Jung-myung Lee - The Investigation

The thick veins in Sugiyama’s neck thrummed. ‘You’ve gone too far. I’m no writer, but I’m not so stupid that I don’t realize what’s going on.’ He was incensed; he gritted his teeth and rubbed his hand over his prickly hair. ‘You knew you’d get killed, but you still tried to fight me!’

‘You can’t kill me.’

‘You knew full well that you’d be beaten if your plot was revealed!’ It dawned on Sugiyama that the prisoner was right. If he were the type of censor who would kill a man for writing postcards, he would have been stricter with several of Hiranuma’s postcards. Hiranuma must have sensed that Sugiyama didn’t catch the seditious undertone of the postcards or had looked the other way. That quiet passage of the postcards informed Hiranuma that this guard, no matter how violent, wouldn’t be able to beat him, let alone kill him. Sugiyama shook his head. ‘Don’t you know they call me The Butcher?’

‘I know more about you than your nickname.’

‘Oh, really. And what do you know about me?’

‘That you understand and love the secrets harboured by words.’

Sugiyama smirked. But it was true that he’d seen the world; the roots of the sentences created a gigantic forest of meaning. His voice hardened. ‘What makes you say such foolish things?’

‘Because I know the real you. You yourself aren’t even aware of who you are.’

Sugiyama recognized that the young man was taunting him. He had to fend him off. He had to fight with vocabulary sharper than knives and with sentences more fatal than spearheads. The odds were against him: Hiranuma was an intellectual, while Sugiyama had barely thrown off the cloak of illiteracy. Sugiyama sensed that he was being dragged into a black, unfathomable swamp. But there was nothing he could do. The battle had begun; all he could do was fight.

Under the shadow of the wall, Hiranuma continued to listen as the men in front of him sobbed and yelled and shook their fists. He soon became familiar with their stories; what their childhoods were like, what crimes they’d committed, how wronged they felt. He wrote postcard after postcard, recalling their voices, expressions, intonation. He had to accurately convey what they wanted to say, but delicately plant two or three other meanings in one phrase to avoid censorship. Each morning Hiranuma woke up from the same dream, drenched in ink-black sweat — the red censor stamp was branded on his forehead. He didn’t know when Sugiyama would tire of this game. But on the other hand, if the censor was firm, the rules Hiranuma had to toe became simpler. He was persuading the censor, one postcard at a time, in a slow and insistent seduction.

Sugiyama felt himself changing. He was getting pulled into the prisoners’ writing, so much so that he subconsciously looked forward to the postcards. The faint letters written on the brownish paper contained longing and hope, tears and sighs between each line. Reading them made him feel relaxed, as though submerged in a warm bath. All day long Sugiyama felt overcome. He struggled to get away from the tug of those postcards. He handled the prisoners with even more cruelty.

Hiranuma observed Sugiyama from far away. The guard was becoming more and more violent. He swung his club and swore and hollered. Hiranuma smiled to himself. It was working. Violence was the final line of defence. He could tell that Sugiyama was in flux. A letter had arrived a few days ago from a prisoner’s wife. Sugiyama had censored the letter, which was streaked with red lines. But Hiranuma could still read the words underneath; before, Sugiyama would have completely obliterated the sentences with black ink. Now, Hiranuma thought, he could begin using bolder, more overt expressions.

Sugiyama glanced at a postcard written by a prisoner to his thirteen-year-old son; it started off with praises for the beauty of the season and went on to describe the burdens of war. Imprisonment, destitution, death. These were bold words, the first overt descriptions of the war in a postcard. Sugiyama rubbed his stamp on the red ink pad.

Don’t despair that Father isn’t there with you. No matter how sad you are, no matter how difficult it is, you can always learn from pain. Pain can destroy us, but it can also help us grow. Francis Jammes, a wonderful French poet, wrote in a poem entitled ‘Prayer for Loving Sorrow’: ‘O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved.’ In another he wrote, ‘These are the labours of man that are great.’ Read his poetry collection when you have a chance, you’ll learn about retaining hope and gain the courage to stand up to any hardship.

It was a daring message, but there wasn’t really a reason to censor any of it. After all, the postcard was encouraging the child to embrace pain. Sugiyama thought for a moment. Was he expressing criticism and scorn for the challenges of the times? Or was he merely offering his son a burst of hope to help him come to terms with his sadness? Sugiyama realized that he would have to read the poems mentioned in the postcard to determine that. His impatient feet led him to the library of confiscated documents. He dug through Prisoner 645’s box and found a yellowed old book, The Poetry of Francis Jammes . He opened the book and scanned the table of contents: ‘Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys’, ‘Prayer to Have a Simple Wife’, ‘The House Would Be Full of Roses’, ‘Orchard with Raspberries in the Sun’, ‘These Are the Labours’. The pages created a breeze at his fingertips. He took in a deep breath and started to read ‘Prayer for Loving Sorrow’:

I have nothing but my sorrow and I want nothing more.

It has been, it still is, faithful to me.

Why should I begrudge it, since during the hours

when my soul crushed the depths of my heart,

it was seated there beside me?

O sorrow, I have ended, you see, by respecting you,

because I am certain you will never leave me.

Ah! I realize it: your beauty lies in the force of your being.

You are like those who never left

the sad fireside corner of my poor black heart.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved:

because I know that on the day of my final agony,

you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow,

so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

Sorrow was something better than a well-beloved. Sugiyama understood that instinctively. A man’s will for life could be broken, but he would stand firm again; his desires could extinguish, but burn bright once more. A man’s acceptance of a lacklustre reality would make him even stronger. He leaned against the hard back of his chair.

Another page caught his eye: ‘These Are the Labours’. He looked back at the postcard he had finished censoring. This was the right one. ‘These are the labours of man that are great.’ Sugiyama felt triumphant. He’d caught Hiranuma red-handed; the fool had put in a secret code, probably a seditious one. The child would read Jammes’s poems and discover the hidden meaning. Could it be that this postcard wasn’t meant for his son at all, but for some nefarious element? Sugiyama could guess at the rebellious meaning of this poem — something to the effect of giving your life to liberate your country, or inciting others to disregard their comfortable lives and resist the Japanese:

THESE ARE THE LABOURS

These are the labours of man that are great:

he who puts milk in the wooden vessels,

he who gathers wheat-ears sharp and straight,

he who herds cattle near fresh alders