The Girl Who Played Go

4

It is snowing so heavily that we have to stop training. Trapped by the frost, the cold and the wind, we spend our days playing cards in our rooms.

Apparently the Chinese who live out in the country in northern Manchuria never wash, and they ward off the cold by coating themselves in fish fat. As a result of our protests, a bathhouse has been built in our barracks, and officers and soldiers alike queue up outside it. Inside the bathhouse, through the haze of steam, the walls can be seen trickling with condensation. In the doorway, molten snow boils furiously in a huge vat. Each man draws off his ration in a cracked enamel bucket.

I undress and wash myself with a towel dampened in this cloudy liquid. Not far away the officers have formed a circle, and as they scrub each other’s backs, they discuss the latest news. As I go over to them, I recognize the man speaking: Captain Mori, one of the veterans who fought for Manchurian independence.

This morning’s newspaper tells us that Major Zhang Xueliang has taken Chiang Kai-shek hostage in the town of Xian, [3] where he and his exiled army have sought refuge for six years. In exchange for the generalissimo’s freedom, Zhang Xueliang has demanded that the Kuomintang be reconciled with the Communist Party to reconquer Manchuria.

“Zhang Xueliang is unworthy of his good name and he’s an inveterate womanizer,” Captain Mori says dismissively. “The very day after September 18, 1931, [4] when our army had surrounded the town of Shen Yang where he had his headquarters, the degenerate weakling fled without even attempting to resist us. As for Chiang Kai-shek, he’s a professional liar. He’ll welcome the Communists with open arms, the better to throttle them.”

“No Chinese army can take us on,” threw in one of the officers while his back was energetically scrubbed by his orderly. “The civil war has ruined China. One day, we’ll annex the entire territory, another Korea. [5] You’ll see, our army will follow the railway that runs from northern China to the south. In three days we’ll take Peking, and six days later we’ll be marching through the streets of Nanking; eight days after that we’ll be sleeping in Hong Kong, and that will open up the doors to Southeast Asia.”

Their comments confirm various rumors, already rife in Japan, in the heart of our infantry. Despite our government’s reticence, the conquest of China becomes more inevitable every day.

That evening I go to sleep relaxed, and happy to be clean.

I am roused by a rustling of clothes: I am sleeping in my own room, and Father is sitting in the next room, wrapped in his dark-blue cotton yukata. Mother is walking up and down, the bottom of her lavender-gray kimono opening and closing over a pale-pink under-kimono. She has the face of a young woman; there is not a single wrinkle round her almond-shaped eyes. A smell of springtime wafts around her-it’s the perfume Father had sent from Paris!

I suddenly remember that she has not touched that bottle of perfume since Father died.