ she said warily, shooting me a hostile glance. ‘You don’t know anything about him.’

My mouth went dry. ‘What do you know about him?’ I asked, and turned around to hide my upset expression.

I heard the piano then, as mournful and majestic as a large collapsing building. I looked back. She had stood up, slamming both hands on the keyboard. Through her tangled hair that cascaded in front of her face I could see her wet eyelashes and the tip of her reddening nose.

‘He wasn’t violent!’

The heavy notes reverberated in my head. I thought about my promise to Choi that I would record the truth about Sugiyama’s death. He had confessed everything, but I still didn’t feel that I knew the truth. Really, I didn’t know a thing.

‘What was Sugiyama like then?’ I asked, trying to appease her. Truly, I did want to know about Sugiyama Dozan’s life. I knew she wouldn’t know the whole story, either. But I wanted to know about the aspects of his life that Choi didn’t tell me. The sunset was dissolving now, giving way to crisp darkness that settled beyond the windows.

She looked out. ‘Sugiyama Dozan was a sensitive man. He knew music, appreciated poetry and loved life.’

What killed the gentle Sugiyama was this insane era, these times that demanded ever more blood, ever more hate, ever more death. Incarcerated in his uniform, he died in his own solitary hell.

One snowy winter morning two years ago, as a nurse in the newly established Kyushu Imperial University Medical School infirmary at Fukuoka Prison, Midori stepped onto the prison grounds. Specialists spent all day in the laboratories studying English medical texts, their eyes glued to microscopes, concentrating on significant research. If, thanks to these efforts, they could advance medical knowledge and develop groundbreaking new medications, they would be able to save thousands — even tens of thousands — of lives. Midori was proud to be a member of a team responsible for safeguarding life during this era of slaughter. Nursing was difficult work; she was assigned to double shifts every day.

She heard the name Sugiyama about a fortnight after she began working there.

‘Sugiyama, that son-of-a-bitch. He’s a butcher!’ hollered a worked-up Japanese prisoner with a head injury. ‘He clubs anything that moves. If he didn’t have anyone else to beat up, he’d probably bust his own head open.’

A few days later, a guard came in clutching a swollen finger. Midori secured his finger with a splint and asked how he had injured it. He looked down at his bandaged finger and snapped, ‘The Koreans got into a fight. Sugiyama clubbed one of them over the head and didn’t stop. I ran over to pull him off, but he slapped me away, completely enraged. Eventually he did step back, but if it weren’t for me, that Korean would be dead.’

Sugiyama again. What happened to the Korean who had been beaten like a dog? Was he in solitary, writhing in agony and cradling his broken bones? She realized she had never seen a Korean prisoner in the infirmary. She learned that the prison had a firm policy of disallowing unnecessary medical care for Korean prisoners. Unless there was a special circumstance, the guards sent injured Koreans to solitary confinement instead of the infirmary.

‘I should actually thank him,’ the guard was saying, grinning smarmily. ‘I got to meet a pretty young thing like you.’

Sugiyama’s name continued to come up frequently after that. A prisoner whose shoulder was shattered and a guard who got a fat lip both referred to him resentfully. The gashes and broken bones were enough to paint in her mind’s eye a portrait of a cruel, merciless man who didn’t care a whit about anyone else and forced his rage onto the world. Like a virus, rage spread its roots even into the hearts of good people; it eventually infected her, too. Tending to the cuts and broken bones, she grew hostile towards him. Sugiyama was evil. People like that should be behind bars.

Then, finally, she met Sugiyama in person. Every Monday morning at assembly 200 or so guards and sixty-odd doctors and nurses stood in rows in the auditorium; they acted as one, praising the Empire and the Emperor. The assembly began with a chorus of the ‘Kimigayo’, the national anthem, and ended with three rounds of ‘Long Live the Emperor!’ Midori chafed at its required reverence, but she stood in front and performed dutifully, to be near the piano.

One day, after assembly, she went up to the piano and opened the lid. She wiped the dust off each key with the tip of her finger, wondering whether it still played. She cautiously pressed a key. A low G grasped the ankles of those who had turned to leave. She pressed another key. A silvery F tapped their shoulders. Murmuring, the others waited for the next note. Midori set her hands on the keys and caressed and pounded them in turn. Music spooled out, like silk unravelling from a silkworm’s cocoon.

A young nurse hesitantly sang along. ‘’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam. ’

The melody spread slowly. People’s collective longing was expressed through song. They remembered each of their homes — the guard who’d left his wife behind in far-away Hokkaido, the conscripted guard who thought of his elderly mother in the mountains of Niigata and the intern who missed the meals around his family’s dinner table in Tokyo.

‘Home! Home! Sweet, sweet home! There’s no place like home!’

Everyone lingered after the song was over. Only a long time later did the guards return to the cells, the doctors to the laboratories and the nurses to the infirmary.

Maeda came up behind Midori, furious. ‘What are you doing? How could you play “Home! Sweet Home!” when you are to sing the “Kimigayo” with the resolve to sacrifice your own life for our country?’

It was only then that she realized what she’d done — she’d led the prison in singing an American song.

Warden Hasegawa approached with energetic, powerful steps. ‘Glorious! Good thing we didn’t get rid of this piano. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of listening to this wonderful performance.’ He twisted his neat moustache and asked her who she was.