Jung-myung Lee - The Investigation

The prison was a melting pot of the human condition. Housed here were ideological prisoners and assassins, con men and fugitives. They shared only one trait: they all insisted on their innocence. But they were all lying. Their wrongdoings weren’t serious, sometimes not even crimes: they didn’t deserve to be thrown behind bars. A docker had chased after a woman he loved and was accused of raping her; a guard overseeing a conscript’s forced-labour unit got him in prison out of hatred; a man knocked on his boss’s door to ask for back-pay and was charged with attempted murder. Everyone talked about their heroic exploits, and each time someone spat out indifferently, ‘Hell, there’s nobody here who isn’t falsely charged!’ The prisoners launched violent attacks on one another. Hiranuma felt only pity. He thought violence was the only way for prisoners to stand up against their fate.

One day, during their daily outdoor break, an old man with short greying hair and a wily look came up to Hiranuma. ‘You’re so gentle,’ he remarked, air whistling out of the gaps in his teeth. ‘You don’t belong in here. What crime did you commit that brought you to this place?’

‘Violation of the Maintenance of Public Order Act,’ Hiranuma answered curtly, digging the dead grass. He could see green sprouts under the dried roots.

‘Maintenance of public order, my arse,’ the old man grumbled. ‘They’re trying to do away with Koreans. I had a high-interest loan, but the Jap financier brought a charge against me, saying I wasn’t paying back the interest. I’ve been here two years. Is that what happened to you?’

‘No. I wrote some poems in Korean.’

The old man clucked his tongue. This boy wasn’t just naive, he was foolish. Their world was one in which Japanese was taught in primary school and no one was allowed to utter a word in Korean. He squinted at Hiranuma. In his mind, educated people like this boy who did useless things were what caused Korea’s demise.

A small man with beady eyes came up to them. He brushed his hand over his shaved head and blinked, looking all around him. ‘Old man, are you crazy? What are you doing? What if the Choi gang sees you?’

Everyone knew that Choi monitored the prisoners and hand-picked those he wanted for his gang. Since Hiranuma’s arrival, this university student had been Choi’s main focus.

The old man grinned. ‘Don’t get so worked up, Man-gyo! Do you even know why Choi is anxious to get this boy in his gang?’

‘I don’t. Do you? Is he made of gold or something?’ Man-gyo snapped impatiently.

The old man turned serious. ‘I don’t know whether he’s a mound of gold or a mound of shit. But since Choi is interested, it’s clear he’s not just anyone. If we get him first, Choi won’t be able to boss us around.’ The old man rubbed his dry palm against his beard, speaking about Hiranuma as though he weren’t standing beside him.

‘Shit! And if he’s not worth it?’

‘You don’t know the first thing about selling something, do you?’ the old man said dismissively. ‘You need a good eye to notice whether something will make you money. And you need gumption. The more money you can possibly make, the more danger you have to risk. But you don’t know any of that. Your fate is to sell cigarettes and crackers and stick your nose up the guards’ behinds.’

Man-gyo settled down. The old man gave him a look, prompting him to take out a dirty cigarette from a seam in his uniform and offer it to Hiranuma, who waved his hands, refusing this small luxury.

Man-gyo shoved the cigarette back into his uniform. ‘I’m investing, so if it’s a good deal you have to split it with me!’ He moved away, looking around furtively.

The old man stroked his jagged beard. ‘You might be wondering how cigarettes are circulated in the prison. Well, you see, wherever people live there is trade. A proper merchant can buy and sell even death. That Man-gyo, he may never be a big fish, but he’s an innate peddler. He began to bring things in from the outside six months after he got here. The guards are hungry, too. Bribes got them to look the other way.’

Hiranuma didn’t know whether to feel hopeful that his fellow man had a persistent will to live or to despair at the tenacity of human greed.

The old man read his hesitation. ‘If you have to bet on something, I suggest you choose hope. If you go with despair, what’s left over is even greater despair. In my experience, believing that the sale will be a success leaves more profit.’ He blinked his crusty eyes and asked, ‘What will you sell?’

Hiranuma shook his head. He had nothing. If he had books he could sell a few to a used bookshop, but they were useless now. Sentences, Criticism of the Humanities, Poetry and Opinion — they’d been confiscated and were either mouldering in the inspection office or had been burned.

‘Everyone has something to sell. If you don’t, you can sell your body. If your body’s damaged, you can sell your life. Son, you studied at a university! You were fortunate enough to study abroad in Japan! If you can read and write in Japanese, you have something to sell.’

‘How could I possibly sell that?’

‘We’re allowed to send out a postcard written in Japanese once a month. But most prisoners are illiterate. Forget Japanese — they haven’t even learned Korean properly. You can write postcards for the prisoners who can’t write. Since Korean is banned, you can translate what they tell you and write it in Japanese.’

‘There must be other Koreans who know Japanese.’

‘The censor here is incredibly strict. He’ll destroy your postcard if there’s a sentence that is even a little bit problematic. You’ll also get a beating. A couple of prisoners wrote postcards for others, but when they almost died from the beatings, nobody wanted to do it any more. Lots of people are itching to send out postcards. Can’t you see the money piling up?’

‘But you just said you can die from a single wrong word.’

‘That’s why you’re the right man to do it. You’re a literary man who knows about writing, so you can avoid expressions that will get censored. And you can make money.’

Hiranuma frowned. ‘How could I make money off penniless Koreans?’

‘The Japs in Wards One and Four are always looking for people to do their work for them. So the Koreans sell their labour. In exchange for writing a postcard in Japanese, you can get them to work for a Jap for a day and take their wages. Then everyone wins.’

‘You’re saying I’m to sell Korean manpower to the Japs?’

‘That’s the deal. If they register as patients with the guards that were bought off, they can avoid physical labour here, and that’s how they can fill in for the Japanese.’

Hiranuma was disgusted. ‘I can’t make my countrymen suffer.’

The old man shook his head. ‘And here I was, thinking you were smart. With your talents you can help the illiterate send news home. But you’re going to decline. Are you stupid? Or cruel? Most prisoners can’t send word to their families. If you aren’t going to help them, what’s the point of your education?’

Hiranuma pondered the questions for a long while. ‘How much do you get for a day’s work from the Japs?’

‘Four sen . That’s the official price.’

‘So how much do I get?’

The old man’s eyes glinted. ‘We’ll split fifty-fifty. Two sen each. But considering that I’ll take out Man-gyo’s cut and the bribe for the guards from my share, it’s actually a better deal for you. Take it or leave it.’ The old man waited expectantly.

Hiranuma gave him a short nod. The old man grinned, and scurried around to publicize his new service. The news about the ghostwriter quickly and quietly spread throughout the cells. But people didn’t approach Hiranuma as he stood under the prison walls. Everyone knew that evading censorship was as precarious as balancing on a straw cutter. Emotional expression, descriptions of the reality of prison life, questions about the war were all immediately blacked out, and both the sender and the writer of the problematic postcard would be called into the interrogation room for a beating. The old man decided that the only way to convince the fearful prisoners was to be the first. He stood in front of Hiranuma and called out his letter in a loud voice so that all the Koreans could hear.